According to Reuters’ copy of the filing, Apple stated:

“Apple’s entry into e-book distribution is classic procompetitive conduct” that created competition where none existed, Apple said in its court papers.

“For Apple to be subject to hindsight legal attack for a business strategy well-recognized as perfectly proper sends the wrong message to the market,” it added. “The government’s complaint against Apple is fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law.”

Apple also denied that the government “accurately characterized” the comment attributed to Jobs.

The “comment attributed to Jobs” is referring to a January 2010 email from Steve Jobs in which he seems to suggest how to set prices of e-books between $12.99 and $14.99.

The “fundamentally flawed” characterization of the case by Apple in the latest filing is a slightly more agressive version of the company’s initial response to the suit last month, when Apple called the accusations from the DOJ “simply not true.”

In April, the DOJ filed suit against Apple and five publishers – Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins (who quickly agreed to settle), Macmillan and Penguin — accusing them of colluding to keep Amazon out of the e-book market unless it changed its pricing structure.

To get up to speed on the case since then, see my paidContent colleagues’ “Everything you need to know about the e-books lawsuit” post.

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The tribute opened with two of the most famous faces from Apple ad campaigns: humorist John Hodgman and actor Justin Long, who starred in the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. Next up was actor Richard Dreyfuss, the voice of Apple’s “The Crazy Ones.”

The tribute, which you can see in its entirety below, also includes appearances from an all-star lineup from across entertainment, news, tech and politics, each giving the traditional five-word Webby tribute to Jobs, including President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, George Lucas, Ariana Huffington, Bono, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Buzz Aldrin, Vint Cerf and more.

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• Get ready for snappy, overlapping dialogue and fast-paced walk and talks with Steve Jobs: The movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography will officially be penned by The West Wing and The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin, reports Slash Film. (This is virtually guaranteed to be less awful than the competing Jobs project starring Ashton Kutcher.)
• Sprint CEO Dan Hesse did his best Honey Badger impression during Sprint’s earnings call this morning. Despite shareholder concern about the large investment necessary to sell the iPhone and knowing that it won’t be profitable until 2015, Hesse isn’t worried. According to AllThingsD, he said, “We believe in the long term. And over time we will make more money on iPhone customers than we will on other customers.”
• You know how Apple and China Mobile have been in talks for years about offering the iPhone on China’s largest mobile carrier? Well,  those talks are continuing, according to the carrier’s new chairman, Xi Guohua. “China Mobile and Apple both have the will to strengthen cooperation,” he said at a company meeting Wednesday, without offering any more specific details, Bloomberg reports.
• Greenpeace tries to get Apple’s attention on coal-powered server farms with protestors dressed as iPhones and a pod-like capsule that projected protest messages onto Apple’s Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday. Gizmodo has the (bizarre) pictures.
• Washington insiders may be miffed that Apple doesn’t follow standard D.C. practice in lining politicians’ pockets with donations, but the company isn’t a stranger to high-ranking officials. Here’s the latest proof: this photo, posted by Fortune, shows Apple CEO Tim Cook meeting with John Boehner, Speaker of the House of Representatives, on Tuesday.

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“I’ve always hated litigation, and I continue to hate it.” Cook said, in response to a question during Apple’s earnings conference call regarding reports that the company is considering settlements. “We just want people to invent their own stuff.”

Apple’s decision to sue Google’s Android partners–HTC, Motorola, and Samsung–over alleged violations of Apple patents for the iPhone and iPad was driven in part by emotion, as detailed in Walter Issacson’s biography of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, who died last October.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion [at the time] in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said in 2010. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”

However, as I pointed out last October, Cook is not Jobs. Apple has fought valiantly in courtrooms around the world against Android vendors, and has at times appeared to have the upper hand, but as of late April 2012, it has little to show for two years of combat. Apple has a mixed record at the International Trade Commission, and is tied up in other courtrooms over procedural questions and endless hearings.

“I would highly prefer to settle than to battle,” Cook said, but don’t expect Apple to settle easily. Cook also said that he didn’t want Apple to be the inventor for the world, and demanding steep royalties from those which it has sued could discourage others from thinking about following Apple into a market without innovations of their own.

But the sad truth is that our patent system is hopelessly broken, filled with patents of questionable value on all sides that can turn any patent dispute into a stalemate as major corporations buy patents from struggling ones to hurl at each other. With another ridiculous quarter just entered into in the history books, Apple is clearly not suffering any competitive effects from those companies whom Jobs believed stole Apple’s inventions.

