SiliconBeat

Apple’s earnings report today was incredibly impressive. But as interesting to me as the record revenues and sales was just how much the company has changed in just a few short years.

As recently as seven years ago, Apple was at heart a computer that also had a sideline of digital music players. As recently as four years ago, you could make the case that Apple was a digital music company that also happened to sell computers.

Now, Apple is clearly a mobile phone maker who also happens to sell computing devices and, oh by the way, a few digital music players.

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Following my Sunday column, “Who will be Silicon Valley’s next Steve Jobs?” the most common response I got was: Why wasn’t Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the list? That was echoed in comments, tweets and emails.

In fact, I did strongly consider Dorsey. But ultimately, I dropped him.

There are certainly many intriguing parallels between the Twitter co-founder and Jobs. Like Jobs, Dorsey created a remarkable technology company that has had huge impact. And while there are several people considered co-founders of Twitter, Dorsey is usually credited with the concept, and the development. And, of course, he was the first CEO of Twitter before being pushed aside a couple of years ago — just like Jobs!

Rather than sulk and withdraw, Dorsey started another company, Square, a mobile payment service that has shown strong growth, attracting a recent venture round of $100 million that values the company at $1.6 billion.

And then, Dorsey made a triumphant return to Twitter earlier this year to lead product development, while remaining CEO of Square. Again, shades of Jobs, with his creation of NeXT, his role at Pixar, and then returning to Apple at first as an advisor.

And certainly, many others have made the Dorsey-Jobs connection. For instance, BetaBeat recently wrote:

“What we were startled by was the growing feeling feeling that there’s something about Mr. Dorsey that just sounds so familiar. A heavy emphasis on clean design. A charismatic presence at public announcements… wait a minute: @jack is kinda like a young Steve Jobs. Apple has even started selling Square in their retail stores.”

So, why didn’t I put him on the list? Part of it was the conceit of the list. I needed to keep it narrowly defined to be able to make comparisons, and so I decided to stick to people who were all CEOs. Yes, Dorsey is the CEO of Square, but that’s not why he’s such a big figure at the moment. Square is still tiny in impact compared to Twitter. It’s his role at Twitter, both as co-founder and now lead product designer that makes him a figure of note.

And in that regard, Twitter is still a mixed bag for me. The company still has scant revenue, and is still struggling to get its arms around a complex set of design and feature issues. The most interesting things about Twitter are often built by third parties, and the company needs to redefine its relationship with its ecsystem.

If Dorsey sorts all of that out, and he helps create a core, unified Twitter experience, then he’s certainly on the path to demonstrating a Jobs-like prowess. And if he can actually help the company figure out a business model, and even return to the CEO chair, then I think he’s someone to be considered for legendary status.

Everyone on that list has a lot to prove to be considered heir to Jobs’ legacy. But right now, compared to other folks on the list, Dorsey has even further to go.

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I reviewed Motorola’s Atrix smartphone in this week’s Tech Files column. What intrigued me about the Atrix are its accessories: one optional dock allows the device to turn into a quasi-laptop; another allows it to turn into a pseudo desktop PC or even an Internet-connected set-top box.

As I wrote in the review, I liked the Atrix and thought the idea of a dockable smartphone had a lot of potential. But I found the docks themselves expensive, underwhelming and their potential largely unrealized.

Since I wrote my column, a reader alerted me to another reason to dislike the docks.

One of the advantages of the docks is that with them, you can use a full version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser to surf the Web and pull up Web apps in much the same way you would on a standard PC. What I didn’t realize was that in order to use the full Firefox browser on AT&T’s data network, AT&T requires users to pay its extra $20 a month tethering fee. (H/T here to blog site These Are the Droids.)

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Since the announcement that it was killing Google Wave, Google has turned on the spin by proclaiming how they “celebrate our failures.” There is a lot to admire about Google, and one of those things is its ability to experiment and, as CEO Eric Schmidt said, “try things.” It’s not just hard for many organizations to find the culture and capacity to do that, it’s hard for them to acknowledge when those things don’t work.

Danny Sullivan, at Search Engine Land, mapped out many of Google’s most notable recent failures, and wondered just what the company was really gaining in terms of knowledge:

“But in its statements to the world, Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these missteps. It doesn’t really document anything that was learned. It just seems to say as little as possible to move on.”

But the bigger problem I see at Google is its approach to developing those new things. Just because you enable it, or allow it, doesn’t mean your approach to you develop new products and services. And what strikes me about Google is that so many of these products seemed dead on arrival.

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I wrote on Monday about a problem with the camera system on Apple’s new iPhone 4 that was affecting users’ ability to not only take pictures but use FaceTime, the new video chat feature. My colleague Maria Avila helped me put together the video below that illustrates the issue. (H/t to another colleague, Greg Young, who helped me illustrate the FaceTime issue.)

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You’ve heard about the yellow screen splotches and the wonky antenna that requires you to hold the new iPhone just right.

But now a new issue is coming to light: a faulty camera system that not only affects your ability to take pictures, it can foil your attempts to use FaceTime, the video chat feature that is the iPhone 4’s top talking point.

