I’ve owned and used Apple’s products for a very long time. In my last year of college, I built my first computer, an Apple II+ clone – sourcing and soldering all the individual components, circuit board, cabinet, keyboard, and it ran on Apple’s OS. That of course, endeared me to Apple early on. Of course, I’ve also owned many non-Apple computing products. When fortyninegroup was launched, I made the decision to always use Apple technology and the line “fortyninegroup runs on Apple” has been in our signatures since the company’s inception in 2008. And, having developed Apple Apps, we’re as entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem as any company can be. At the start of every day, I look at this keyboard, smile and think about what I’m going to be able to do with it today.

These moments remind us how rewarding it is to do great work, to create, to delight. They also remind us that the moments of life are fleeting. In 2005, Steve Jobs’s commencement address at Stanford summarized several life lessons and inflection points, and borrowing from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, suggested we “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” The text of that speech is below. Thank you Steve, for everything.

Here’s the speech:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The availability of Beatles tracks and albums in iTunes is, understatedly, long overdue. The standoff and speculation has been documented endlessly elsewhere, as have the specific issues that have existed between Apple Computer (now Apple Inc. and Apple Corp. I’ll add a couple of points to the stories. Back in the early days of digital licensing… late 2001… exactly 9 years ago, MediaNet (then known as MusicNet) was partly owned by EMI, who hold the distribution rights for the Beatles repertoire. One of the first things I did at MediaNet was to analyze all the catalogs we were missing before launching what is now a laughably small library of 60,000 tracks from BMG, WMG and EMI in a legal subscription service. And I clearly remember, after alphabetizing my spreadsheet of outliers, going to Alan McGlade, MediaNet’s CEO and saying “Alan, we have a real problem with the B’s”. Because we were missing The Beach Boys, The Beastie Boys, Garth Brooks, and The Beatles. All EMI artists. 9 years later, the problem with the B’s is now down to 25% of that original assessment, as with The Beatles finally joining the party, it’s only Garth Brooks who is still sitting on the digital sidelines. Still, that’s 9 years… in case anyone was looking for further evidence that the music business moves at a pace best described as glacial. It’s also worth mentioning that The Beatles catalog was one of the last to be released on CD.

But I will also add this point. One of the top traffic drivers to this blog comes from a post I wrote about the 40th anniversary of the Abbey Road album. So in spite of the slow pace of adoption of digital distribution by Apple Corp., in the digital world the curiosity for and interest in The Beatles and their music endures.

Looking back

I seldom look back on a week, preferring to always look ahead to the next week. Even rarer are the occasions when I would allow the occurrences to coalesce into a posting, but in the technology world, a lot has happened – one event was substantial in scale, others… smaller but portending the development and shaping of the future, and then… there is what is ahead! So here we go…

iPhone 4 – Like many others around the globe, I stood in line a week ago Thursday (June 24th). For 13 hours… which is a long time for just about anything. Fortunately, The Apple Store’s WiFi at The Falls in South Miami was working, so my iPad was in contact with the world, Victoria Secret let me charge my iPhone, and it was largely a productive and somewhat pleasurable day. While my iPad arrived on the release day, April 3rd, direct shipped from China, the last time I’d gone to a store to buy any new product on the day of release was in 1995 – August 24th, for Windows ’95. A lot can change in 15 years in the technology world. I expected that Apple would sell 2 million phones over the 4 days from Thursday through Sunday. This week, the 1.7 million number surfaced in reference to 3 days of sales. So 2 million over 4 days is probably light, irrespective of limited stock etc. The phone is great, for me – I’m not experiencing any antenna issues. I truly can’t believe how stunning the display is. Any CD covers in the iPod section look incredible. And FaceTime is amusing.

Kin – RIP – No surprise – As I wrote in April I indicated the prospects were grim for this device before launch. And since then, Robbie Bach and Jay Allard have exited Microsoft, the device was widely criticized, and it surfaced that that factional dissent existed between the flagging Windows Mobile and Kin teams – never a positive indicator for an aligned corporate strategy or a product’s potential. We may never know how many of these devices were sold – yes, the rumors were “around” 500. Nor could we calculate how many hundreds of millions this mistake cost Microsoft in cash outlay, lost opportunities, and reputation damage.

But certainly, iPhone 4′s first weekend sales killed the Kin.

Great week for Startups!

Woot! - Woot! gets acquired by amazon. After investing several million dollars into Woot in 2008, amazon fully immersed itself in the social commerce space by acquiring Woot.

