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Apple After Jobs
recoiledsnake writes "The connection between Apple and Steve Jobs is unlike any other brand and CEO relationship in corporate America, maybe the world. While Bill Gates has successfully transitioned himself away from his day job at Microsoft, can Apple do without Jobs at all? Once word started circulating that Jobs may be ill, Apple stock took a considerable hit, dropping more than $10 a share. And when Mr. Jobs was absent from last week's quarterly earnings conference call, the questions started again — and the stock fell again. What does this mean for corporate users of Apple for whom switching costs are high? Can Apple continue innovating in Job's absence?"
Can the press, or maybe slashdot, stop speculating??
Maybe today is Apple trifecta day, you never know...
how long until
I would contend that Jobs isn't the source of innovation at Apple (yes, he is _a_ source, but not _the_ source, imho) so, yes, Apple can still be innovative without him. Jobs is, however, the source of confidence. He ensures that investors are confident in the choices Apple makes which allows them to proceed the way an innovative company needs to - the engineers are given the room to innovate the way they need and want to. The company is allowed to develop products at the right pace and in the right way and investors remain confident that they are doing "the right thing." Would that same confidence exist in his absence? Would investors be as willing to allow Apple to proceed the way it currently does? That's a more accurate question. In my opinion, at least.
he has already transitioned the day-to-day operation to his younger brother, Raúl.
Oh, wait a minute, that's Cuba...
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Jonathan Ive
Responsible for look and feel of virtually all Apple products for the last ten years, is as much responsible for Apple's resurgence as the man Jobs himself.
Old news though is that he himself is already positioned as a possible successor to the big man.
Jonathan Ive groomed to take over from Jobs
If that happens, I'd feel pretty confident about Apple and their continued ability to innovate in create great products.
G4 Hackintosh
Jobs' vision for the company, and the computer industry as a whole is what sets Apple apart from other technology companies. I'm sure Jobs can be replaced, but what happens if the wrong person takes over his job and wants to turn the company into another Microsoft?
Thinking Jobs does everything at Apple would be silly, but Jobs does enable those who work at Apple to do the kind of work they do. If, for example, Steve Balmer took over the reigns, it wouldn't be long before Apple was putting all their efforts into web searching.
Yeah, but remember what happened when he left before? They ended up losing a huge amount of market share and got their asses handed to them by MS. Certainly Apple would survive, but would it ever again be the same kind of force that it was under Jobs' charismatic leadership? He's not just a CEO, he's a symbol. And much as I personally despise his smug attitude and heavy-handed leadership, it has given him a certain cache among Apple users that can't be replaced with just any old CEO in a business suit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Lets face it, under Scully Apple was within a hairsbreath of becoming another Windows beige box shop. Computer industry CEOs all seem to want to be Dell, except for Jobs who knows that there is a better way. For another example, look at what happened to SGI when they got a "seasoned" CEO. Sadly, in that case the CEO left the dagger in their back when he left and they've never recovered.
I read the internet for the articles.
This is the second high-profile article online that has mentioned Steve Jobs' absence from last week's quarterly earnings call. I have listened to Apple's quarterly earnings calls pretty regularly for over five years, and it is rare for Steve Jobs to be present at that event. It's usually Tim Cook (COO) and Peter Oppenheimer (CFO). And holy jeebus...the linked article cites Rob Enderle as its chief Apple 'expert'. Enderle is a joke among the Apple community, as his track record is abysmal.
I did a research project on Polaroid and came to the conclusion that, like Jobs and Apple, Polaroid was essentially Land's company and after he died, it spiraled rapidly downhill. They had some amazing stuff and once their "vision" had been lost, they were caught short by all the tech that came after.
With Jobs and Apple, I think the situation is the same only insofar as, pointed out in the article and elsewhere, Jobs and Apple are synonymous. The difference, I see, is that Land was the chief guy people expected all tech advances to come; once Land left there wasn't any one person to keep their eye on the industry. Jobs, however, is not the tech guy; he has a *lot* of good people who are clearly making great stuff, only to be held in check by Jobs until he's satisfied they "have a product".
Apple without Jobs would probably put out more products quicker, and that is the problem; Jobs is the "great floodgate" for a company that probably is literally bursting with cool, but unpolished, stuff that, if put out in the marketplace, would get a lot of buzz, but then probably sink under the weight of bugs.
Obviously Jobs can't be there forever, but unlike Microsoft that has been happy to throw everything and anything at the wall to see what sticks (and promise it'll stick better in the next version), Apple needs that special someone who can tell when a they "have a product", as well as be the human face to the company.
So yes, Apple can continue and prosper without Steve Jobs, so long as they find someone who is just like Steve Jobs.
Any takers?
I guess submitter doesn't listen to many quarterly calls, because Steve is literally never on them, and certainly hasn't been in the last year. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, runs those calls. His not being on the Q3 call is simply business as usual, not something special.
I disagree. If there is one company that is its leader it's Apple. Of course Jobs doesn't personally do the engineering, but what he does is get people to work long hours for normal pay to be part of something that they feel is bigger than themselves. He also inspires tons of people to buy products for the simple reason they are cool. I obviously don't know him personally, but from the stories I've read he has an exacting, perfectionist personality that he uses to drive all of these engineers and thus the products.
