Remembering Warren Hellman

The great financier, big-hearted philanthropist and enthusiastic banjo player died at age 77.

FORTUNE -- I saw the great financier, big-hearted philanthropist and enthusiastic banjo player Warren Hellman twice this year. My two sightings, neither of which had anything to do with his career as the co-founder of the leading San Francisco private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman, say a lot about this towering yet kindly man.

My first glimpse of Hellman was MORE

BlackBerry's business problem

Slow browsing, few apps, and an embarrassing service outage. Can BlackBerry recover from its biggest crisis yet?

FORTUNE -- Addictions are tough to break, yet Research in Motion seems to be doing whatever it can to help users cast aside their CrackBerrys once and for all. Consider just a few of the reasons the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is ailing: an international outage in mid-October; the Playbook tablet, a MORE

Apple and me

Journalists are supposed to pretend to be blasé about important figures they cover. Anyone, though, who bought even one Apple product during the era of Steve Jobs was a witness to history. I was privileged enough to take an even closer look at a great man and his creations.

FORTUNE -- Steve Jobs took Apple so far in the last 14 years that it's easy to forget where Apple was when MORE

How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup

From Steve Jobs down to the janitor: How America's most successful - and most secretive - big company really operates.

Editor's note: This article appeared in the May 23, 2011 issue of Fortune magazine. A shorter version of it originally appeared on Fortune.com on May 9, 2011.

FORTUNE -- Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when MORE

Apple's core: Who does what

An unconventional org chart for an unconventional organization. CEO Jobs was at the center of it all.

Click on the chart for a larger version.

--Reporting by Doris Burke

*Ronald Johnson left the company in June 2011.  Apple has yet to officially name his replacement.

This chart is from the May 23, 2011 issue of Fortune.

How Steve Jobs influenced Frank Quattrone

The tech banker Frank Quattrone has been through multiple technology cycles in Silicon Valley, having been around long enough to know many of its central characters when they were just getting started. A Philadelphian when he arrived for business school in his young 20s, Quattrone went one to an illustrious career banking some of the industry's biggest IPOs, including Cisco (CSCO), Netscape and Amazon (AMZN). In an interview at Fortune's MORE

Dick Costolo on how Twitter makes -- and might make -- money

With a multi-billion-dollar valuation and relatively small revenues, Twitter is Exhibit A for those who believe Silicon Valley is experiencing another bubble. At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference on July 19, the company's CEO, Dick Costolo, explained how the company's business works, including what ad products its customers are buying and how Twitters sells to them. He even hinted a major future product area: capitalizing on the commerce currently being conducted MORE

Not e-commerce, but f-commerce: Facebook as a platform (for tickets to see rockstars on stage)

Startup Fansnap is trying to bring the events business to Facebook, betting a social layer will help teams and rockstars fill seats.

FORTUNE -- I heard a new expression today: F-commerce. The "F" is for Facebook, and it refers to transactions that happen in that alternative universe that isn't merely the web, isn't specifically mobile and most definitely is not a physical store. Rather, it's commerce on that friendly service that MORE

How Apple works: Inside the world's biggest startup

From Steve Jobs down to the janitor: How America's most successful -- and most secretive -- big company really operates.

Apple doesn't often fail, and when it does, it isn't a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop. In the summer of 2008, when Apple launched the first version of its iPhone that worked on third-generation mobile networks, it also debuted MobileMe, an e-mail system that was supposed to provide the seamless MORE

Genachowski: FCC inherited a "real mess" in net neutrality

On April 14, 2011 Fortune's Adam Lashinsky interviewed Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in Mountain View, Calif., at an event sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California. The chairman danced around the most prominent item on his agenda, the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. He also discussed spectrum re-allocation, his pragmatic approach, and what it was like being a law school classmate of President Obama. An MORE