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What is Apple Without Steve Jobs?
necro81 writes "David Pauly at Bloomberg has written a piece that asks 'Does Apple Inc. Have a Future Without Steve Jobs?' He writes in the context of Jobs' latest success in launching the iPhone, set against the backdrop of stock backdating troubles. In Pauly's worst-case-scenario, the SEC prosecutes Apple, and the board is forced to oust Jobs.Even without resorting to such scenarios, it's an interesting question to ask the fanboys and detractors out there: could Apple succeed and continue to innovative without Jobs at the helm?"
In Pauly's worst-case-scenario, the SEC prosecutes Apple, and the board is forced to oust Jobs.
They'll just bring him back as an "independent consultant" and it'll be business as usual.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It doesn't necessarily have to be Jobs, but I have a hard time imagining who else could be as effective. The Reality Distortion Field is a very real thing and must be taken into account. Anything Jobs says is automatically newsworthy. The black turtleneck has become an icon of geek chic. Apple and Jobs are, in the minds of the believers, inseparable.
Regardless of who sits in the big chair, that person must positively sweat charisma. People have to want to believe them. And whatever else is true, they must never ever have worked for HP :D
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, that's what Apple would have been with Steve Wozniak.
History says no. Apple without Steve was not the same...
Successful launch of the iPhone? What launch?
They've only announced a future product, and the general sentiment seems to be that it won't be a hot seller. That's a far cry from being a success.
(Jobs) I loved Mac's in the 80's. High-res screens. Mice. Cool apps.
(No Jobs) I hated Mac's in the 90's. Slow. Ugly (my opinion). No cool apps. Crashed as often as PC's (I worked at a graphic design firm, macs at work, pc's at home)
(Jobs) I love Mac's in the...2000's(?). Beatiful. Fast. Tons of cool apps + lots of OSS stuff.
So, anecdotally I'd say that Jobs makes a huge difference. That being said, I think Apple would still have a good chance if the Jobs appointees stayed in power after he left.
Today, he has produced a new phone with deliberate limitations, much like the Mac of 22 years ago. There's the chance it won't take off. Will that destroy Apple? No. All businesses strike out sometime or other. The good businesses have more successes than failures.
If at this point, with the stock options stain, he has developed a sense of entitlement and therefore expects to get extra special treatment, then he will be a drag on the company, and he must go. The graveyards are full of tombs of irreplaceable men. Someone will step up and fill the void. As for innovation, do you think that the hordes of Apple designers and engineers are just a bunch of dodos?
I'm sure Steve's influence on the company's success is overrated. They did just fine without him, launching many successful products under the wise leadership of their brilliant interim CEOs.
Wall Street will punish Apple in a huge way if Jobs goes, either by choice or force. For many people Jobs is Apple, and the useless analyst at places like Gartner will paint awesome forecast of doom when Jobs does go.
Somebody within Apple (strongly rumored to be Jobs) who has a lot of power has exceptionally high standards for design an usability, and this is why we get iPod+iTunes from Apple (killer app - even my little sister can rip CDs onto it) and Media Player+Some strange OLED WMA player from others.
Thats the key, somebody who will say no to an average product which would make a fair amount of money until its even better. If they lose that, they're the same as everyone else and they can't command premium prices anymore.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Apple is as much about convincing you that their products are the best as they are about making good products, maybe more. How many Apple products without horrible flaws of some type can you come up with? Mostly it's a handful of laptops, like the second-gen iBook, the intel-based macbooks, some of the powerbooks, and a handful of their 68k machines... For example iPod has perhaps the best user interface of any mp3 player but the battery problem is a real problem and more to the point was totally unnecessary - and you have to use Apple's software. (I realize there's third party software with Apple support these days.) They could have put a door on the unit and specified a cellphone battery for chrissakes - In fact I have a cheesy little "digital camcorder" (glorified digital camera) that takes a Nokia battery, OR some AAA batteries.
And of course, let's not mention that OSX is just about the most inconsistent OS I've ever seen short of Linux with athena widget, wxwindows, qt, and gtk apps all running at the same time. Some context menus will open on a click and let you click open submenus, some of them will close when you click on a submenu. Apple themselves uses three different widget sets. The OS may be relatively virusproof (an argument we could have all day, but I'm not going to) but it's not especially reliable and it's easy to get into a state where you have to reboot for things to work properly. The Dock resizes itself, destroying any use of muscle memory, but looking awfully pretty!
