After joking last month about reports of his death, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is poking fun again at the endless speculation over the state of his health.

At a Tuesday event to unveil new MacBook laptop computers, Jobs stood in front of a big screen that said his blood pressure was 110/70, quipping, “And that’s all we’re going to be talking about – Steve’s health today.”

(In case anyone’s wondering, blood pressure under 120/80 is considered normal)

Remember a month ago at Apple’s 3G iPhone launch, Jobs had stood in front of another big screen that said “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

(Photo: REUTERS/Kimberly White)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a new iPod nano that lets users shuffle songs by shaking the device.

Not content with the so-called “shake to shuffle” feature, Jobs also boasted that the nano is the thinnest and cleanest iPod Apple has ever made, calling it “highly recyclable,” “mercury free” and … um … “toxic free.”

The 8-gigabyte model costs $149 and the 16-gigabyte version costs $199.

(Photo: Reuters)

Apple’s market cap edged over Google’s to hit $159 billion today (kudos to AllThingsDigital’s John Paczkowski for spotting this).

Is the maker of the iPhone, iPod and Mac worth more than the top Internet company’s $157 billion? How soon might either beat tech stalwart IBM, which is now worth $170 billion?

Mull over these stats to help you decide, courtesy of Reuters Estimates:

Forecast fiscal 2008 revenue
IBM: $109 billion, Google: $22 billion, Apple: $33 billion

Forecast FY2008 profit (excluding special items)
IBM: $12.2 billion, Google: $6.3 billion, Apple: $4.7 billion

Share price rise/fall in the year to date
IBM: +16 percent, Google: -28 percent, Apple: -9 percent

Forward price/earnings multiple
IBM: 14 times, Google: 25 times, Apple: 34 times

In case you’re wondering when any of them might catch up with the world’s largest tech company, they’ve got a ways to go yet. While Microsoft may lag Google on the Web market, the software maker’s shares are worth $255 billion.

(Photo: Eamon Sullivan of Australia (C) swims to a world record next to Pieter van den Hoogenband (R) of the Netherlands and Brent Hayden (L) of Canada in their men’s 100 meters freestyle semi-final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympics August 13, 2008. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay)

(Updates earlier post to clarify deal terms)

After four years of recriminations and in-fighting between executives from Sony Music and executives from BMG Music Entertainment, Tokyo-based Sony Corp has decided to end the mutual pain of a controversial merger and take full control of Sony BMG.

Artists like Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen and Justin Timberlake will now record under a new banner: Sony Music Entertainment Inc.

The FT had reported in June that Bertelsmann was looking for $1.2 billion-$1.5 billion for its 50 percent stake in Sony BMG, but it looks like the German media company settled for $600 million-$900 million — the exact sum depends on how you do the math.

Basically, Sony said it is paying $600 million cash to Bertelsmann, which will also get half of another $600 million in cash on Sony BMG’s balance sheet for a grand total of $900 million. The deal values Sony BMG at $1.2 billion. (UPDATE: You can argue that half of Sony BMG’s cash belonged to Sony, so its total cost was $900 million but Sony says it hadn’t consolidated Sony BMG’s cash. Bertelsmann adds that the value to it was higher than $1.2 billion, after taking into account tax breaks)

Will full ownership by Sony give the record label a new lease on life? According to Music & Copyright research, Sony BMG ranks second in the music industry with a 20.1 percent market share, behind Universal Music’s 28.8 percent. Here’s what some analysts told our correspondents in Tokyo and London:

Daiwa Institute of Research analyst Kazuharu Miura

Sony BMG is a company whose sales have been on a declining trend. But it has managed to post profits so far thanks in part to its restructuring efforts. There is no reason to see this as particularly negative. But I don’t think this is something that prompts investors to chase Sony shares, either.
Sony’s cash out is $600 million, while Sony BMG has been posting after-tax profit of about $100 million to $200 million. Of that profits, Bertelsmann’s portion will come to Sony after the deal. So, Sony can expect a return of about $50 million to $100 million for a $600 million investment. That is not a bad
investment.

Informa music analyst Simon Dyson

It would appear that Bertelsmann was getting out of the music industry altogether but actually they’ll still deal with some management and rights, which signals that they think there’s money to be made, just not in retail.
I’m probably a little more pessimistic than most people. I’m very sceptical as to whether music sales are going to return to growth for a good five or six years.
Sony is big in music and games, for example with Guitar Hero, for which artists seem keen to sign up. I wouldn’t think that actually owning the music company would need to be a part of it.
BMG on the surface seems to have got the most out of it. But they’re very clever people at Sony, perhaps they’ve got some kind of plan.

Jupiter music analyst Mark Mulligan

This is absolutely related to the fact that the music industry is in a really difficult time. But it has much if not more to do with Bertelsmann refocusing itself. What Bertelsmann really created was a cross-media megalith, trying to do too many things across too many areas. Owning everything isn’t necessarily the best way of getting the most out of a media company.
The timing and the importance of getting this done has been intensified by the state of the music industry. The music industry’s declining but some time in the next couple of years the decline will slow. Digital music sales will ultimately catch up with the rate at which CD sales are declining.

