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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

Carly Fiorina likes to boast about her friendship with Apple founder Steve Jobs but Fortune Magazine reports that it turns out Carly may have outfoxed of by Apple's late leader [fortune.com]. In January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina cut a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful iPod and sell it through HP retail channels but HP still managed to botch things up. The MP3 player worked just like a regular iPod, but it had HP's logo on the back and in return HP agreed to continue pre-loading iTunes onto its PCs. According to Steven Levy soon after the deal with HP was inked, Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP’s version outdated and because of Fiorina’s deal HP was banned from selling its own music player [cnet.com] until August 2006. "This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs," says one Apple source. "We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. Steve only did this deal because of that."

In short, Fiorina’s “good friend” Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP’s shareholders. By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP’s music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free [medium.com], stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor. And he lost nothing, except the few minutes it took him to call Carly Fiorina and say he was sorry she got canned. Levy concludes that Carly's experience with her "good friend" Steve Jobs [cnn.com] is not an encouraging precedent for a person who wants to deal with Vladimir Putin. "It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America."

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