Tapulous – Disney certainly had the inside knowledge of how successful Tap Tap Revenge is, through the tight relationship with Apple. Great to see this frugally funded startup joining a company with significant investments and acquisition successes in social and mobile properties.

TESLA – TESLA IPO’s – Behold the new Tesla Roadster. Stunning, quick, and green. Congratulations on being the first American automotive manufacturer to IPO in 54 years – not since Ford in 1956 has there been a new public company creating cars here. If only Silicon Valley’s speed of innovation had once been embraced by others in the automotive sector.

BuyWidget – One of our apps, BuyWidget, got mentioned in Billboard this week. As the music biz saying goes, you’re not a hit until you’re a hit in Billboard. Thanks for the mention! Thanks also to the many, many new sites who signed up for BuyWidget this week. Among them, one took me back a few years. Steve Kilbey was the unmistakable voice of The Church, whose big hit “Under The Milky Way” is still alluring, even a “few” years after it was first released. Steve has teamed up with Australian Martin Kennedy and has made some great new music. Check out their site, and this performance clip to hear what they’re creating.

Canada Day - Canada Day was July 1st. So, a belated Happy Canada Day to all my friends and family.

Looking ahead

July 3rd

I’m not much of a fan of Wimbledon, and the World Cup holds only a passing interest for me. But starting tomorrow I’ll undoubtedly be mesmerized for three weeks by the Tour de France. This year there are four strong teams in contention – Astana, Radio Shack, Saxo Bank and Cervelo – all with great riders, and the potential for great stories and drama. As I wrote a year ago, Lance Armstrong remains the story, but there are significant sidebars to be found along every mile of the ride. the race is defined in the Time Trials and mountain stages, so with the Prologue on the 3rd, mountains starting on the 8th, and final TT on the 24th, it will be an epic tour.

4th of July – Have a safe and enjoyable Independence Day!

I think constantly about these two business fundamentals. When all facets of a business – operational, financial, product development or innovation and marketing are distilled to the most valuable assets, in the end I believe the essence is found in Innovation and Marketing. So it is that I find myself assessing the merits of all companies based on these parameters – are they Innovative, is their Marketing effective?

In the last two weeks Apple and Microsoft have been front and center in the technology news, no different really from any other two week period in the last 30+ years. But when looked at through the dual lenses of Innovation and Marketing – and reviewing where these companies are today, the arc of their momentum, the trajectories they are on in their respective products, foretells the next few years for each company. Both companies are extraordinarily profitable – Microsoft is widely regarded as the world’s most profitable company. And if the tents were folded up in the Innovation and Marketing departments at both Apple and Microsoft tomorrow, both companies would print money for years on the backs of their current product suites. So I want to explore this across the current AAPL and MSFT products, and use this as the basis of a critical analysis, to build a series of assessment parameters for future development.

By way of disclosure, I don’t currently own stock in Microsoft. I have in the past. I’ve worked extensively with MSFT hardware, software and content personnel on their products. I do hold shares in Apple, but have not worked with Apple, Inc. Most of fortyninegroup’s devices are Apple. My first computer was an Apple II+ clone I built up from raw parts – but that was a couple of years ago! However, I’ve spent more time in the Windows environment than in the Mac environment out of necessity for work purposes. Again, it’s not to suggest that I’m predisposed to favor a particular company, rather, look at them analytically…. look at their Innovation and their Marketing. I’ll add to this post in the upcoming weeks.

I was buried in a project yesterday and didn’t come up for air until late at night, when I realized it was April 12th – the day MSFT was set to reveal their new mobile devices. From the few things I’ve seen so far, it looks like the reviews were written before the products were revealed, then an image was added and writers clicked Publish, or Send, or whatever. I hope this works for Microsoft and the device division isn’t shown to be a one-hit (XBox) wonder.

The thing is, they’re so late to the market at this point, that it feels like Zune all over again. When Zune was launched in 2006, Apple had a 5 year head start. That wasn’t like Apple were the pioneers who got the arrows, while Zune could be the metaphorical settlers and get the land. Apple had settled, planted and harvested the land, built the infrastructure, opened the stores and couldn’t keep enough of their product on the shelves. Zune was dead late and dead out of the gate. Consumers were on their second or third iPod at that point – and instead of marketing to where there was a slight opportunity – adults 25+, parents, people who had trusted and were familiar with MSFT and Windows and to whom Apple was still an outlier – MSFT went after the 18-24s with Zune – the early adopters who were entrenched in their gen 2 or 3 iPod, and for whom MSFT was decidedly uncool. So Apple continued to sell between 11 and 15 million iPods per quarter, while Zune took over 2 years to sell 1 million units.

