Steve Jobs for the day

Jay Yarow  has a Business Insider article about the history of Steve:

We just posted an old photo of Bill Gates with the first Microsoft tablet. It reminds us of one of the great quotes in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs (photo, above).
One of the people who was building Microsoft's tablet was friendly with Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell. He asked Jobs and Powell to come to his fiftieth birthday party.
Jobs went, reluctantly, says Isaacson. At the party, the guy was telling Jobs about the Microsoft tablet and how great it was going to be. This did not go over so well.
Here, in his own words, Jobs describes what happened, and what he did next:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said: "Fuck this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be."

Jobs says he went into Apple the next day and asked for a multi-touch tablet with no keyboard or stylus. He got one six months later. Instead of making it a tablet, though, Apple shrank it and made the iPhone. Later on, they released the iPad.

Rico says his friend Kelley, knowing Rico's past at Apple, nicely forwarded this...

Apple has made a number of small missteps over the past few years that, combined with some adverse market trends and the death of Steve Jobs, have led to Apple's stock getting clobbered.
We've described many of these factors in detail:

A gradual loss of supremacy in the smartphone market (relatively slow innovation and new product rollouts that allowed competitors to catch up).
A decision not to launch a lower-price iPhone that is affordable in emerging markets, where the hyper-growth in the smartphone industry has migrated in the past few years.
A decision to protect profit margins at the expense of market share, pricing, and aggressive investment in future products.
In the tablet market, the abandonment of the "best price and best product" combination that made the iPad the only viable tablet choice in the first couple of years (now, other excellent tablets are cheaper).
Relatively weak offerings in apps and services, which have allowed Google and other competitors to gain stronger footholds in mobile.
Taking too big a cut of app and content revenue, which has prompted some developers to try to find ways to avoid the iOS ecosystem.

None of these by itself was a big issue. But, together, they added up to a stock that got ahead of itself in 2012 on the strength of a few of quarters of spectacular iPhone profitability, followed by a severe margin compression that caused the stock to get cut in half.
But, in addition to all of these small issues, there is also evidence to suggest that something big has gone wrong at Apple over the past year. And that something, we would guess, is likely problems with the launch of a major new product category: namely, Apple's television set.
In his last few public presentations, Apple CEO Tim Cook has been on the defensive about one main issue, which is Apple's lack of new product launches this year.

Julie Bort has this at Business Insider:

Apple's iPad is a revolutionary product that is cratering the PC industry. But it wasn't Steve Jobs' idea.
A full decade before Jobs launched the iPad in 2010, Bill Gates launched Microsoft's touch input tablet computer.
Here it is:

Two years later, Gates showed up with an improved model, a color tablet. It used the Windows XP Tablet operating system.
Here it is:

Unlike today, Microsoft didn't manufacture the tablet itself. Lenovo produced the tablet in 2000 and other partners, like Fujitsu, made the XP tablet in 2002. Here's a closer look at the Fujitsu tablet:

So if Microsoft was a decade ahead, why did Apple become the King of the Tablets?
In July of 2012, during an interview with Charlie Rose, Bill Gates explained that Jobs "did some things better than I did. His timing in terms of when it came out, the engineering work, just the package that was put together. The tablets we had done before, weren't as thin, they weren't as attractive."

Henry Blodget has this at Business Insider:

As Jay Yarow observed earlier this year, by the time Apple's developer conference rolls around in a couple of weeks, Apple will have gone a staggering 230 days between new product announcements. That's more than twice as long as any new product gap in recent history. And it's three to four times as long as Apple's normal new-product gap over this period.
Given Apple's extraordinary skill at developing, manufacturing, and launching new products, we highly doubt that this drought was planned. Rather, we suspect that Apple had planned to launch a major new product late last year or early this year, one that would have carried the company through this drought.
And based on all the reports about an Apple television (faked photo, above) that hit the market early last year, most of which predicted that Apple would launch its TV in the 2012 holiday season (or at least announce it and then start selling it early in 2013), we'd bet that that major new product was intended to be Apple's television.
Alas, for unknown reasons (perhaps having to do with the television industry's refusal to meet Apple's distribution demands) the predictions for the arrival of the televison have now been rolled forward a year, to late 2013 or early 2014.
Given Apple's secrecy, we may never know for sure why the company has effectively gone at least nine months without launching a significant new product. But it seems likely that a product that was expected to launch earlier this year took longer than expected to become a reality.
Disclosure: I own Apple stock.