I'm not saying that the competition is dramatically better or anything - and in many areas Apple has the best idea going, such as in their preferences system which I think is less opaque (especially to a new user) than anyone else's. But again, they are at least as much about style as they are about substance, and you need a salesman to sell style. Substance sells itself, although granted, to a different crowd - and some Apple buyers ARE buying based on functionality. Maybe even the majority.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I think is most important for a company like Apple is focus. And that focus needs to come from the top. Perfectionism is a double edged sword, and not really all that hard to find. It can enable you to make some really great things, but the nature of working that way means that you can only make so many great things, because perfectionism takes time.
Before Jobs returned, Apple still made some cool stuff, and I'd imagine there were still plenty of smart, perfectionist engineers and such working there. But they were producing about 12 billion different projects, and there's just no way to get that many things right. The old Apple may have had all the technical and design oriented staff they needed to design the iPod, but it never would've happened, because an mp3 player project would've been competing with too many others for resources and talent.
Steve Jobs' cult of personality and RDF are certainly a benefit. It gets them a good bit of free advertising and makes following Apple that much more fun. But his best contribution to Apple is his ability to focus the company's efforts in just a few directions, and usually in the right directions.
If Jobs was out tomorrow, and they replaced him with a guy who was as boring as a stump in the ground, they'd still do alright as long as the replacement kept the company on task. There'd definitely be a short-term stock slump as investors got worried, and Macworld keynotes would probably be far less amusing, but Apple could survive, and continue to churn out cool stuff.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"Apple ought to break up into three companies: entertainment systems, computer systems, and software. Each would work nicely on their own, and be able to then attack their respective marketplaces less encumbered by the other. "
Oh... you mean like Sony.
Clearly he won't settle for less than best in him employees--but viewing from the outside, it's hard to say if that helped or hindered Apple's success.
It's a peculiar argument to make that a greater tolerance for mediocrity could have in some way helped Apple's success.
Is Jonathon Ives.
Then put Woz at the wheel. The man is incredible, when you meet him you cant not like the man. He has great ideas, Is an incredible prankster (we need a CEO prankster to shake up the industry) and actually knows what he talks about.
Problem is, Woz will never EVER do it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The thing is, it simply isn't a real problem for the majority of customers. Hard-to-replace batteries were all over the news for a while, but Apple still sells iPods by the bucketload. Apple realised that a sleek exterior and minimum size and weight sell much better than inconvenience a few years down the line. For most customers, a battery cover you can remove with your thumb or a coin is an unnecesarry cost (in terms of style and weight, not cash). I bet Apple have figures on how many replacement batteries are sold for consumer electronics (generally, not just iPods). I'd like to see those figures, but my guess is few are ever sold. You get them for mobile phones and laptops, though I suspect that market is more about increasing runtime than replacing ageing batteries. When I walk into an electronics store I do not generally see racks of replacement batteries for non-Apple MP3 players. Where I have seen replacement batteries they are right next to the kits to replace your iPod battery.
Part of Apple's success comes from challenging the conventional wisdom. There's no point making the sleep light pulse, is there? There's no point adding a speaker so the click wheel actually clicks, is there? Nobody would want an all-in-one PC & monitor that they couldn't upgrade, would they? Well, it turns out that when you do lots of those 'silly' things and get rid of 'essential' features like no-tools battery replacement the result is devices that people want to buy.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Contrast to IBM and M$, who let the IBM PC clones freak flags fly, welcoming any and all third party developers and apps.
Uh, not hardly. They had a proprietary BIOS and they wouldn't share it with anyone. Compaq reverse-engineered the BIOS so as to make clone, and IBM sued them for copyright infringement. Seeing as this was pre-DMCA, and Compaq did a good job of clean-room reverse engineering, they won the lawsuit, and were able to start manufacturing IBM-compatible machines.
That wouldn't have been the end of it, except IBM made a strategic error in not signing an exclusive license with Microsoft for MS-DOS. So Microsoft started selling DOS to Compaq and all the other clone makers that cropped up like weeds. Now the thing that made a PC a PC was not IBM, but Microsoft, and overnight control of the market switched to MS. Oh, and the market exploded as the clones became cheap and popular.
Make no mistake about it: IBM "allowed" clones only under duress. It was only after being beaten up badly in the 80s and early 90s that IBM started to learn some lessons about openness.
The enemies of Democracy are
As Jerry Pournelle (long of Chaos Manor from Byte Magazine in ages past) has noted
The LA Times has a We Hate Gates series. Most of the press seems to have a similar crusade against Apple. One wonders if some press consortium has sold Apple stock short and is working to make it come true?
Because whatever irregularities in the stock option of many years ago, Jobs has taken Apple from a struggling company to a major player, and the stockholders were rewarded with a 1200% stock value increase.
Why regulations designed to protect minority stockholders are now being used to smear Jobs is a story someone with more resources than I have should dig into. I doubt it's really coincidence.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"