Postcards

Geek Squad rivals: Bring 'em on!

by Jessica Shambora

Watch out, geeks. You've got company.

Yes, Best Buy's (BBY) Geek Squad, whose "agents" drive those Volkswagen Beetles to the homes of customers in technology distress, has competition to contend with: digital troubleshooters who aid consumers via the Internet.

Even as these forces are expanding, it's hard to detect them. For instance, the "solution engineers" of Support.com (SPRT)'s are almost impossible to spot since they work via remote-access subterfuge. Once MORE

Power Point: Go for lead dog

"As every Iditarod musher knows, if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes."

-- Sarah Palin, in Going Rogue. Yep, she's ambitious--and No. 1 on Amazon.com.

Power Point: It's all about the hair

"The hair is 75 percent of my performance."

-- Actor Robert Pattinson, who stars as vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen in the screen version of the literary sensation, Twilight. In a Q&A in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, Pattinson says that for New Moon, the franchise's second installment, he told the filmmakers, "Listen, I need to tone down the hair. Let's make it a little more real, a little bit more...Method."

Pattison's MORE

Power Point: Steve Jobs, message master

"A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message. He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic. Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say -- and don't say. "

--Fortune's Adam Lashinsky on Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs. Lashinsky's cover MORE

Power Point: What drives Steve Jobs

"There hasn't been a day in Steve's life that he doesn't get up, think about the company he works for, or what he's going to do next. These are things that drive him."

--Bill Campbell, Intuit (INTU) chairman and former CEO, about Steve Jobs--Apple's (AAPL) CEO and Fortune's "CEO of the Decade," on the cover of the current issue. Once Apple's VP of marketing and now on the board, Campbell  claims MORE

Power Point: Get involved in the details

"He's involved in details you wouldn't think a CEO would be involved in."

--Ken Segall, a former Chiat/Day creative director who has worked with Apple (AAPL) on and off for years, talking about Steve Jobs, Fortune's "CEO of the Decade." Jobs commissioned the 1997 "Think different" campaign, says Segall, long before any of Apple's new products were introduced -- or even described to the ad team. "He'd say, 'The third word MORE

Power Point: What would Steve Jobs do?

"The threshold for the release of the first product should be, 'What would Steve Jobs do?'"

-- Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder, who often evokes Apple (AAPL)'s maestro CEO in his advice to entrepreneurs. Andreessen is quoted in the Fortune cover package, "Steve Jobs: CEO of the decade," hitting newsstands Friday. Fortune's retrospective of "all things Steve" includes timelines, online photo galleries, and testimonials from Jobs' friends and colleagues. MORE

The real meaning of J&J's layoffs

by Jessica Shambora

We keep hearing how the economy is improving, but with U.S. unemployment at 9.8% and rising, the job market gives us nothing but anxiety. Today Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) added to the pain by announcing layoffs of 6-7% of its workforce. That's about 7,000 employees.

While J&J faces lots of industry-specific challenges--patent expirations, increasingly complex regulation, healthcare reform--the news is stunning. Particularly because J&J is known for its MORE

Power Point: Get customer-facing!

"If you're interested in an entrepreneurial career, find yourself in a customer-facing job."

-- Greg Waldorf, CEO of eHarmony. I had lunch today with Waldorf, who was was a founding investor in the online-dating pioneer long before he rose to the top of the Pasadena-based private company. Besides telling me a few funny things ("Everyone thinks their town is the worst place for dating," he said--and in every new country MORE

One social-networking player making real money

by Jessica Shambora

Are there green shoots of profitability in the land of social networking?

Last week Twitter announced deals with Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) to make its posts available on the Bing and Google search engines--and this could be a reliable source of future revenue. Though as Adam Lashinsky writes in the current issue of Fortune, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are still less focused on making MORE