Reference Auto

Speculation is rife that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is terminally ill with pancreatic cancer and has only weeks to live, setting the stage for an uncertain future for Apple, especially in the wake of an intense slugfest with peers such as Microsoft and others like Dell and Samsung.

Fears of Jobs being diagnosed with cancer surfaced when he was photographed outside the Stanford Cancer Center. It was here that late actor, Patrick Swayze, who was also diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, spent his final days.

Jobs publicly revealed about his battle with surgery for pancreatic cancer way back in 2004.

Jobs is in his second stint at Apple. In 1984, he had to quit Apple after a tiff with the board when he formed a company by the name NeXT, engaged in computer platform and specialising in higher education and business markets.

In his first innings with Apple, Jobs became a game changer and put Apple at the forefront in global technology. He was the first to realise the potential of the mouse and also paved the way for the creation of the Macintosh.

In 1996, Apple said it would buy NeXT for a whopping $429 million.

The deal was charted in 1996 and brought Jobs back to Apple, the company he co-founded. He became Apple interim CEO and the incumbent CEO at that time, Gil Amelio, was shown the door.

In his second stint, Jobs has had a slew a successes, putting for instance, Apple right at the top in mobile aps. Apple apparently sold apps worth $1.8 billion last year, which accounts for 84% of the global market share. So, just how many companies have that kind of a market share?

Also, Apple more than doubled its sales volume from $769 million in 2009. Even though competitors are witnessing sales growth, they don’t seem to get anywhere closer to Apple.

So, what would it be for Apple if Steve Jobs were to not remain the CEO for ill health? Apple will surely miss Steve’s innovation. When Apple invented the iPod, it brought in a revolution similar to what Sony did with the walkman in the 1980s.

Moreover, from iPhone just a few years ago, now Apple is ready with the iPhone4 in such a short time, giving no legroom to its competitors. There is constant innovation at Apple under Steve Jobs.

Apple needs Steve Jobs more than ever before, and without him at the helm, there is a big threat from rivals like Google and Android which are making big inroads into the market and could be a potential threat to Apple even in the near future.

Steve Job’s death has created a huge sympathy wave, and in order to pay their respects to the tech genius, consumers have lapped up 40 lakh units of the new iPhone 4S during the first week of its launch.

The iPhone 4S has the iOS 5, which is the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.

The iOS 5 has over 200 new features, including a notification centre, a new messaging service that allows you to send text messages, photos and videos among all iOS 5 users.

The iOS 5 will also be available as a free software in iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS handsets.

The iPhone 4S is the highest selling in the iPhone series. Of course, sales didn’t hinge totally on the death of the tech guru but also to recognize Apple’s technology edge, which it brings about whenever a new product (the i series products it often rolls out, such as iPad, iPhone and iPod) is launched.

Till date, over 2.5 crore persons have downloaded iOS 5 to their iPhones, iPads and iPods in just five days since the release of the operating system.

The story doesn’t end there. Over two crore persons have signed up for iCloud, Apple’s free service that synchronises data like calendars, contacts and photos wirelessly across a user’s computer and portable Apple gadgets. The service was rolled out along with the iPhone 4S.

Apple’s Jobs has literally been a one-man army, and even though Apple has a host of very senior employees, Jobs’ reputation has cast a shadow on all of them.

And, after his death, his fan following seems to have burgeoned and how better to judge this than recent data which shows iPhone 4S sales were double that of iPhone 4 in the first four days itself.

The iPhone 4S had not impressed critics at its launch around a fortnight ago, a few days prior to Jobs death.

The iPhone 4S sells for about $200 to $600, looks nearly the same as iPhone 4, but it comes with upgraded hardware with a dual-core A5 chip (like that found in iPad 2) and a new 8-MP camera that can shoot up to 1080p high-definition video.

The new iPhone 4S comes for $199 for the 16 GB, $299 for the 32 GB and $399 for the 64 GB handset along with a two-year contract.

So far, the iPhone 4S is selling in the US, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and Britain.

Apple has said that it will be available in 22 more countries (possibly India also) from the end of this month and in more than 70 countries by December.

Steve Jobs has made Apple the world’s top gadget maker, and will this leadership position be maintained by his successors at Apple, amid threat from a host gadget makers such as Samsung, BlackBerry and Motorola, among others?

Apple seems to be getting better by the day (in terms of technology as well as sales) with every iPhone launch and the latest iPhone 5 has scaled unprecedented heights after the order book showed a whopping two million bookings just within 24 hours of its launch, and this way, sales could touch 10 million in this month itself.

The previous iPhone, the iPhone 4S, had sold just half that figure during pre-bookings.

Apple iPhone 5 is rich in features: It will come in two colour choices: Black and Slate and White and Silver and offer models with three different capacities – 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB.

Price of the 16 GB will be $199, while the 32 GB will cost $299 and the 64 GB $399. The new iPhone has the following dimensions: height: 12.38 cm, width: 5.86 cm and it weighs 110 grams.

iPhone 5 will not support the micro SIM card, and so, users will need to buy a Nano card to use it.

The new iPhone will be offered in two GSM models and one CDMA version. It will also have bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology.