It seems Cook would prefer to focus on keeping Apple’s remarkable business on track, and if he finds a way to wind down the mobile patent wars, it could be the smartest thing he does in his first full year as Apple’s CEO.

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If you have time, then you should read this story Schlender he has published in the Fast Company magazine. It focuses on what Schlender calls “the wilderness years.”

…this middle period was the most pivotal of his life. And perhaps the happiest. He finally settled down, married, and had a family. He learned the value of patience and the ability to feign it when he lost it. Most important, his work with the two companies he led during that time, NeXT and Pixar, turned him into the kind of man, and leader, who would spur Apple to unimaginable heights upon his return.

In other words, it is not our successes but our failures that define us. How we choose to deal with failure, learn from it and grow because it, makes us who we really are.

The Pixar Story

The story also highlights the slow and steady growth of Pixar and Jobs’ role in the company and its history. Apparently, he wanted Apple to buy it, but the board wouldn’t agree. He eventually bought the company for $5 million and put another $5 million into the company to build specialized graphics computers that sold for around $135,000. When that didn’t work, when John Lasseter and Ed Catmull told Jobs that they could create short animation films (that would eventually become Pixar’s hall-mark), he went all in. As part of the change of strategy Jobs fired much of the Pixar staff and told the new team:

I got everybody together, and I said, “At our heart, we really are a content company. Let’s transition out of everything else. Let’s go for it. This is why I bought into Pixar. This is why most of you are here. Let’s go for it. It’s a higher-risk strategy, but the rewards are gonna be much higher, and it’s where our hearts are.”

Ironically, this all or nothing strategy is what would eventually save Apple itself too. Of course, he would later get Disney to do a deal with Pixar that would eventually make Pixar a massively valuable company.  The lessons learned from Pixar would eventually help save Apple and then propel it to new heights. I picked out these little bits – some choice quotes and wisdom from Steve Jobs essentially to highlight Pixar and its impact on Jobs.

The audience isn’t gonna care about the Pixar animation system, they’re not gonna care about the Pixar production system, they’re not gonna care about anything–except what they will be able to judge for themselves, and that’s the end result, which they can appreciate without having to understand what went into it, what went into creating it. And that, I love.

I guess, that is how they feel about iPhone and iPad.

The difference between the best worker on computer hard-ware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you’re lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it’s at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.

Well, looks like guys from Google and Facebook have learnt that well from Jobs.

Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint….I’m a long-term kind of person. I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.

Yup, maybe all those who want to emulate Steve Jobs remember that!

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Daisey’s infamy has grown following the decision of This American Life on March 16th to retract an earlier report after discovering that Daisey could not account for key facts in both his monologue (The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs) and in his statements to This American Life for a report on Apple and manufacturing that got widespread attention. Among other things, Daisey completely made up an anecdote in which he had supposedly invoked a sense of child-like wonder in a former Foxconn worker with a hand mangled on the iPad production line by showing the man a working iPad for the very first time.

After his uncomfortable performance on “Retraction,” Daisey defended his work, writing on his personal blog that “my show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.” Given more time to think about it, he actually doubled down, attacking his critics: “Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.“

However, it later emerged that Daisey had insisted on printing “this is a work of non-fiction” on playbills for his monologue, making it clear that he wanted audiences to walk away from the performance seeing Daisey as a courageous muckraker unafraid to tell the stories others wouldn’t touch.

Daisey’s conscience finally caught up with him over the weekend. On Sunday, he wrote the following:

When I said onstage that I had personally experienced things I in fact did not, I failed to honor the contract I’d established with my audiences over many years and many shows. In doing so, I not only violated their trust, I also made worse art. This is not the place for me to try and explain my good intentions. We all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. In fact, I think it might lead to where I’m sitting right now.  I had an acting teacher, years ago, who always taught that the calling of an artist is to be humble before the work. He knew, I think, how easy it can be to lose one’s way.

He went on to apologize to his other theater performers, human-rights advocates, and journalists that had interviewed him for stories in which he repeated all his falsehoods. “Things came out of my mouth that just weren’t true, and over time, I couldn’t even hear the difference myself,” he wrote.

But Mike Daisey forgot to apologize to the entity that was the direct target of his lies: Apple.