Now its Q2, 2010 and Apple has had close to 3 years of selling the iPhone, with over 50 million units in the market and a situation that is eerily familiar. The wind is at Apple’s back. Enterprises have abandoned the once widely used Windows Mobile platform for the Blackberry platform, leaving Microsoft with market challenges in consumer, and professional use of mobile devices. And then there’s that little company called Google and their aspirations for Android’s mobile platform. It doesn’t leave much space for a new platform, tied to a low-ranking manufacturer. And again, MSFT is chasing the teens and early adopters with the Kin 1 and Kin 2 – the demo that only wants iPhones, iTouches and apps. Instead of Microsoft relying on their pre-existing trusted relationships in enterprise and the recollection of the versatility of Windows Mobile by corporate IT departments everywhere.

I hope they Kin make this work… but what they need to do, what they’ve needed to do all along, is to take a wheelbarrow full of cash up to Waterloo, Ontario, kiss Jim Balsalie’s ring, and return to Redmond as the owner of RIMM.

I’ve had some time to explore the competencies and potential of my iPad, since its delivery on Saturday. For me, at least, it’s already a game or habit changing device. Like any connected person, I’m not at a loss for screens in my life, but iPad has extended my screen time and opened up new opportunities for exploring and experiencing online  content and extending productivity, and that’s without a significant number of apps installed. I purchased Pages and Keyword immediately after initializing the device. Both are beautifully ported over from the Mac OS to these iPhone OS versions. POP mail settings were a little tricky to sort out, but my Gmail accounts were set up in a minute. WiFi connectivity is, as others have experienced, not as robust as on  a MacBook, or iPhone. But last night, I sat in bed checking and replying to e-mail, and catching up on the WSJ and TechCrunch sites and news.

I believe Safari will prove to be the ultimate iPad app. The web experience is just fantastic on the device. All my bookmarks have been synced and so far, every site I frequent that looks great on the iMac or MacBook mirrors the experience on iPad. It’s interesting – so many print and magazine publications appear distracted by building apps for the device. My belief is that the time, resources and investment would be better spent on re-tooling their web experience so that it can be enjoyed on browsers, AND iPad. For the foreseeable future, the pure web audience will be many orders of magnitude greater than the iPad audience. Hundreds of millions vs. millions of users. Their apps investment may help Apple sell devices, but it’s not necessarily going to boost their own bottom line. To quote Marshall McLuhan – the first content in a new medium is the old medium. New apps, will be the new content, and help define this new medium. I can’t wait to see where this device takes computing!

Lastly, price… before buying iPad, and even after using it for a couple of days, I’ve thought about it in the context of some of my other early adopter purchases. I recall paying around $525 for a Palm Vx in the late ’90s, the same for a great Compaq iPaq around 2001 – neither of which had the platform, connectivity, native software or Apps iPad has. But the iPaq did support Windows and allowed PowerPoint, Excel, Word and Outlook – however, it only synced through a cable to my (at the time) Dell laptop. I paid at least $400 for a Palm 650 phone in 2004, and almost $500 for a Samsung (SCH-i730) Windows Mobile phone in 2005… in its day a fantastic handset, which worked seamlessly with Windows, and supported Slingbox’s mobile streaming app. On the basis of these comparative devices, iPad isn’t an overpriced purchase. Instead, I’m already looking forward to less expensive, even more feature-rich future versions.

As the days and hours count down to the launch date of Apple’s iPad, there is no end to the forecasts on pre-launch, Q2, and 2010 sales etc. of the device. Speculation aside, there is a palpable excitement and anticipation which finds its precedent only in the June 2007 launch of the iPhone. I’m not going to speculate on AAPL’s iPad sales numbers… those are all over the web… I ordered one, and it’s arriving on April 3. But I will tell you this instead.

A couple of weeks ago, I was over at a friend’s place and was relaxing some of the stress she had been enduring, by providing a friendly shoulder massage. I should say at this point that I would consider myself to be fairly good at working the kinks out of  a neck, shoulders, backs and upper arms, and this aforementioned friend happens to be an fairly tech-savvy girlgeek. We had been talking earlier in the day about the iPad launch on April 3, and that I’d ordered one for delivery on the launch date. So then, out of the blue and in the middle of the massage, she turned her head around and said… “So which iPad did you order?”

