A friend recently asked me, knowing that I was involved with Siri, what Steve Jobs’ legacy will be. Siri was the last giant milestone in Jobs’ career, but he had a long list of accomplishments.

In the course of one lifetime, Steve Jobs:

• Helped create and popularize the personal computer (Apple II, 1977)
• Oversaw the second most valuable American IPO, after Ford Motor Company (Apple, 1980)
• Helped create the modern personal computer with mouse, icons and a graphical user interface (Macintosh, 1984)
• Co-created an influential modern operating system (Mac OS, 1984)
• Created the most memorable advertising campaigns of his generation (Macintosh Superbowl Ad, 1984; “Think Different” campaign, 1997; etc.)
• Co-created a modern publishing platform (bitmapped display, Apple LaserWriter, Aldus PageMaker, 1984–1985)
• Ushered in the concept of a modern movie animation studio (Pixar, which he bought in 1986)
• Popularized two more modern operating systems (NeXTStep, 1989, then OS X in 2002)
• Released the modern object-oriented programmer’s toolset (NeXTStep, 1989)
• Resurrected the company he founded after returning to it when it was 90 days from bankruptcy (Apple, 1996)
• Reimagined and popularized digital music players (iPod, 2001)
• Transformed the retail experience and created the highest revenue-per-square-foot retail stores in the world (Apple Stores, 2001)
• Enabled easy digital music management (iTunes software, 2001)
• Released mass-market digital media creation and management software (iLife, 2003)
• Revolutionized online paid digital music distribution (iTunes Store, 2003)
• Sparked a transformation of the broadcast TV and cable industries (iTunes + Apple TV, 2007)
• Introduced the modern smartphone and helped shift the focus from telephony to music and Internet access (iPhone, 2007)
• Took down the “walled garden” application stranglehold of telecom carriers (with the iPhone + App Store, 2008)
• Reimagined the modern laptop computer (MacBook, 2006; MacBook Air, 2008)
• Transformed online software distribution with the application (“app”) store (Apple App Store, 2008)
• Invented the modern tablet computer (iPad, 2010)
• Along with Amazon, reimagined digital magazine publishing and distribution (Apple Newsstand + iTunes, part of iOS5, 2011)
• Laid the groundwork for mass-scale adoption of the artificial intelligence revolution in mass-market computing (Apple “Siri,” 2011)
• Built one of the world’s best management, engineering and marketing teams (Apple, 1996-2011)
• Created the world’s most respected and highly valued brand (Apple, 2008-2011)
• Increased value to shareholders 65-fold in 10 years (Apple, 2000-2011)
• Built the most valuable company in the history of the world (Apple, 2011)

Steve Jobs did not achieve any of this alone. But he was the visionary, instigator, leader, motivator, marketer, pitchman and showman for all of them. He was the most prolific technology and business innovator of our time. His restless intellect uniquely combined the humanities with technology and science, and brought a Zen sense of spare aesthetics to our everyday lives.

His brilliance, passion, commitment and energy changed, and continues to change, the lives of hundreds of millions of people for the better.

Steve’s legacy is hard to judge as a whole, as it lives on in the company he created, the technologies he unleashed, the many acolytes he trained and the aesthetic sensibility he imbued in all of us.

My family, many friends and I mourn for someone we never met.

Gary Morgenthaler is a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures. He was the first VC investor in Siri and was a board member at the company until it was acquired by Apple. Morgenthaler was also an investor and board member in Nuance, a partner of Apple. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Keng Susumpow.

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First, it was essentially a fire sale. Imeem, which in the past has been threatened into submission by large music labels, was feeling the heat from second-tier music labels wanting to get their pieces of flesh. On Oct. 21, The Orchard Enterprises, one of the largest independent record labels, sued imeem in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York. According to the suit, imeem had to pay $150,000 per infringement. On those terms, for multiple infringements, the total could have run into billions of dollars.

Remember the billion-dollar lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube? Imeem, I’m pretty sure, knows how painful it is to fight the record labels in the courts. The company fought Warner Brothers, but had to eventually settle by giving up equity in the company. A long, bruising battle is something imeem couldn’t quite afford since it was running low on cash. And it couldn’t pay these guys off. By selling to MySpace, which already has arrangements with The Orchard Enterprises, some of these legal threats might go away. Interestingly, with this deal, record labels that owned a nice chunk of imeem could see their equity in MySpace Music go up as well.

At the same time, founder & CEO Dalton Caldwell hadn’t been able to rustle up more cash. I bet the investors who have pumped in more than $35 million (including $10 million in debt) got tired of putting more cash into what seems like a bottomless pit. Back in September, news emerged that Sequoia Capital, one of the long-time backers of imeem, opted out of funding the company. Back in May, Warner Brothers wrote off a $16 million charge, but gave imeem new money and forgave future royalty payments in exchange for more equity. Fat lot of good that did them.

I have been fairly skeptical if imeem and their ilk, mostly because I felt that they cut bad deals and had painted themselves into a corner. Frankly, I am not that hot on MySpace Music, either. MySpace earlier bought iLike, another free music service, for $10 million — a firesale price – mostly to get hold of the talent. The bargain basement sales of iLike and imeem once again shows that the online music industry remains as risky as walking through a minefield punch-drunk.

Well, I guess when the company had a choice between locking the doors or teaming up with MySpace, it wasn’t a hard decision to make.

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The Wall Street Journal quotes Unity CEO Darrell Rinerson saying that Unity plans to use its 60 patents “to keep others out, to not allow this technology to be commoditized.” I’m not sure exactly what Rinerson’s aiming at with that statement, but to a certain extent commoditization — or at least driving a standard — is the key to becoming a successful chip company. Making chips is all about scale, so the bigger your operations are, the better it is for the business, even for those who hold patents. This is essential in the memory market for consumer electronics goods, where companies try to cut their costs to the bone. For example, many are not shy about passing the costs of memory upgrades to consumers.

However, the technical specifications of the memory resulting from Unity’s CMOx process are exciting. It’s supposed to perform 5-10 times faster and can store four times as much data as current NAND Flash. There’s an ever-increasing demand for more data on devices, for storing more pictures, songs or even HD movies. To address this market, SanDisk has been making strides beefing up its Flash products using a specially designed controller, and other memory companies are doing the same. Today Samsung signed a partnership with Fusion-io to speed up Flash inside the data center. Unity plans to have a 64 GB chip out within two years, and because of its production process it believes it can build a fab to manufacturer the chips for about $1 billion — about a third or a fourth less than other chipmakers.

If it can deliver chips with comparable data capacity for a quarter or a third of the cost of competitors, it could create a technology that’s cheap enough to satisfy the consumer electronics market, while also delivering nice margins on each chip. But given how far out its first products are, the number of other memory technologies seeking to replace Flash and how cutthroat the memory business can be, that’s a big if.

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The news of the layoffs has a tinge of morbid glee. American writer Russell Baker once wrote, “Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.” Perhaps we try and use the cacophony to turn a blind eye to the human cost of these cuts.

This weekend, when details emerged on the news that three executives at a Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip startup, SiPort, were shot dead by Jing Hua Wu, an employee recently laid off from the company, I like many others was forced to face the harsh and dark side of the job cuts. In a few random shots, four families were destroyed forever. The sad episode is weighing heavily this weekend. Join me in saying a silent prayer for the families of these three victims.

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