Original Sin

Daisey’s selection of Apple and Jobs as the centerpieces of his monologue was not a coincidence. A self-confessed Apple fanboy, he held great admiration for the work that Apple contributed to the world under Jobs’ second term as CEO as well as immense disgust for the conditions under which modern consumer electronics devices are produced. Given that Apple is the largest producer of modern mobile devices made in factories such as Foxconn’s, and given the intense scrutiny that is paid to all things Apple both inside and outside the tech industry, it’s not hard to see why Daisey chose Apple and Jobs as protagonists in his work.

But in reality, Daisey exposed nothing about Apple’s manufacturing issues that wasn’t already known. It’s not that his whole account was fabricated: workers manufacturing products for Apple have been poisoned by dangerous chemicals, killed in explosions that were preventable, and have committed suicide in groups over the last few years.

Steve Jobs Announces iPhone

What Daisey did do, however, was present made-up emotional and personal stories about those issues as if they were new. He spent months on a media blitz linking Apple as the main contributor to the widespread labor and safety issues at companies like Foxconn (which builds products for an entire industry) based on fabricated accounts of his travels in China.

He implied that the company was covering up even worse violations, such as the widespread use of child labor, in one of the most dramatic scenes of his monologue. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News the day before the latest iPad was released, saying “I traveled to the factories in China, spoke to dozens of workers, heard their stories firsthand and went undercover into factories and dormitories. … The company has been choosing profit over workers’ lives.”

And perhaps worst of all, on the day after Jobs died Daisey repeated the story about the Foxconn worker with the mangled hand in The New York Times, linking Jobs’ legacy to a horrific anecdote that never happened.  After This American Life published its retraction earlier this month, the Times removed that paragraph from its archived copy of the article.

The Daisey And The Damage Done

There is no doubt that the consumer electronics industry needs to do more to improve the working conditions under which its products are made, and that Apple, as the leading consumer electronics company of our time, is in a position to make an outsized impact. But Daisey’s contribution to this issue was not just to raise attention to the problem at large (which he definitely did), it was also to generate publicity for his Apple-themed show. He did that with lies that declared not only was Apple not doing as much as it could to solve the problem, but that it was actually a worse actor than its peers.

On a petition circulated by Change.org following the airing of the first episode of This American Life, over 255,000 people affixed their names to a call for Apple to do more to protect workers. They said things like “I can still make the decision to buy PC instead for the sake of my conscience and the wellbeing of other people” and “As a Mac user for 17 years, this is the first issue that could make me stop buying from Apple.” A petition to retract that petition following the exposure of Daisey’s lies has just 373 signatures.

Mike Daisey built the key parts of his monologue–and much of his current fame–on lies he told about Apple. He has one more apology to make.

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Apple has nearly $100 billion in cash on its books. It is also a source of constant nagging by Wall Street investors who want  Apple to do something with it: a dividend, give it back to investors or something.

In order to address the cash balance issue, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, are going to host a conference call to announce the outcome of the company’s discussions concerning its cash balance, the company announced Sunday. The call will be held on Monday at 6 a.m. PDT (9 a.m. EDT.)

During the Steve Jobs era, Wall Street’s demands fell on deaf ears. In a recent conference call, Cook’s position on cash balance wasn’t that extreme. As my colleague Erica Ogg pointed out, Cook and the board have been in discussions about the company’s cash position, which continues to rise. “We have more cash than we need to run the business on a daily basis,” he said during a Goldman Sachs investors’ conference last month.

I, for one, believe the company should just sit on the cash and not worry too much about Wall Street just yet. It is important that they use the cash to lock up supplies of components for its products. The cash cushion gives the company room to actively compete for talent as well as any future startups it might need to acquire to enhance its overall ambitions. 

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Apple is about to introduce a new iPad. Good — for I need to buy a new one. I left my old one with my mother. When visiting my folks in India, I decided to leave my Macbook Air at home — I didn’t want to write and just wanted to spend some quality time with the family. Instead, I carried my iPad 2. (I don’t leave home without it.)

When at home, I did a FaceTime call with my siblings who also live overseas. I handed over the iPad to my mom. She had this look of amazement, one of pure unadulterated joy as she chatted with her grandson.

