An email revealing former Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ plans for the company outlines his strategy for the company in a "post-PC era".
The email, dating back to October 2010, was released as part of the ongoing Apple-Samsung legal battle regarding patent infringements.
It was sent out to a hundred of the company’s most senior employees ahead of the company’s Top 100 annual meeting, where the company’s strategy for the upcoming year is decided.
Published by Quartz, it includes discussions over the release of the iPad 2, which Jobs saw as a key part of Apple’s move into the ‘post-PC era’, noting that the original iPad had outsold Macs within six months.
Writing that "Apple is the first company to get here", Jobs noted that 66% of Apple’s revenues were from post-PC era products, showing the impact that the iPhone, iPad and iPod were having.
As part of his plans for 2011, Jobs vowed ‘Holy War’ with Google, aiming to get Apple to examine all the ways in which it would compete with the search engine giant. He admitted that Apple needed to "catch up" with Google cloud services and Android areas where they were behind, including notifications, tethering and speech.
2011 was set to be Apple’s ‘Year of the Cloud’, signified by the moving of users’ ‘digital hub’ of contacts, music and videos away from the PC and into the cloud.
Microsoft and Google, "are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet", Jobs noted, spying an opportunity for Apple to seize the initiative, as he feared that the company was "in danger of hanging on to (its) old paradigm too long".
This, he noted, would be an ideal opportunity to tie all of its services together and "lock customers into our ecosystem", in a similar fashion to how Microsoft has got customers in their Windows operating system.
Referencing upcoming products, Jobs spoke of an Apple TV 2 set-top box and mentions TV subscriptions with networks, apps, a browser and most interestingly, a "magic wand" control device.
"Stay in the living room game and make a great ‘must have’ accessory for iOS devices," Jobs advised.
Jobs passed away in October 2011 following a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was succeeded as Apple CEO by current incumbent Tim Cook.
