According to Apple’s 2012 Proxy Statement, Cook received a jaw-dropping $377,996,537 in total compensation last year — which is $377,996,536 more than his late predecessor made.

Cook made a little more than $900,000 in salary in 2011, but a massive bonus in restricted stock units, vesting in two five-year increments and doled out with his appointment to the CEO slot, sent his total compensation into the stratosphere.

Of course this isn’t the first time Apple has showered a CEO in stock options. A similar scenario played out in 2006, when Steve Jobs received $646.6 million, much of it in stock.

“Customer response to our products in China has been off the charts,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. “With the launch in China next week, iPhone 4S will be available in over 90 countries making this our fastest iPhone rollout ever.”

In addition to China, Apple is also bringing the 4S to a host of other countries, from Anguilla to Uganda. In all, 22 countries will be added to the list of places carrying Apple’s latest smartphone.

Apple isn’t commenting and is officially treating all this as rumor and speculation (it rarely comments on acquisitions, anyway). But the deal is being reported in Israeli newspapers, and the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted a welcome message to Apple today, which sure feels like confirmation. So I’ll proceed under the assumption that the reports of this acquisition are true.

Welcome to Israel, Apple Inc. on your 1st acquisition here. I’m certain that you’ll benefit from the fruit of the Israeli knowledge.

December 20, 2011 2:55 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@IsraeliPM

The PM of Israel

That makes this a cause for celebration. With the Anobit buy, Apple is now the latest member of the Flash Madness Club, which I created over the summer, in the wake of the Fusion-io IPO and other activities by notable flash-technology companies like Violin Memory, Pure Storage and Qwilt.

So why is Apple willing to throw down a reported half-billion dollars on this company? It’s because flash memory has a fundamental problem: As it ages, its ability to store data wears off. This problem is sometimes compared to the semiconductor equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Individual cells on the flash-memory chip lose their ability to store the individual ones and zeros that make up the pictures and music and other data they may be storing, especially after millions of read-and-write operations — the act of putting data on the chip and then loading it from the chip for use. After a lot of heavy use — this can vary depending on the chip — the chips begin to suffer problems with “endurance.”

As flash starts to show up in data centers and PCs and other places beyond consumer gear like iPhones and iPads, this becomes a more important problem. If your iPad gets old enough to suffer data-endurance problems, it’s a pretty simple matter to replace it. But in the more rigorous world of an enterprise data center, where millions of reads and writes will be done on a chip daily, data endurance is a potentially very expensive problem. In the enterprise, a solid-state drive is considered suitable only if it can stand up to five full-drive write cycles, where the drive is filled to capacity and then erased every day for five years.

Anobit’s solution to these problems involves techniques known as memory-signal processing and the use of some secret-sauce memory-processing error-correction algorithms, plus some management tricks for moving data around a flash chip in more efficient ways, in order to make them last longer.

It’s also the sort of problem that a company like Apple — which is the world’s largest consumer of flash memory, and has been for several years — would want to solve. Think of the many places where Apple uses flash — the iPad, iPhone, iPod, MacBook Air and Apple TV. And those are just the products we know about, so far. Flash can’t help but appear in many more products.

On top of that, flash technology plays a significant role in Apple’s data centers. Fusion-io, the company that builds flash-based insert cards that speed up garden-variety servers, has named Apple as a significant customer, so there’s plenty of flash inside Apple’s facilities in North Carolina. Flash endurance can’t help but be a problem Apple might face with its iCloud service, for example.

Israel has a big connection to the flash industry. SanDisk’s founder, Eli Harari, is Israeli; a few years back SanDisk acquired an Israeli company called Msystems, which, if my memory serves, was the first to popularize what we now call a thumb or keychain drive. So, historically, there have been a lot of useful innovations on flash memory that have come out of that country. Supposedly, the deal calls for Apple to open a research center there, so it will get the benefit of ongoing innovations on flash. Chances are it’s going to need a few.

In recent weeks, Apple executives have discussed their vision for the future of TV with media executives at several large companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple is also working on its own television that relies on wireless streaming technology to access shows, movies and other content, according to people briefed on the project.

