Yesterday january 14th, 2008 Steve Jobs sent an eMail to his employees explaining that his health-related issues seem to be more complex than expected last week. He will take a medical leave of absence until the end of June. In the meantime Tim Cook will be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations.
Stock exchanges suspended trading Apple shares after they went down 10%.
» Read Apple’s Media Advisory here…
Steve just released an open letter, describing he’s healthy as ever. His loss of weigth is caused by a hormon imbalance that is currently getting treatment. He will regain his original weight at the end of spring.
Apple shares increased 3%.
P.S. All the best for you Steve. Just continue with your major lifework called Apple. You’re doing almost everything right. But please would you just lower the prices of the Mac Pro’s to the half ;-)
The next DRM Server’s Shutdown to come
The transition is coming silenty, for Walmart it began in August 2007, when they began selling digital music free of DRM. Prior Walmart has been using the proprietary implementation WMA by Microsoft to protect music from copying. With the open letter by Steve Jobs (February 2007), that dealt with the DRM topic, the music marketing model began to shift from DRM protected music to pure MP3’s. In February 2008 Walmart ceased to offer digital music with DRM in favor of only offering pure MP3’s.
Now the transition seems almost over. Walmart now sent emails informing their DRM customers, that the DRM servers will be shut down soon – thus turning all legally bought WMA audio tracks worthless. Walmart strongly recommends to back up the protected music to normal audio CD’s:
“By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.”
The hassle-freeness of Legality?
Like the customers of Microsoft Music, who forced them to have the DRM servers running for the next three years and the customers of Yahoo Music, who will shut down their servers tomorrow, also Walmart’s digital music customers from the earliest days will most likely consider this the end of an argy-bargy story. We can’t imagine they would really feel pleased for having to manually convert all their legally bought audio tracks to tons of audio CDs and having to re-rip them with loss of quality.
Now what exactly was the advantage of buying music legally online vs. illegally downloading vs. buying the CD in the first place? The evolution of digital consciousness has obviously just begun to start in the heads of the music industry’s leaders.
Jim Goldmann of CNBC interviewed Steve Jobs on tuesday. Steve talks about their new iPod holiday collection, about bugs in the iPhone 3G and Microsoft’s new advertisments. Steve – as always – is kinda simpatico, but he definitly looks a little bit thinner than last year.
This video is courtesy of CNBC. Find original CNBC article here.
It looks like Google learned from Apple in the question how to distribute content and useful applications to the customer. Google will introduce a marketplace, that is quite similiar to what Apple already introduces as AppStore. As Google puts it: “We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it.”
Google also plans to integrate a wide range of statistics and analytic tools to the developers. More infos and more photos to be found here. We feel like Android’s GUI looks like Google learned a lot more from Apple than other companies in this short time. Isn’t it sarcastic, that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is member of Apple’s Board of Directors?
Yes, Steve really gave us what we wanted to have so desperately. See the video of a pre-presentation here:
;-)