The new iPhone will come with a four-inch screen and retina display. It also supports multiple languages and characters. It will have a finger resistant coating in the front.

The gadget comes with a powerful 8 megapixel isight camera. HD videos are also possible. The iPhone 5 has auto focus and LED flash and images can be captured from video also.

In battery life, the iPhone 5 has talk time of up to 8 hours on 3G and standby time of 225 hours. Internet use time is up to 8 hours on 3G, 8 hours on 4G LTE and 10 hours on Wi-Fi. Video playback is up to 10 hours and audio playback 40 hours.

Philip Schiller, senior vice-president of Apple (worldwide marketing), dubbed the response as “phenomenal” during launch.

According to website CNET, potential buyers were standing in long queues with coats and sleeping bags outside a retail outlet in New York. There were similar queues in London’s Regent Street as well.

Although Apple has come up with the best product in cellphones, it is being challenged by Korean electronics giant Samsung, which often offers bigger screens on its handsets and prices them judiciously. In fact, Galaxy has posed a challenge for the iPhone with the latest flagship of Samsung, the Galaxy S III, achieving a feat by overtaking iPhone 4S sales.

But any analysis of the iPhone 5 is futile in the wake of the overwhelming response. Apple is slated to make 70-80 per cent profit on every iPhone sold. So, with such unprecedented sales and profit, Apple would surely fulfill the dreams of its late CEO Steve Jobs and cast a shadow on the Galaxy S III, at least in the near term.

India apparently claims to be at the forefront of the global IT revolution as well as technology but have we seen any IT innovation from India (not by Indians living abroad) during or after the Internet revolution, leave alone having our own Steve Jobs?

With growth of the Internet, we have seen the concept of email evolve with Hotmail, Yahoo and a host of others providing email services for free.

At that time (in the mid 1990s), email technology made all of us awe-struck.

Messages, and more importantly, job applications along with CVs could be sent instantly and that too for free!

But here, there was no apparent role played by India, except of course Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia was an Indian brought up in the US.

Along with Internet came search engine giant Google and another Internet-platform-cum-email provider Yahoo. Still, there was no sign of India.

The onset and evolving of the Internet created instant billionaires with for example, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, starting Google as their college project at the coveted Stanford University in the US.

Google today earns over $5 billon in a quarter. The search engine’s second quarter earnings touched $9 billion.

Let’s take another example. Late Steve Jobs, who has literally changed the world with his innovative applications, is another success story.

The technology world lost one of its brightest stars with the demise of Steve Jobs last week. Jobs not only founded Apple but also recreated it and turned Apple into one of the world’s favourite consumer electronics brands with products like iPad, iPod and iPhone… names that are uttered by almost every youth of the world.

Another success story is that of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who like Jobs is a college dropout but the chairman of the world’s biggest company Microsoft Corporation.

Gates, who is best known for the personal computer revolution, had been among the world’s richest men for almost a decade.

Then, there is, of course Mark Zukerberg, who with site Facebook, has revolutionised social networking on the Internet.

No one from India figures in this coveted list. So, when will we have someone like them?

We’ve also not been at the forefront of the recent Cloud computing, which has revolutionised the way we store data.

But Indian IT giants or majors (there are four, namely TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies) were quick to replicate Cloud and are offering services at much cheap rates, even though the quality may not be the best.

Instead of becoming a leader in IT services, India has become a good follower.

Thus, our IT industry has to bear the brunt of being called various names. For instance, US senator Charles Schumer called India’s IT bellwether Infosys a “Chop Shop”, a derogatory term used to indicate car mechanics who cut parts from used vehicles and sell them as scrap.

We do have Indians contributing significantly to the tech and IT industries but not India.

For instance, Vinod Dham is known as the father of the Pentium chip that runs on almost all our computers. Would Dham be the man he is if he was in India?

We have Indians at high places in developed countries like the US. For instance, almost one-third of US top doctors are Indians, Microsoft has an equal per cent of Indian employees and the percentage of Indian scientists working in Nasa is almost 30 per cent.

But what if these men were in India? Could we have offered them a platform to pursue their interests and make them achieve the milestone they have reached today?

Indians (in India) have not received a single Nobel prize in the field of physics, chemistry or economics in the recent past.

Also, at a recent ranking of universities and institutes globally, the best we could do is achieve a rank of 187th (bagged by IIT Bombay), way behind even countries like China, Japan and Taiwan leave alone nations like the US, the UK and Germany.

On the scientific research front also, India is a laggard despite its tall claims.

For example, we have just managed to come up with one fighter aircraft (the Tejas, which just passed the trial stages) where as America, Russia, Germany, Britain, France and China have rolled out scores of fighter planes in the last few decades.

But we have made some progress in space technology and that too by collaborating with foreign countries.

Does it take an Indian to go out of India in order to succeed?

Isn’t it time for India also to produce a genius like Steve Jobs or Microsoft chairman Bill Gates from its own soil before flaunting the milestones it has “achieved” in the field of technology.

By involving private companies in research, more collaboration with global firms and less politics in our offices can pave the way, to some extent, for us to carve out our own Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.