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Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

That’s the new theory being put forth by J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz, who believes the Fire will end up being a catalyst for additional iPad sales.

Moskowitz met recently with Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and came away with the impression that Apple isn’t much bothered by Amazon’s new lower-priced entrant in the tablet market.

“If anything, we think that Apple views the Kindle Fire as a device that stands to bring incremental consumers to the tablet market, and here, these consumers could gravitate to more feature-rich experiences,” Moskowitz said in a note to clients. “We think that Apple is not seeing much pressure from lower-priced tablets.”

In other words, the Fire may well expand the iPad’s addressable market by drawing more price-conscious customers into it — customers who might someday upgrade to the more capable and versatile iPad.

“Given all the investor interest in the Kindle Fire, competitive risk in tablets was one focal point of our meeting,” Moskowitz said. “[But there’s] not much concern in tablet town.”

The country is now beginning the arduous job of cleaning up from the floods that killed upwards of 600 people and dealt a body blow to its industrial and manufacturing base.

One industry hit especially hard is the computer business. The world relies on factories in Thailand to turn out critical components used to build hard drives, and factories there are out of commission for now. This is not a trivial problem — the factories in question are not easy to replace, retool and restart once they dry out. Nor is the answer simply for the hard drive manufacturers to build new factories somewhere outside the flood zone.

This is the kind of supply chain disruption that the computer industry hasn’t seen in many years. I had a chance to talk with Steve Luczo, the CEO of Seagate Technology, for his view of the situation. Seagate has been relatively lucky in that its factories haven’t been directly impacted like those of Western Digital and Toshiba. But many companies that supply Seagate with necessary components have been hit, and it will be some time before they’re back on their feet.

Luczo told me that the computer industry as a whole — including companies who make PCs, servers, workstations and any other device that contains a hard drive, whether a set-top box or an enterprise storage device — can expect acute supply-chain disruptions to last well into 2012, and that it will take until the end of 2013 for the industry to return to its pre-flood operating posture. You read that right: It will be two years before the supply of hard drives is anywhere near “back to normal,” and there are simply no easy solutions for getting it fixed.

An estimate by the market research firm IHS iSuppli pegs the available supply at 125 million units, which is about 29 percent short of demand of 175 million units. By its reckoning, more than one-quarter of the world’s hard drive manufacturing capacity has been disrupted in one way or another, including 45 percent of the capacity devoted to making hard drives for personal computers. I spoke with Luczo by phone yesterday, and tossed in an extra eighth question because of the importance of the subject.

AllThingsD: Steve, at a high level, I think everyone understands the problem. There’s been a terrible flood in Thailand, and a lot of factories that make crucial parts for hard drives are out of commission. To that end, I think people expect this to be a temporary problem that works itself out in a couple of months. But you say it’s a much more complex problem than most people realize. You’re tracking this situation day to day, and probably hour by hour. So, how bad is it, really? And what’s likely to happen?

Luczo: What’s surprising to us is that even with all the data out there — we’re six weeks into it — there are a lot of fairly sophisticated companies that haven’t fully come to grips with the depth of the problem and the duration that is likely to occur. What is going to happen in the next couple of weeks is that the real shortage begins to show up right about now. There was already a lot of built inventory and a lot of finished goods moving through the system. And now all that is gone, and I think customers are starting to see shelves of parts go empty, and realizing that they’re not going to be filled for anywhere from one to two months. So the concern is heightened.

We heard Meg Whitman talk about this on HP’s earnings call Monday. She said HP stepped in and started doing some strategic buying. She says HP is going to see effects at least through the first half of next year. Apple talked about it on its earnings conference call, too. Are you hearing from them?

Tim Cook at Apple was way in front of this. I saw Tim the first week it happened, and took him through the situation, and in 15 minutes he understood the magnitude of it. Meg was on the second week of her job as CEO when I went to see her, and she got it right away. HP’s procurement VP, Tony Prophet, was also early to understand this. Companies like that reached out to us early on, because they understood that this is going to be an extended problem. They started asking for longer supply agreements. Deals that would typically last about a year, they’re now asking for two years.

