Apple the corporation exists to enhance shareholder value. All corporations do.

Apple doesn't design attractive platforms for developers for entertainment, or because they love changing the world. They do it to increase shareholder value. Being perceived, by its customers, as qualitatively superior to Android and Windows, is a means to the end of increasing shareholder value.

Mod parent up. There is quite simply no other relevant measure of a CEO for a publicly traded company. These people are hired by the board, who have a responsibility to the shareholders, who want exactly one thing: long term appreciation of their assets.

AAPL is at a record high, up 99% since he took over. NASDAQ is up 93%, S&P500 up 77%. He's beating the market with the world's largest market cap. This is extraordinarily difficult.

I'll give him an A-, because GOOG is beating AAPL, up 137% in the same time period - and while there is a lot of difference between the two businesses, they seem to be the closest competitor. He's beating Samsung (83%), MSFT (87%), and HPQ (56%).

Running a contest, information on products, where to buy - grant the premise, man!

The summary alludes to this, but Facebook has done a much better job integrating into society than MySpace ever did at it's peak. At best, MySpace was a good place to go see about a new band. Facebook has built alliances (either officially, or just by use) with almost every major brand, and every company in the western world. This kind of branding will be held on to by corporations big and small, as they know it's a good way to reach users.

What we could see happen is that users abandon the service to connect to real people, and only use it to connect to brands, because the brands are demanding it. Over time (several more years) the brands will likely deprioritize their presence on the network, because people don't engage with them the way they used to. Go watch a commercial break on TV right now, I bet that one of the ads uses facebook.com/brandname as their website address. How insane is that? Snickers uses facebook.com/snickers instead of Snickers.com! Why would you do this? Facebook limits the opportunities that brands have to engage, and yet brands have played right into it, because the network is so powerful.

I do believe Facebook will live on as a way to authenticate and connect with other websites. It's a useful way to verify someone's real name, their social connections, and that they are a "good actor." See: many dating websites.

Sometimes being two minutes late for work means missing the train, meaning you're 30 minutes for work, meaning you get seen as a not-hard worker, meaning you get fired and have all the time in the world to brush your teeth! Problem solved!

On second view, these are actually Windows 8 ads, showing an Asus tablet ... whoops.

They were solely focused on use cases, until these series of ads came out. Our signature. I find these ads ridiculously pretentious. Apple has earned that right to be pretentious, but I do wish they went back to their old style of showing the product doing something cool.

These ads seem to be everywhere for me. Isn't this what you're advocating for? Less talking.

I think the ads are quite effective, but I still don't know anyone who has a Surface.

You lost your credibility in the second line:

In chronological order, an abbreviated list:

• Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)
• The Shield (2002)
• The Wire (2002)
• Arrested Development (2003)
• Deadwood (2004)
• Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005)
• Lost (2006)
• 30 Rock (2006)
• Friday Night Lights (2006)
• Dexter (2006)
• Big Love (2006)
• Mad Men (2007)
• Breaking Bad (2008)
• Parks and Recreation (2009)
• Party Down (2009)
• Community (2009)
• Louie (2010)
• Downton Abbey (2010)
• Homeland (2011)

Yeah, it's been a pretty crappy decade. (Any show listed before 2003 had a significant number of episodes in 2003 and beyond.) There are a lot of people out there that feel that this is the new golden age of television.

New Jersey has been running out of money for at least a decade and at least as long as Corzine (the guy before Christie) proved he couldn't manage a budget. If this is a way to raise revenue, why not?

Nevermind. Spoiler: at the end he says he spent THIRTY MINUTES with the OS. Give me a break. He brags about learning Linux when Slackware was the most user friendly OS. You think he learned that in 30 minutes? You really need to be able to sit down for a few hours to give an OS a fair shake, potentially much longer. Is this ideal for Mom and Pop, who get their new machine? Absolutely not, and some tweaks are necessary to make this OS a bit easier for those making the transition. But there is no way this guy should be taken seriously until he spends a couple of days with the OS and learns the ins and outs.

He brings up a lot of good points. To be fair, there are a lot of UI changes in the new OS, and many are not "Conveyed" well (to use his language). However, I feel like he really didn't give the OS a chance. He openly admits he didn't figure out how to do certain things. He says he doesn't know how to close apps in the Metro UI. He says he couldn't figure out how to easily open up Control Panel. Um, hit start, start typing "control panel" and it pops right up.

Come on. It's different, but it's not impossible to use, not by a long stretch.

And I hit 85/35 on my FiOS every time I've ever tested it. This is an average. You've got basically the best LTE connection in the country "regularly" and you're comparing it against an average.

I am guessing he was using BBM, and set a broadcast message or a status message. Alternatively, he might have had a Swim Team group, which could have been next to his adult friend's name, and he could have hit the wrong group. The summary obscures this "all of his contacts" might have better read "all of his BBM contacts" but I don't expect the mainstream press to get into technical details like this.

Protect your 6 digit id!