Being a broadband nerd who cannot stop thinking and talking about the need for speed and connectivity, I felt this moment captured essentially what I, and by extension GigaOM, am all about — connectedness and the change it brings. For once, the technology didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter how it was happening — just that she could talk to her grandson who was oceans apart from her. If there ever was a moment that captured the emotion in a piece technology, that was it. The look on her face made me realize how lucky I am to write about an industry that makes such things possible. I also thought to myself, maybe somewhere Steve Jobs is smiling too.

Apple, clearly, is not for everyone. But for me that moment of joy experienced by my mother is enough of a reason why there will be no other computer company. Apple’s competitors will do their own thing. Some, like Samsung, will do spectacularly well. But for me, Apple finds ways to delight people, pushing technology into the background. When Steve Jobs passed away, I wrote:

Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects. Everyone saw steel, silicon and software; he saw an opportunity to paint his Mona Lisa. People saw a phone; Steve saw a transporter of love. People saw a tablet; he saw smiles and wide-eyed amazement. They made computers; he made time machines that brought us all together through a camera, screen and a connection.

The smile on my mother’s face captures what I wrote the best.The iPad is now with mom. She set up her iCloud account. She figured out Skype, browsing and email. She knows how to send iMessages. More importantly, she has created FaceTime connections for all those who matter to her. I get a feeling that her Windows PC will gather dust and she will be bothering me a lot — right in the middle of a meeting in San Francisco. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

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Cook did talk at great length about his view of the potential growth opportunities for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. But just as important for investors who want a clue as to where the company is going in Steve Jobs’ absence, Cook also opened up a bit on how he plans to make his own mark on Apple. He is very obviously not Steve Jobs, something he’s been repeatedly reminded of by the press and Wall Street since it first became apparent he would likely take the reins from Jobs permanently. And while it’s clear he has learned from Jobs in many ways — peppering his sentences with words like “amazing” and “incredible” and espousing his belief in the supremacy of Apple’s vision and extreme focus — Cook is passionate about Apple in his own way.

One of the things he takes very seriously is his role as the caretaker of Apple and what Jobs created. He said:

Apple is this unique company, unique culture that you can’t replicate. And I’m not going to witness or prevent the slow undoing of it — because I believe in it so deeply. Steve drilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products and we should stay extremely focused on a few things rather than so many that we did nothing well. And we should only go into markets where we can make  a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products. Along with keeping excellent as an expectation of everything at Apple, these are the things I focus on.

Sure, we all think of Cook as the spreadsheet-and-numbers nerd, but he is becoming a salesman too: During the Q&A session, he recommended at least three times that listeners go buy an Apple TV.

It’s not a secret that the things that made Jobs tick are not the same for his successor. And Cook, who is a notoriously private person, is starting to show what those things are to company outsiders. For him, it seems, rather than inventing the future or ruminating on big ideas, the big reward for him is winning customers and putting products in people’s hands. “There’s no better thrill than to look at an audience and see people using iPods or iPads,” he said. “These are the things that bring a smile to my face, and there is no substitute for that.”

Cook’s view on cash

One of the ways Cook may turn out to be different from Jobs is what happens under his watch with the company’s cash and liquid assets. Jobs was very adamant that no dividend or share buybacks or large acquisitions be made, in order to keep Apple totally out of debt and independent should the company hit rough financial waters. Cook has signaled he’s not nearly as extreme in his position — several times, including on Tuesday, he has reminded investors he is “not religious” about keeping cash or not.

So what is his attitude? He cleared up any ideas that Apple just sits on its pile of cash (or goes swimming in a lake of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck). He noted that the company has spent “billions” on its supply chain, acquisitions, retail operations and company infrastructure:

Yes, we still have a lot. I guess I’m saying we’re judicious. We’re deliberate. We spend our money like it’s our last penny. And I think shareholders want us to do that. They don’t want us to act like we’re rich. We’ve never felt that way — that may sound bizarre, but it’s the truth.

Cook trotted out the same line the company has been using about its cash in the last several years, that the board is “in active discussions” about what to do with it. But this time he admitted that there is more focus than ever “because the balance has risen.” And he made another admission:

We have more cash than we need to run the business on a daily basis. 

With that he asked for patience while the board decides what to do. While it’s not terribly likely he will get it, how he’s handling the issue does demonstrate Cook’s style. He’s very much a product of the Apple/Jobs way, but he’s looking ahead and is not opposed to at least thinking a little differently about the way things have always been done.

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