How bad is it really going to be? What’s your outlier worst-case scenario, and then what do you think is a little more realistic?

If you think pre-flood, a mix [of products] that the customers need, the industry had the capacity to ship about 190 million units a quarter. Pre-flood, we expected the demand to be pretty consistent at about 180 million a quarter, with a bump in September 2012 for Windows 8. We now believe the March quarter is going to much more difficult than the December quarter, and December is going to be about 120 million or so. We think the March quarter will be about 120 million, in the best-case scenario. And that’s with customers mixing down pretty aggressively; and by that, I mean companies like Western Digital, who don’t have access to the sliders [a critical component in a drive], are shipping one- and two-headed devices so they can ship more units. So instead of shipping a drive that contains two disks and four heads, which is what the market needs right now, they’ll be shipping a one-disk, one-head or one-desk, two-head product. They’ll be maximizing the units they can sell, rather than shipping the product the customer actually needs. … So we see something like 130 million for March on the optimistic side, and then 150 million for June, 170 for September and then 190 million for December. And so by the end of 2012 you’re back to being close to industry demand. But even then, you’ve not included the impact of that missed 100 million units. And that will take another year to absorb, because it’s not like the industry is building new factories to chase that demand. We can’t over-invest to meet some bubble and then get stuck with excess capacity.

I think, intuitively, people expected companies like Seagate to just build more factories outside of the flood zone, but it’s not that simple, is it? Would this not be a moment to add capacity?

There are some in the investment community who think that’s what is going to happen, and that there will end up being a supply glut after all this is over, but it’s not the case. For us, it’s more a function of how to recover the supply chain and then work with the customer to get a good read on what their needs are for the next several quarters. If we see a multiquarter shortage that goes beyond what I described before, then we would think about maybe putting some capital in place. But we’re not going to do that to solve a temporary problem, because we end up being stuck with the excess capacity. Now if it turns out there is no recovery, and then the industry is more constrained than I first described — and that, by June, the industry is still 30-40 million units short and looks like it will be for the next six quarters — we might revisit. But then we’d want longer-term commitments to make sure we’re not overinvesting. But we’re not to that point yet.

What is this doing to prices? And what does that mean to the person who wants to buy a computer or server this year or next year?

If you look at a 10-year moving average trend, the industry has in general seen prices come down about 2 to 3 percent a quarter, and that is for a particular product. In 2009, there was a little price erosion, and that was because the storage industry recovered quickly from the recession. And there had been massive capital cutbacks, so there were big shortfalls through all of 2009 and into 2010. Then, when the Greece crisis happened, that put a big flatline on a lot of growth, and the industry had put in a lot of capital because everyone expected there would be growth. So, since spring of 2010, the price erosion has been higher than normal, which would show that supply is greater than demand. And what this flood has done is drive the supply curve down, while the demand curve has stayed constant. For OEMs [original equipment manufacturers, or the PC and server manufacturers like Apple, HP and Dell, who buy directly from Seagate], you’re seeing an average increase of about 20 percent, and in the channel [resellers who sell parts to smaller PC and server vendors], probably much higher. So all the sensational quotes you see about pricing are about those that occur in the channel, where we have no control whatsoever.

The markups in the channel are much higher? Are the channel guys taking advantage of this?

Yes, they’re higher, but I don’t think they’re taking advantage. I’ve heard stories about drives that we sell to OEMs for $60 that show up in the channel at $105. Normally the channel price is within about 10 percent of the OEM price. It’s just the law of supply and demand. They can’t get supply. The channel is getting about a third, at most, of the supply they would typically get. The OEMs are the ones with the supply agreements, so everyone in the channel is way short. In some market segments, supply is about 70 percent below what the demand is. And so those shortages are very acute. The channel is selling the few drives that are out there to whoever needs them the most and is willing to pay for them.

So what does all this mean for Seagate, specifically?