Which said to me that the iPad has already found its way into a way of life, even before either of us, or anyone has really used one, or even held one. It also said to me one of the first Apps I should be buying is Better Massage Techniques should such an app possibly exist!

Check out the guided tour videos Apple posted this week on all the program functionality in the iPad – Keynote, Pages and Numbers look amazing! Oh, and my iPad will be the 32Gb Wi-Fi version accessorized with the dock, keyboard and case. The shipping confirmation e-mail arrived last night. It’s on its way direct from Shenzhen, China.

Apple’s Q3 results were announced after the market close yesterday.

For a company that traditionally softpedals its projections, this was a blowout quarter for 3 reasons. 1. We were in a recession at the start of the quarter and 2. We were in a recession at the end of the quarter and 3. The days in between weren’t exactly great either. Trailing GDP numbers may show that technically the recession ended in March, but consumer sentiment was brutal for April – June 2009 – a quarter that kicked off only 24 days after the NASDAQ scraped the bottom. All the more amazing then, that Apple should sell 5.2 million iPhones in those 3 months. 5.2 million. In 2008, in a very different economic climate, the company sold 717,000 iPhones in the same quarter. That’s an increase of 625.4% year over year. In the most challenging economy in decades. 57,000 phones per day globally, with US unemployment above 9%, and even higher rates outside the US.

What other product, if any, can claim year-over-year growth like the iPhone in the same 2008-2009 quarter. None that I can think of immediately, at least as a purchased consumer product. There hasn’t been a Crocs of 2009 yet, probably because the consumer is cautious, which means it hasn’t been a great year to launch products – except the iPhone 3GS, apparently. Twitter, I suppose. Up 1900% in visitors from June 2008 (1 million visitors) to June 2009 (20 million visitors). Meteoric in its own right, but hardly in the same category –  no commercial strings attached for the user – free, just tweeting time.

625.4% growth – what a phenomenon…

It’s been intriguing following the long expected bankruptcy of GM today. While the coverage has been substantial… there is no doubt the long decline and demise breakup of a 100 year old icon of industrial power, with the continued destruction of Americans’ livelihood from fallout of GM and it’s vast supply system, makes June 1, 2009 a day not to be forgotten in American business history… However, I believe the true story is being overlooked. We’re witnessing something more significant than the end of a company… it’s really a metaphor for the death of the industrial age.

I don’t profess to be an expert on the automotive sector. I know the business very well, and I’ve watched it closely for years from the perspectives of both investment and ownership knowledge. And not just cars in America, but around the world.. I current;y own shares in Toyota because I believe they are the global automotive standard in lean manufacturing processes and in continual product development. I invested in Toyota because their cars met my standards and I bought one. Now, I apparently own a piece of the 60% of Government Motors that will emerge from Chapter 11. It’s not an investment I would make, nor do I… at least as of June 1, 2009… expect to buy one of their cars. I stand by what I said on my personal blog last October when I wrote “Exctinction”, suggesting that we do not need GM, Chrysler or Ford any more. For decades, these companies have gazed nostalgically in their rearview mirrors hypnotized by their past glory, blind to  the approaching threat of first German, then Japanese, and Korean manufacturers, ignoring consumers who had long before given up on their products.

So wheat does GM’s  Chapter 11 filing really signify? On the day of the filing, the Dow climbed 221 points or 2.6%. The market at least, is saying that Chapter 11 is good news, that the uncertainty is behind us. That a company, once as large as Microsoft, Toyota and Google combined, that once commanded 50% of  the US automotive market, is no longer capable of maintaining its Dow 30 or S&P 500 status. In effect, the market is saying GM doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t.  We’re not a country  whose might is measured by industrial icons anymore. Steel, rubber, automobiles… they defined the first half of America’s 20th century. The automotive industry, from 1970 to 2000, experienced not only disruption, but distraction from the public focus as seductive new products (electronics, home computing, mobile communications) emerged that diminished the significance of cars in our lives. And with its long, slow decline, we traded our standing as a manufacturer of industrial-age machines, for that of a manufacturer of information-age ideas.

And that is how America is measured today. Not by industrial might, but by information might. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Disney, Walmart, Dominant in their markets, vast in their scope and scale, and broad reaching in influence beyond that of an automotive company… even one as large as GM in their halcyon days. Welcome to the Information Age, good-bye Industrial Age.