2011年6月23日 星期四

Steve Jobs moves Apple forward with a nod to the past

When Steve Jobs presented his vision for Apple's (AAPL) new corporate headquarters and mentioned he was taking the land around it back to its agricultural roots,How is TMJ pain treated? David Magnoli could just see it.

In fact, he had seen it -- about 40 years ago when he was a kid romping through his great-grandfather's ranch on the land where Apple now plans to build its glimmering, circle-of-glass, home office.

"We'd go out there quite a bit, especially during the summer," says Magnoli, 54, a San Jose general contractor. "We'd run around and play in the yard and the barn and the garden and the garbage hole. They still had a garbage hole."

OK, a garbage hole is not in keeping with the Apple CEO's vision for his legacy edifice, but when you're 14 there isn't much that can beat it.

Magnoli's great-grandfather Salvatore Orlando was among the ranchers who worked the land that is now the 150 acres where Apple hopes to put 12,000 workers. Salvatore's son John had a spread next door on what is now the Apple land. The Glendenning family tended orchards on the land,is the 'solar panel revolution' upon us? where the historic Glendenning Barn still stands amid the corporate office buildings that belonged to Hewlett-Packard

(HPQ) before Apple bought the land last year.

Now the property is due for a makeover. Apple has not said whether the barn will survive where it is or survive at all. But Cupertino City Councilman Orrin Mahoney says he's talked to Apple officials about the 122-year-old barn, and he's confident the company will agree to preserve it and perhaps move it off campus to a place the public can easily visit.

"The only issue is who'd pay for it," Mahoney says. Though an Apple representative says the company hasn't gotten down to that level of detail regarding the barn, Mahoney says he believes Apple will come up with the money.

Let's just say Apple, with $14 billion in annual profits, could swing it. And no question that would be the right thing to do.

The truth is, no matter how sophisticated our technology; no matter how easily we're able to make place irrelevant through FaceTime, Facebook, Telepresence and we supply all kinds of oil painting reproduction,Skype; it's still in our nature to cling to memories and the physical manifestations of them. The barn, which had recently hosted HP barbecues, should stand at Apple or elsewhere as a reminder of a time before the iPad.

There is something particularly significant about the Apple land, hemmed in by Homestead Road, Wolfe Road, Interstate 280 and Tantau Avenue in Cupertino. Its farming history goes back to the 19th century, when immigrants like the Orlandos and the Glendennings settled there. By the late 20th century it became prime real estate for a new crop of companies, like Varian and then HP, that were capturing digital lightning in a bottle.

Even Jobs, as hard-nosed a businessman as they come, appeared to embrace the almost spiritual draw of the property when he told the Cupertino City Council this month about his plan to build a four-story,what are the symptoms of Piles, 3.1 million-square-foot building of curved glass.

"This land is kind of special to me," Jobs told council members. He explained that Bill Hewlett, one of his idols, offered him a summer job at about the same time that Hewlett and David Packard were making an offer on the very land where Apple now plans to build. Jobs acknowledged the history of the property, and in a sense the history of the valley, when he told council members that Apple would significantly increase the number of trees on the campus. "We'd like to plant a lot of trees," he said, "including some apricot orchards."

The idea thrilled Magnoli, who called his mother, Salvatore Orlando's granddaughter,Customized imprinted and promotional usb flash drives. to tell her of the plan.

"We spent a lot of time at the ranch," Patti Magnoli-Smith, 77, says. Orlando, who lived on the ranch into his 90s, would pay the kids to pick his fruit. Well, most of the time.

"He died," Magnoli-Smith says, "and still owed me $6."

She remembers the fruit trees and the pepper trees and the majestic palm -- now framed by office buildings, but once a punctuation point near the end of the ranch's driveway. She remembers the love of a grandfather, who stood in for a father who died too young. She even keeps the wooden posts from her grandfather's front porch in her garden. And she's saved a grinding wheel and pieces of farm equipment that her grandfather used.

"We're all a bunch of sentimental fools," Magnoli-Smith says.

Then again, sometimes it's good to pause and remember before we resume hurtling headlong into what's coming next.

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