For us it’s a different story, because we’re going to be driving more volume than our competitors, because we’re not as directly affected, and we’re going to be making some  technology transitions. When we do that, it lets us take cost out of our product, so we can offer more capacity for the same or fewer parts. That helps us drive down pricing. Our goal is to recapture some of the more aggressive pricing of the last eight quarters, in order to sort of get our business back in balance. Our long-term business model calls for gross margins of 22 to 26 percent. And we use our manufacturing expertise to drive down our costs and then pass that on to our customers. This quarter, end users really won’t see it, because product has been built and has been on the shelves. As the shortages just started occurring, you’re starting to see prices increase in the channel. And then at the OEM there will be shortages in some high-value areas like enterprise storage or cloud computing. You’re going to have to see price increases, because there’s such big shortages.

One thing that occurred to me when I first wrote about this a month or so ago is that it represents an opportunity for the flash memory chip companies to make some inroads against hard-drive guys like you, mainly on notebooks. Is there a threat that flash could pick up some of the demand?

Some of it, but not very much. I think to the extent that there is a high value purchaser who can afford to pay $200 for 100 gigabytes, then that market will expand from 1-2 percent to 3-4 percent. Of the 35 to 40 percent shortage that exists, could you see a little of that get absorbed by silicon? The answer is yes. But there’s a cap. There’s just not enough of a raw supply of silicon to meet all the demand. Our industry will ship 400 exabytes this year. We would have shipped 450, were it not for the floods. Of that, 180 exabytes is notebooks. Reduce that by 30 percent, and you get about 55 or 60 exabytes. If you were to take all of the capacity from Samsung’s newest state-of-the-art flash factory, and dedicated it just to notebooks, it would only put out 7 exabytes a year. Plus, there are already other markets demanding flash, like  tablets and cellphones and other things. So it’s not like you can steal from those other markets. You’re not going to take a $32 product and replace it with a $350 product. Can you do it at the edges of the market? Sure. But the threat is capped by the amount of silicon available and the price point for flash storage, which is still an order of magnitude higher.

I can’t report that it does. I spent several hours futzing with the service last night, and found it balky. But I’m guessing that, just like its iCloud launch last month, Apple will work out many of the kinks over the next couple days.

In the meantime, sometimes iTunes Match did what it was supposed to do: It moved my songs — whether I bought them from Apple, acquired them legally somewhere else or flat-out stole them — from my computers to Apple’s servers. Then it let me move the files back down again to my iPhone and other machines.

That’s useful for me, and worth the $25 annual charge. But it’s great for Apple.

Because now my computer, my phone and several other devices are even more closely bound by iTunes than they were before. And it’s happening just as rival cloud services are trying to bust up Apple’s hold on my media.

Tomorrow, for instance, Google is set to finally unveil its Google Music service, which is supposed to combine a cloud/locker offering with the ability to share songs with friends who also use the service. Yesterday, Amazon started shipping its Kindle Fire tablet, which is both a media consumption device and a media obtainment device — designed to get me to buy more media from Amazon.

Meanwhile, Spotify has been pushing me — with an insistent assist from Facebook — to use its music service for free, with the hope that I’ll become so deeply enmeshed that I end up paying $10 a month for a premium account.

None of these rival services preclude me from using Apple and iTunes. In fact all of them will work, at least initially, with iTunes songs (video will be another story). And it’s possible for me to maintain parallel cloud systems if I really want to. I could use Spotify as a discovery tool, for instance, and iTunes as my gotta-have-it archive. But I’ve got limited time and attention, so the reality is that I’m going to end up picking one cloud and sticking with it.

I’ve been working with iTunes since 2001, so Tim Cook already has a very long lead — long enough that he can get away with charging me $25 a year to make it even harder for me to leave. The new guys are going to have work very hard to pull me away.

[Image via: instruct9r/Shutterstock]

According to Morgan Stanley’s new China PC Survey, 21 percent of consumers considering the purchase of a new PC would like it to be a Mac. That’s more than said the same of Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Sony, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. It’s also significantly more than the Mac’s current market share in the country, which hovers around about 5 percent.

