John Heilemann in NY Mag on Steve Jobs
Jill says: "John Heilemann looks at the man behind Apple Inc. and asks if the iPhone will make or break his career."“Now, however, Jobs is departing from classical structure and undertaking an Act Four. With the iPhone, in particular, he is hurling Apple into foreign waters. His motivations for doing so aren’t difficult to discern. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion cell phones are sold worldwide every year; in terms of scale, ubiquity, and relevance, it’s the mother of all consumer-electronics markets. The chance to upend this sprawling industry, bend it to his will, is one that Jobs, being Jobs, finds irresistible.LinkApple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. ‘The entire fucking Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,’ says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. ‘But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?’”