Grandiloquence

Now, there's one very good friend of mine who will be quite pleased to see this. One of my best friends, Dom, showed me a book that would be amazingly useful for my blogs - it's just a book of long words - and I spotted this little gem. Well, Dom brought it to my attention, but it's really the same difference. Regardless, grandiloquence means grand or elaborate speech.

Since my last post, I've made quite a few decisions. Some of them I will discuss and describe later in this post, some later in the future and some not at all. Some of them don't really matter, and some of them are just for fun.

To begin with, a few days ago in daily free newspaper, The Metro, there was a story about a young man who decided to see how far he could get with just a penny, and just trading it. He ended up with a plot of land in Bulgaria, I think. So, my beautiful, mischievous, fun-loving nature has prompted me to decide that I'll attempt the same thing. Well, I'll be extremely lucky to end up as an international landowner, but you get the idea. I'm just going to try it and see if anything comes of it. I will also be updating the items that I am in ownership of via this blog. Maybe something'll come of it, maybe it won't. If the worst comes to the worst, I'll only be a penny down.

I'm also going to be doodling a lot, so I figure uploading them might be pretty funny. I need an outlet right now that guitar, singing and even merely writing isn't quite fitting. They may be depressing, they maybe cynical, but one thing is certain. They will be god-awful. My drawing skills are second to none, and so they will be shoddy stick figures or amusing technical drawings. And most probably on lined paper. Nonetheless, it's something to keep my mind off of my mind. Not that that makes any sense whatsoever, but I know what I mean.

Also, I'm going to go off on a rant that I got really really carried away with today, but that I quite enjoyed. It regards one Mr. Steve Jobs. Now, for those of you who do not know (shame on you, if you don't) Steve Jobs is the official founder (though technically, he co-founded) and CEO of Apple.

Apple was, as of Sunday, the second most valuable company in the world with share prices of $360 a piece, second only to Exxon Mobil (the oil and petrol company). Mr. Jobs wasn't always at the forefront of Apple, however. He began working with Bill Gates who, as I'm sure you all know, is the founder of Microsoft. He is a bad man, though. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were working on software development together, before Bill Gates took the software and ran to get it patented under his own name, leaving poor old Steve with nothing.

Mr. Jobs then went on to co-found Apple with a friend of his (I forget the name of his friend . . .) in 1976. He then, in 1985, left Apple due to disagreements with the board, and began yet another computer company (NeXT Computers) and joined an 3D animation company that is now very very famous. You may know it by its iconic desklamp sketches, or by the name Pixar. Yeah, that's right. Steve Jobs helped build the Pixar that we know today, and Bill Gates was left developing already buggy software. I think we know who came out on top here.

Meanwhile, Apple Co. were beginning a particularly sharp nosedive, and in a last bid attempt to save themselves, bought NeXT Computers and, by extension, the now infamous Mr. Jobs in 1996.

I have made quite an unforgivable mistake here, however. Whenever Steve Jobs is in the news, he is always compared to the likes of Bill Gates and other software developers. And these comparisons always fall short of the mark when attempting to explain the success of Apple and how Steve Jobs has managed to make Apple Co. the second most valuable company in the world. It's because he's not a standard programmer. He is, for want of a better description, an entrepreneurial programmer.

The success of Apple came from Jobs' ability to find a problem that even the consumer hadn't realised yet. The release that really put Apple on the map was the iPod and iTunes. But why? There were already many many different MP3 players on the market. It all came down to iTunes. iTunes solved the problem that many users hadn't even realised. It was rare that a user would have a music library on their computer, so when they wanted to upload music, they would have to trawl their computer for the files they wanted and then drag-and-drop them into their portable music player via a window interface. Now, iTunes provided an interface through which music could be organised and ID3 (the metadata tags associated with music files - i.e. album name, artist name, song title, track number, et cetera.) tags could be viewed and edited, a media player, and most importantly, a sync centre.

If, god forbid, your MP3 player became corrupted, you would have to format it (essentially wiping the flash drive inside clean) and then go trawling through your computer to find your media files and re-copy them to it. With iTunes, there was a neat little function that, on the rare occasion that your iPod for some reason became corrupted, you could format it through iTunes and then resynchronise all of your media back onto the iPod in one swift movement. It was the ease-of-use and organisation of your media that made the iPod and iTunes such a hit.

From then on, Apple has only become more and more famous. Once the iPod took Apple's name into the limelight, more technological advances were also highlighted. Apple's highly-efficient use of the processor, and other system resources, its smooth and elegant graphical user interfaces and it's fantastic capabilites for the media world (due to its efficient use of system resources). And since then, its success has just snowballed with the subsequent releases of the iPod Nano series, the Touch series, the iPad and, of course, the computers (the iMac, iBook, MacBook etc.). And the iPhone was a massive hit. Apple now owns a massive 17.25% of the smartphone markets, and an even more phenomenal 4.2% of the total mobile phone market.

But it's not primarily down to good software or good hardware. It was down to Steve Jobs' faultless ability to solve problems that had not even been realised. With that, he was just pushing at an open door.

 And in the words of Mr. Jobs himself, I leave you with this:

"You can't just ask the customer what they want and try to give it to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."