I ran into this issue over the weekend. Apple kindly sent me two iPhone 4s to test out. I’ve been trying to convince my wife that we need to upgrade our iPhone 3G’s to the new model, so I thought I’d show her how FaceTime works, figuring she’d be as wowed as I was when I tested it on a friend’s phone in the office.

But it didn’t work. While the phone I was using received my wife’s image, the small box that was supposed to display my image wasn’t showing anything. Meanwhile, on the phone my wife was using, she could only see her own image in the small box on her screen; she didn’t get any images from my phone. Read the rest of this entry »

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The PC market is coming back strong, according to new research released today by Gartner and IDC. But HP and Dell, the leading US manufacturers, are losing share to their Asian rivals.

Worldwide PC shipments were up 27.4 percent in the first quarter of 2010, compared with a year earlier, according to Gartner. IDC pegged the year-over-year increase at 24.2 percents, still exceeding expectations.

HP remains the world’s leading seller of PCs, with 18.2 percent of the global market by Gartner’s count and 19.7 percent according to IDC. Both firms estimate that HP shipped almost 20 percent more units than a year earlier, while still losing a little under one percentage point of market share.

Acer, by contrast, was in the No. 2 position with 14.2 percent of the world market, up from 11.7 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner. IDC’s report gives Acer 13.6 percent of the market, up from 11.9 percent.

Both research firms are reporting that Dell’s share of the market also slipped a bit, while Lenovo, Toshiba and ASUS showed gains from a year ago.

IDC and Gartner each use slightly different methods of estimating the market, but their numbers usually track pretty closely. One difference this time: Gartner reported Apple gained almost a point of market share in the United States, while IDC reported Apple lost ground slightly.

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I just got an iPad review unit. I’ll have my full review later today. In the meantime, you can read my thoughts about it here:

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If you missed it, over the weekend we ran my look at Hewlett-Packard’s massive job cuts over the past decade: 75,505.

I have a few other stray thoughts that didn’t make it into the main story. And a few questions I want to follow up on in the coming weeks.

First, the stray thoughts.

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A few months back, I noticed a bunch of folks tweeting about the 1999 made-for-TV-movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley.” I remember hearing about the movie just as I was moving to Silicon Valley that year, but never got around to watching it. I had heard mixed things about the movie, and its accuracy, but the tweets seemed pretty positive, so I decided to rent it and see for myself.

It exceeded my tremendously low expectations. Though as far as factual accuracy, it’s hard to say where truth ends and creative license takes over. The movie hits some of the high points of the emerging battle between Microsoft and Apple as told through the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And narrated by their wingmen: Steve Wozniak and Steve Ballmer.

There’s an amusing scene, about 20 minutes in when Wozniak and Jobs walk out of the famed Homebrew Club in 1976, having triumphantly demonstrated a version of their personal computer:

Jobs: “IBM is going to be loading in their pants!”

Wozniak: “Steve, I don’t think IBM even knows who we are.”

Jobs: “That’s okay. Because they’re the enemy.”

And later, in a conversation with John Sculley:

Sculley: ”Steve, I’m worried. About what’s happening. All the “them versus us” stuff. Macintosh versus Apple II.”

Jobs: “You don’t understand, John. People need a cause.”

Creative license aside, back in the late 1970s, and the early 1980s, Jobs had enormous power and the ability to impose his will. If you wanted to play with Apple, you did things Jobs’ way. And he wasn’t afraid to define his enemies and go after them (IBM, Microsoft). That is, until he was ousted in 1985 and Apple began its long, slow decline. And even after Jobs’ return in 1996, Apple was just happy to still be around, even striking a deal with Microsoft to invest to keep it going.

Apple’s clout has grown steadily over the past decade, thanks to the success of the iPod and the iPhone. With the iPad announcement a week behind us, it seems the the gadget itself may turn out to be less interesting than some of the things it tells us about the state of Steve Jobs and Apple. With the iPad, it appears that Jobs is confident that he’s once again in a position to dictate terms and define the opposition in a way he hasn’t been able to since the early days depicted in Pirates of Silicon Valley.

You could feel this renewed swagger when Apple announced it recent earnings. Jobs said in a press release:

“If you annualize our quarterly revenue, it’s surprising that Apple is now a $50+ billion company,” Jobs said. “The new products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.”

That was a not-so-subtle reminder of Apple’s financial strength. Consider that Apple has closed the gap in terms of market capitalization with Microsoft. This is from Silicon Valley Insider last November:

“In May 2000, Apple’s market capitalization was $17 billion. Today it’s $182 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft was around $356 billion in May 2000. Today it’s around $261 billion.”

By the way, Google’s market cap is $171.73 billion as of mid-day Wednesday.

Since the release of the iPad and iTunes, Apple has had the music industry under its thumb. And with the iPhone, Apple was able to change the balance of power between device makers and phone companies. But with the iPad, let’s look at the new ways Jobs is flexing those growing muscles:

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