It is because of his past accomplishments that it should come as no surprise that Apple has created a "Remembering Isaac Hayes 1942-2008" page of the iTunes Store. While you can't rent Shaft, you can download a songs from any of the twenty albums present on the store, a music video for Thing For You, rent the South Park movie, purchase Hustle & Flow, or take a look at his Celebrity Playlist.
If Steve Jobs says the iPhone comes with Visual Voicemail, the iPhone really comes with Visual Voicemail. We simple users of the device don't get to disable it. That is unfortunate for those of us who travel internationally, because voicemail is really expensive when roaming abroad. The problem is that phone networks are also really dumb. All calls have to go through your home country, where they're forwarded to the roaming network, incurring international charges. Then, when the roaming network decides your call needs to go to voicemail, it sends the call back to you home network—incurring international charges a second time. You would normally call your voicemail box for the hat trick, and most of the time, the message is "Can you call me back?" or, after a long story, "I'll just e-mail you." (Can you tell that I'm not a big fan of voicemail?)
With Visual Voicemail, the first two steps and the last one are the same, but the good part is that you normally don't have to call voicemail: it's delivered to your iPhone where you can admire it in full visual glory. It turns out that the iPhone downloads voicemail messages over its 3G (or 2G) data connection, but not over WiFi. So, when I was in Dublin (where I turned off 3G data roaming to avoid the insane data roaming fees), I was presented with a badge on my phone icon that told me I had a message. But because the iPhone couldn't, well, phone home, it couldn't download the message—or even tell me how many messages I had. The badge was just a sad, empty circle. Strange.
The first thing you want to do is discover the number of your voicemail box. You can do this by typing *#61# and pressing "call." The iPhone will now tell you if voicemail is enabled and the number of your voicemail box. Copy down this number and keep it in a safe place.
Now that you know your voicemail box number, you should be able to forward all calls to it using Settings - Phone - Call Forwarding. This is—among other things—useful when roaming internationally: because this type of forwarding isn't conditional, the incoming calls don't have to go through the network where you're roaming, saving you a lot of money. (This is all in theory, and your milage may vary.) However, this didn't work for me. In fact, I was unable to set up call forwarding at all, regardless of the number.
And now, finally, disabling voicemail on the iPhone: type #004# and call. Enabling it again is done with *004# and call. I made two contacts for these numbers and made them favorites, so I can just "call" "VM disable" and "VM enable" from my list of favorites. You can also forward calls to a different number, or selectively enable/disable diverts for no answer (61 rather than 004), not reachable (62), or busy (67), and there are some other tricks as well. See the lists linked above.
Post scriptum: These codes generally work on all GSM-type networks, but there are no guarantees. I asked Jacqui, our fearless editor, to try this on her AT&T iPhone in the US, and it didn't work for her. Deactivation seemed to work, but both the "activate all conditional diverts" (*004#) as well as the individual ones (*61#, *62#, and *67#) resulted in errors. Despite all this, her voicemail kept working. Apparently, AT&T (and other US carriers) don't let their users disable voicemail—the only way to get this done is to call customer service.Apple is worth more than Google. Huh? This doesn't make sense to me.
Let's start with the obvious: Google makes more money than Apple does. It had earnings of $10 billion over the past 12 months, compared to $8 billion for Apple. And while both companies' earnings are growing fast, Google's are growing faster.
But here's the clincher: Google's earnings were on less than $20 billion of revenue -- that's what I call a profit margin. Apple, by contrast, needed more than $30 billion of revenue to get its $8 billion of gross profit.
Of course, when it comes to stock valuations, the present doesn't matter nearly as much as the future. So what does the future hold for these two franchises?
They're both strong technology giants with very large "moats." But Google is stronger, and its moat is bigger. It owns search, certainly in Europe and the Americas, and it's making strong inroads into display advertising as well. Sam Gustin might be kvetching about "the toll being inflicted on Web advertising by the slowing economy," but the growth rates are still pretty torrid for what is now a reasonably mature industry:
19% market growth? I think Apple would be very happy with that. And remember that Google is increasing, not decreasing, its share of total online ad spending. Over at Apple, by contrast, the iPod/iTunes duopoly can't help but see its market share eroded going forwards, as DRM-free online music stores start competing on price, the record labels try to cut Apple down to size, and the marginal utility from buying your fourth or fifth iPod starts to decline.
Apple's phone business looks great right now, but the industry is notoriously cutthroat, Apple doesn't have the degree of control it's used to elsewhere, and in any case handset margins are never going to be as big as margins on iPods or MacBooks. Yes, the iPhone app store is a very promising business model -- but it's going to be quite some time, if ever, before it makes a significant contribution to Apple's bottom line.
And then there's the computer business. Macs are selling well, at very high margins. But Google's muscling in on the computing business too: over the long term, it makes sense to do all your computing in an ever-improving cloud than it does on specific, individually-owned pieces of hardware which always, eventually, break. The more important the cloud, the less important the computer, and the less important the computer's operating system, too.
Howard Lindzon, by contrast, thinks the stock market is right, and that Apple should be worth more than Google. Two of his arguments are weak: that "social search" will make Google obsolete (I'll believe it when I see it), and that "MacBooks are getting cheaper" (no they're not: Apple's entry-level laptop has been priced between $1,000 and $1,100 for years, and it's going to stay there).
Howards best argument is that a falling Google share price could become self-fulfilling: "if the stock lingers between $500 or worse yet, drifts lower, you will see a brain drain of epic proportions," he says. Google's competitive advantage has long been that it was smarter and richer and one or two steps ahead of the competition. As it matures, it might not have the same ability to attract the very best and the brightest.
But if Google has job risks, Apple has Jobs risk -- which is much bigger and probably just as imminent. No one at Google is even as important to the company as Jonathan Ive is to Apple, let alone Steve Jobs. If I'm holding a stock as a long-term investment (which is the only sensible way to hold a stock) then I don't want to run the risk that the company will founder the minute the CEO exits.
And talking of the long term, the option value of all those crazy Google projects which never make any money is huge. There's a good chance that, eventually, one of them will take off in a big way, and if it's energy-related, it could make Google's present business look positively puny.
Google stock is volatile, just as the founders said it would be in their prospectus. But if I was going to sleep today to wake up in ten years' time, I'd be much happier with Google stock under my mattress than Apple.