Jobs is 53 and has no life threatening illness. The cancer he had in 2004 was of a type that usually doesn't recur, and both Apple and Jobs have said that it hasn't recurred. Thus the odds are that Jobs will be in charge for at least the next decade. There's no point in speculating on how Apple would do without him that far in the future. TFA is just "analyst talk" directed at manipulating the stock price.
Someone coming in after Jobs will be more concerned with not becoming "the guy that killed Apple" than in creating innovative products. Jobs plays to win. His successor will play to not lose and that will hurt Apple.
And the casual investor will get scalped. Don't be a casual investor. Be a trader, or find a less risky long position. News moves markets but only so far, and most casual traders play news totally bass ackwards anyway.
Also, you said it... "facts will be blown out of proportion and influence investors"
That's called an "opportunity" where I come from. The market is very information efficient. If it's blown out of proportion, it will be blown back into proportion.
The majority of this article is based on opinion from Rob Enderle. Enough said. The man is an absolute pin-head. This is the man, who stated that SCO had a case against IBM.
Nothing to see here but the ravings of a lunatic.
From what I've read, Jobs has a pretty decent plan in place to arrange the right successor when that time comes. As I'm sure most of us know or can determine, Apple uses their software (practically as a loss leader) to sell hardware, whereas Microsoft primarily leverages other people's hardware sales to sell its own software. Regardless of your thoughts about either approach, you need to remember that they're completely different and almost completely incompatible with each other. Microsoft's goal, as (primarily) a software company is to make it as easy as possible to get it on each and every piece of hardware in existence, and all things considered they do a pretty good job with it. As Apple makes nearly all of their money on hardware, their competitive advantage is Mac OS X, so it's obviously in their best interest to keep it limited to their own hardware.
Point being that the two business models are so fundamentally different that there would have to be a screw-up of monumental proportions in order for Jobs' successor to try using Microsoft's business model with Apple. Ballmer would obviously be a terrible choice, but that has just as much to do with Apple employees sitting on bouncy balls and rainbows instead of chairs as Ballmer's complete inability to strategically run a company.
Of course, if by "turn the company into another Microsoft" you mean creating a monstrously profitable giant - well, isn't that the goal of every corporation out there?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
#> tar -czvf back.tar.gz *.*
If you're currently backing up to the same volume as what you're backing up, you might just one day find out that Time Machine is an innovation ;P
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I'm all "power to the engineers" but let's say this another way.
You can work for a company that micromanages your time to 5 minute intervals. You will help coworker A debug his system for 2 hours. You will then work on a cross-team initiative to replace the corporate tools with duct tape and sandpaper. Then you will innovate for exactly 1 hour, on the subject of how to make product U enclosure shinier without adding cost. Etc. In this environment you're just turning the corporate crank, any creativity you may have had will be replaced with cheap corporate synthetic. You're doing what your CEO thinks he needs to succeed. You may have this idea for a cool smart phone, but it doesn't help your CEO meet his OPEX goals, or it doesn't give a 5% Y/Y increase in business unit Q's gross margin, or whatever. You present your idea, people give you weird looks like "WTF is that", maybe ask "How much money will this make?" and you don't know, because no one has built it before, so it sounds like risk and we don't like risk. Marketing doesn't help you, because they spend all their time doing the same thing you do, and the idea is lost.
Or you can work for a company that insists you develop a product. They don't know what product, figure it out. You, your teammates or that really clever guy in the basement says "Hey, we can make a really awesome phone, all we need is a major cellular telco, and a few million dollars". The idea flows upstream, someone sees the vision and potential, the idea gains momentum and voila you're funded. You do your design thing, probably get some user interface stuff wrong, probably miss some polish. You get a proto, the CEO works out a deal with otherwise impossible to approach cellular telco's and they agree to support the project. Managers sit in your lap to get you to behave for a few months to a year doing disciplined design and engineering, but out comes a nice product.
So yes, the CEO and the middle management he chooses, matters a whole lot, even if you believe your company has a lot of smart engineers.
The average joe blow's experience with HP is, "Those guys that make cheap computers and laptops?" or, "Those %!@#ing ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg."
Not, "Wow, what fantastic load testing and server software suites they have!"
Which is supported by the fact that many of their successful products were not created in-house, but acquired and then polished internally. Jobs would have to be one helluva creative guy if he could be the creative force behind something without actually having contact with anyone working on it.
Which lets Apple make $1.411.764 per employee, while HP made only $336.569.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Talk to an apple employee about what they think of Steve. Everyone I have ever talked to thinks he is a nut job. Everyone I have talked to is dearly afraid of him. No one wants to be near him for fear of losing their job. I think Apple needs to be rid of him.
At NeXT, he founded a company and went from nothing to a company he sold for around $400m. At Pixar, he started, once again, from nothing, and built a company he later sold for $7.4b. Between Steve Jobs leaving Apple and his return, the stock price roughly doubled, over a 12 year period - an average annual growth rate of around 6% - slightly ahead of inflation, but not much. Since his return, it has gone up by a factor of 75 over 11 years - around a 43% annual growth rate. If you'd invested $1000 in Apple when he left, you'd have had $2000 when he returned. If you'd kept that money in Apple, you'd have $150,000 now. If you'd had a time machine that let you see into the future, but not past 1997, and had sold it at the high point in the intervening years, you'd have around $16,000.
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