Steve Jobs: 'I admire Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg'

Steve Jobs expressed admiration for the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for not selling out and dominating the social networking space, his official biographer has revealed.

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Steve Jobs in 2007 holding the iPhone Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images

By Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor

2:12PM BST 24 Oct 2011

Steve Jobs expressed admiration for the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for not selling out and dominating the social networking space, his official biographer has revealed. According to Walter Isaacson, the Apple chief spoke about the young technology entrepreneur with respect.

Jobs told his biographer: “We talk about social networks in the plural, but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there. Just Facebook, They are dominating this. I admire Mark Zuckerberg . . . for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.”

These kind words were a stark contrast to the ones he reserved for the likes of Microsoft founder Bill Gates or for Google.

In the official biography, which is out today in the US, Jobs accused Gates of being “unimaginative”, saying: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology."

He also vowed to destroy Android, Google’s rival mobile phone operation.

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” he told Isaacson.

“I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

However, in the outtakes of the CBS 60 Minute interview with Isaacson, the author revealed Jobs’s admiration for Zuckerberg.

When Jobs passed away, the Facebook founder and chief posted a message on his Facebook profile paying tribute to the late Apple founder.

He wrote: “Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”

Many have drawn comparisons between the two entrepreneurs, both of whom dropped out of college and ended up founding huge technology companies in their 20s.

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How Does Google Make the Big Bucks? Ahh .. we got you the Detailed Report

 

Google is now making $3 billion a month in advertising — the majority of which comes from little text ads next to search results.

You might wonder how that’s possible, and who’s spending that much money on search ads.

The answer, according to Larry Kim — the founder of a company that sells software to analyze text ad campaigns — is in industries where a customer is worth a lot of money over the long-term.

Wordstream, Kim’s company, analyzed search terms that advertisers pay the most to have their ads show up next to, and grouped the top 10,000 by industry, using its own software. They multiplied the so-called cost-per-click — what advertisers pay Google for each time someone clicks on their ads — times the number of times people search on that word. They then divided that pie up by keywords that fit different industries.

The top industry? Insurance, where companies eager to outbid their rivals for new customers pay Google more than $54 for a click. Together they make up 24 percent of Google’s revenues from search advertising, according to Wordstream’s calculations. Companies in the business of issuing loans come second, with CPC rates of more than $44 — providing nearly 13 percent of Google’s revenues.

“There are lots of lawyers finding clients,” Kim said. “Even if they have to pay for 50 to 100 clicks to get a client, they can get that back in a court case that last for years, all the while billing $500 an hour. The same thing happens with CRM software, where companies pay a high month fee.”

(For more on how Google prices ads and tries to ensure ads are relevant, check out this great feature story from Wired Magazine about the money-making machine that is Google ad auctions.)
Speaking of lawyers, the mortgage and legal industries show up third and fourth, respectively.
Rounding out the top 20 is an odd entry — Cord Blood.

“I didn’t know what that was,” Kim told Wired.com. “Turns out the industry has to with rich parents preserving their child’s umbilical cord with idea that the stem cells in it will be able to cure diseases in the future. And storage of cord blood has huge upfront cost and substantial ongoing payments.”

Again — an industry that can make lots of money from a customer over a long period of time — making it not unwise to pay $27 per click, even if only one out of 50 of those who click on the ad actually signs up for your service.

The top 20 categories account for about 70 percent of Google’s ad revenues, according to Wordstream’s calculations. Wordstream, which offers some free keyword analysis tools, sells software that lets companies and search engine marketing consultants organize and manage their advertising campaigns.

As for the remaining 30 percent?

About 1000 different categories combine to make up that last 30 percent, each getting thinner and thinner — which Kim refers to as the “Long Tail,” a reference to the Wired magazine article and later book by Chris Anderson. Those categories together “represent a tremendous amount of spend,” Kim said.

Infographic courtesy Wordstream

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