Steve Jobs speaks out

As the founder and saviour of Apple, Steve Jobs is seen as a messiah in the technology industry. So his interview with Fortune 500 comes as a fascinating insight into how he has masterminded one of the world's most innovative companies. Here are some snippets.

Steve on consensus:

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what's the next big thing. There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, "If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse.'""

Steve on trends:

"It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do."

Steve on consultants:

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

Steve on integration:

"There's no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to do that. There is no intimate interaction between Windows and a Dell notebook."

Steve on decisions:

"I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done."

Further reading on CNN.com.

Introducing Google Chrome OS

Google's recent re-labeling of it's applications from Beta to official has culminated in an announcement on their blog that they will be entering the operating system market with their long-anticipated Google OS, or Google Chrome OS as they would like to call it.

Since the launch of it's Android OS for mobile phones, it became clear that this sleeping giant is not just a one trick search engine pony. And with the market for netbooks increasing, currently 8% of the market share, PC manufacturers will welcome the competition to challenge Microsoft prices for software licensing.

This new emerging market is crucial as sales of these lighter and cheaper computers continues to grow. Microsoft's current OS, Windows Vista, is simply too big and cumbersome to install and run on the smaller hard drives and RAM. So they've had to extend the life of Windows XP which it officially killed off in June 2007.

With the migration of expandable storage and software online, Google has allowed Chrome to run on varying machine sizes. It can even be run on the chip that powers the Apple iPhone. Online usage is the key issue, where computers are no longer limited by their physical constraints. Google has also addressed users without internet connection with the launch of it's offline software, Google Gears.

With Microsoft Bing's recent foray into the search engine business, it looks like Google is fighting back. Interesting times are ahead.

Read more on Guardian Online.