(Photo: Reuters)

If you’re getting lost in all the nasty rhetoric between Yahoo, Microsoft and Carl Icahn, here’s our primer on what the fuss is all about.

They’re trading insults (again) after the latest deal talks broke down (again). Microsoft’s top lawyer is pressing the antitrust issue in Yahoo’s Google search partnership in Washington today, while Yahoo’s top lawyer accused Microsoft of trying to force a fire sale.

Don’t forget, this comes after Monday’s war of words over the latest Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo search, which was floated with the help of billionaire activist investor Icahn and rejected by Yahoo (again). Here’s what they’re saying about that deal:

Source: Statements from Yahoo, Microsoft and Icahn

Further to our earlier post on the hottest looks in executive casual at Sun Valley, here are a few more outfits hot off the runway.

Who gets your vote for America’s next top model?

Mouse over the photos to identify your favorite executive and comment below.

(Photos: REUTERS/Rick Wilking)

Media moguls — well really, tycoons of all kinds — trickled into the Sun Valley Lodge on Tuesday for Allen & Co’s annual pow wow in Sun Valley. Or, in the case of Rupert Murdoch, he drove a white Toyota SR5.

Here are some mugshots:

         
No wonder the swans got scared.

(Photos: Reuters)

Bill Gates’ retirement from Microsoft Corp was an opportunity for him and Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to espouse on their decades-long partnership. Here are some excerpts from their Town Hall meeting with Microsoft employees on Friday.

On how they met:

Gates : Steve and I were both at Harvard and I was in this dorm up at Radcliffe where the kind of anti-social math types hung out … I was energetic and had ideas. There was a guy who would hang out with me who also knew Steve and he kept saying “There is this other guy who is super energetic like you and he’s a neat guy.” So … we went out to the movies together. I think we saw right away that, even though we are different in some ways, we had a lot in common and from that day forward, we brainstormed about our dreams, what we wanted to do and that was fantastic.

Ballmer: So we went out to see this movie. It was a double bill. ‘Singing in the Rain,’ which is my favorite movie ever. I’ve seen it now 30 times … We come back from the movie and we’re dancing, playing Gene Kelly and some guy wrestles me to the ground. Bill is trying to beat him away. It was really a weird kind of place.

On how Ballmer joined Microsoft:

Ballmer: Bill and Paul (Allen) interviewed me. Bill’s Mom and Dad took me out to dinner. They had met me once before. That was the big rush back then, dinner with Bill’s Mom and Dad. And then at the end of my job interview, and I think this is unique, Bill says “OK, I’m leaving town. Here’s my car, take care of yourself.” So I took him to the airport and he left on vacation in the middle of my job interview. So I guess I got the job anyway.”

Gates: I knew I wanted Steve. I knew I needed Steve, because every contract seemed like such a miracle … Picking which to do, how to price it and how to hire people. I had hired my friends, which was a small set and that wasn’t going to get us there. I was shy about it. I thought Microsoft was very important, but Steve clearly had so much opportunity that I was shy about saying to him, “Hey, come here.”

On negotiating Ballmer’s salary:

Gates: I went on that vacation, I was on a boat … and so it was over the radio phone … that we negotiated, not his share ownership, we’d come up with a formula that came up with something like 7 or 8 percent. We were negotiating his salary, whether it would be $36,000 or …

Ballmer: $40,000 or $50,000. That was the negotiation

Gates: So, over this radio phone, my friends on the boat, they’re all drinking and saying “Give him whatever he wants.”

Ballmer: “Don’t worry, he was tough. We split the difference. I came to Microsoft because of Bill. I didn’t know much about programming or I didn’t know much about personal computers. I knew Bill had a cool company. I knew he was a great guy and that he was brilliant and something good could happen.

On how Ballmer wanted to quit a month into the job:

Ballmer: I said “Jeez, I just dropped out of business school to come to a 30-person company as the bookkeeper.” My parents didn’t got to college. My dad didn’t finish high school and the fact that I dropped out wasn’t considered very good by my family. So I went out to dinner again with Bill and his dad … So this is what Bill said to keep me: “You don’t get it. You don’t get it. You don’t get it. We’re going to put a computer on every desk and in every home. It’s not worth it to go back to business school.” It was the vision that Bill, maybe it had been repeated before that, but it sticks in my mind as the thing he said that got me to stay.

On the office car park:

Gates: In the early days, we worked unbelievably hard. In fact, it was kind of a fun thing that I knew everyone’s car in the parking lot and there was always a thing that you would try to take the first parking place, because that meant you were the first to come in. If, when you left, there was a still a car to the left of you, that meant someone had done something called ‘lapped you.’ That is they had come in before you and they left after you. That was a humiliation that someone was lapping you. In fact, we told a guy at IBM, Mel Hallerman, who was part of the original PC project and we told him about this. He was a hard-working guy so he started doing it at IBM and doing it very well. He was in early and left late.