So great news for Apple, right? Sure, were it not for one caveat. Most Macs are well beyond the $600 average price Chinese consumers typically pay for a PC. And few survey respondents said they were willing to meet those prices.

“Apple’s share gains in the near term are likely limited to the 7% of respondents who are willing to pay over $1,100 for a PC,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty. “In the long term, as Chinese consumers become more affluent, we believe Apple could see further share gains as it is the most desirable brand.”

And that does seem to be the trend here. Already the company’s growing retail presence in the region, along with a fast-developing brand preference for its products among higher-income consumers, is generating blockbuster sales and profits. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier this year, “In my lifetime I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class aspiring to buy products that Apple makes. It’s an area of enormous opportunity.”

That has yet to happen. And if it ever does, it won’t be anytime soon: Gartner projects that by the end of 2015 digital music revenue may hit $7.7 billion worldwide, while CD sales will still be around $10 billion.

But there’s something else that really struck me about Gartner’s newest numbers. Take a look and see if you can figure it out:

Catch it? Took me a minute, because I couldn’t figure out what “Personalization Services” were. What kind of name is that for a $2.1 billion industry?

Here’s the English-language definition, via Garnter’s PR team: “The ringtones and ring-back tones that consumers pay for to use on their mobile devices. Typically, these can be acquired directly from service providers and synched to the mobile phone over the air, or can be acquired via a PC or connected device and then synched to the mobile phone.”

To sum up: More than 10 years after Napster, one of the key pillars of the music business is ringtones, a business that peaked around 2005, when some of you would have recognized the image at the top right of this post.

If you’re reading this, you probably haven’t paid for a ringtone since 2007, and you probably don’t know anyone who does. But there it is, generating two-point-one-billion dollars.

And Gartner thinks ringtones won’t die off anytime soon — four year from now, it thinks it’s still a billion-dollar business. Meanwhile downloads, dominated by Apple’s iTunes, are going to grow ever so slowly. Which means that if digital music is ever really going to take off, it’s going to be up to subscription services like Spotify, which up until now haven’t gained any real traction.

Gartner figures that will change, and who knows? Perhaps the Facebook fire hose that’s spraying Spotify at the social network’s 800 million users will work. So far, the signs are encouraging.

But if that doesn’t work, things are going to look as grim as ever — a flatlined CD business, a slow-growth download business controlled by Tim Cook, and … Crazy Frog.

[Image via Wikipedia]

The top four most powerful people are politicians, including Barack Obama in the top spot. At No. 5 is Bill Gates, who ranks high for his philanthropic role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Some of the other tech leaders and their rankings:

5. Bill Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

9. Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook.

30. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders, Google.

40. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.

42. Robin Li, CEO, Baidu.

44. Li Ka-shing, chairman, Hutchinson Wampoa.

58. Tim Cook, CEO, Apple.

60. Masayoshi Son, CEO, Softbank.

But the low-key Mr. Cook has already put his operational mark on Apple in ways that suggest the company won’t be entirely the same as under its intense and tempestuous co-founder.

In recent weeks, Mr. Cook has tended to administrative matters that never interested Mr. Jobs, such as promotions and corporate reporting structures, according to people familiar with the matter. The new chief executive, 50 years old, has also been more communicative with employees than his predecessor, sending a variety of company-wide emails while addressing Apple employees as “Team,” people close to the company said.

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To wit, the company’s latest 10-K filing, issued Wednesday, which shows net sales in the Asia Pacific region rising to $14.3 billion during 2011, compared to 2010.

That’s an increase of 174 percent.

Another data point: In 2010, the Asia Pacific segment represented 13 percent of Apple’s total net sales.

And in 2011?

21 percent.

That’s quite a year-over-year spike, but not all that surprising given Apple’s momentum in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the latest earnings call, the company’s prospects in China are very strong right now. “In my lifetime I’ve never seen a country with as many people rising into the middle class aspiring to buy products that Apple makes,” Cook said. “It’s an area of enormous opportunity. It has quickly become No. 2 on our list of top revenue countries very, very quickly.”