Ballmer: No life. The guy had no life.

Gates: About nine months later, we’re down at IBM. Steve and I go out to dinner with Mel and Mel’s saying ‘there is some guy who’s been working harder than I am. I come in really early, I leave really late. The guy is here before me and leaving after me every day. I’m going to find out who this guy is.’ So after we have dinner, we go back to this IBM parking lot and Mel points out the car of this guy. Steve looks at it and says “Wait a minute, that’s the rental car that a few months ago I took and forgot to take back.”

(Photo: Reuters)

Bill Gates bid an emotional farewell to Microsoft on Friday, the company he co-founded in 1975. Here are some of his quotes, filed by Reuters reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi, who was at the event at the software giant’s leafy Redmond, Washington, campus.

Gates on starting Microsoft:

Microsoft is one of the few companies you can say it just started with a dream. A dream that software would be important. A dream that there would be a computer that was affordable on a personal level. That’s a dream that Paul Allen and I had, which at the time seemed very crazy.

Gates on IBM:

Our relationship with IBM was one of the defining things in this company. We were their partner. At some point, they chose not to have us quite as much of their partner. They went off with OS/2 and we were left with good old Windows. Sure enough, the David vs. Goliath story came out with the right ending.

Gates on growing the business:

I remember Steve (Ballmer) and I stayed up late at night wondering if any software company, whether it was Microsoft or anyone else, would ever get to a billion in sales. That is a big number!

I love that kind of thing where people are underestimating Microsoft. They don’t realize the vibrancy. Yes, we make mistakes and we know it, but we come back and learn from those things. A lot of our best work is the result of that.

One of the newspapers had an e-mail that I sent about how maybe Windows could have been better at something. And they said, ‘this is a shocking piece of e-mail. Shocking.’ And I said ‘What do you think I do all day?’ Sending e-mail like that IS my job.

Gates on leaving Microsoft:

For me, this will be a big change. For 33 years, I’ve essentially had the same job.

Some days, I’m so used to coming in to Microsoft. Even if I have the kids in the car and I am supposed to take them to school, I forget and if I start thinking about work a little bit, I start driving toward Microsoft. They say to me, ‘Dad, what are we going to do at Microsoft?’ So I get back on course.

I am sure there will some day next month where I start thinking about software and I will start driving here to Microsoft, go up to the fifth floor and walk down to my office and they will be remodeling it. In fact, they were wondering if I was leaving at 4 or 5 today, so they could get started on that.

(Photo of the “Albuquerque Group”, the original 11 members of Microsoft who worked at the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico before it relocated to Washington state. Dec. 7, 1978. Source: Microsoft.com)

Yahoo shares have fallen 20 percent since talks with Microsoft broke up, and some shareholders are blaming big egos for the failure.

Robert Hagstrom, a portfolio manager at Legg Mason Capital Management, the third-biggest institutional shareholder of Yahoo, said the only way to try to catch up with Google is to put Microsoft and Yahoo together:

I thought the dynamic was great. Unfortunately, personalities got involved, egos got involved and that I think disrupted negotiations. I was shocked, shocked that Microsoft walked away.
Microsoft’s problem is that 80 percent of its business is going to go away one day… Microsoft has to figure a way to get a lot of eyeballs. Well, who’s got the most eyeballs after Google? Yahoo. I didn’t see why this couldn’t go together.

As our mutual funds reporter Muralikumar Anantharaman reports from Morningstar’s annual investment conference in Chicago, Hagstrom is not sure if he will support activist investor Carl Icahn’s proxy to oust Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

Yang turned down Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s $33-per-share offer for the company he co-founded:

It’s going to be so interesting a year from now, either Ballmer will look like the fool or Jerry will look like the fool, if Jerry is not fired by Icahn if he gets the board. But somebody made the wrong decision. Steve either made the wrong decision walking away or Jerry made the wrong decision not to sell. And their careers will be defined by that in the next 12 months.
Jerry owes me $33. Steve says it wasn’t worth it. We’ll find out.

Brian Rogers, chairman of the board and chief investment officer at T. Rowe Price Group, said they were happy with the deal Microsoft proposed:

A normal outcome would have been a slight sweetener to the original Microsoft bid. You raise it by $2 and everybody kisses and makes up and hugs. And that’s not an uncommon outcome in these circumstances.
The return of one of the founders of Yahoo to running the company after the turmoil they had a couple of years ago probably was a big barrier to that. Because whenever you have the kind of legendary founder returning, it becomes a different dynamic.
I think in hindsight, one wonders if there could have been a reasonable compromise found between Yahoo and Microsoft if some of the personalities weren’t the way they were.

In a sign of how desperate investors are for Microsoft to come back to the negotiating table, Yahoo’s reorganization announced on Thursday didn’t manage to save the stock in a down market — but blog rumors on Tuesday that talks were back on sent Yahoo shares up 15 percent.

As Hagstrom put it

What a soap opera! You can’t write a better soap opera than Yahoo, Microsoft.

(Photo: Amazon)