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How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs
ThousandStars writes "The Wall Street Journal asks How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs: 'Speculation about the continued reign of Mr. Jobs — which has popped up from time to time since his 2004 treatment for cancer — underscore how closely Apple's fashion-setting products are identified with its co-founder.'"
Meh... Same thing could be said about Oracle or Microsoft. Answer is; it depends.
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How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs
No, I'm sorry, it's just not possible.
You see, cancer was also a chance to have an operation where they inserted a tiny chip into his body to track his heart beat. In turn, it relays a message of his heart beat to his iPhone which is always on him. That relays it to a satellite receiver which sends the message back down to earth to the triggers on 4 pounds of C4 placed carefully around the support base of each Apple building telling it not to blow up. If it doesn't receive that message, no more Apple.
A bit eccentric, I know--but most geniuses are.
My work here is dung.
While initially it may go down with any news of him leaving Apple, I think the talent pool they have is great.
Whoever should succeed Jobs should be very aware of this talent pool and be sure to keep things running as smoothly as possible to ensure a bright future. In essence I wouldn't be too worried about Apple being Jobs-less.
i.e. Not well at all. They company floundered from 1967 to around 1987 until a new CEO with vision arrived on the scene.
I suspect Apple would do the same, gradually returning to a state akin to how it was in the early 90s. Ultimately it might end-up in the same state as Commodore (which also lost its visionary CEO and slowly but surely died-out).
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Maybe when Steve is gone, somebody else will take the steps necessary to introduce a little fresh air into that unhealthy (and unholy) position.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Apple survived from 1985 to 1996, didn't they?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Everytime I see a new Apple discussion - like before (and after) the iPhone introduction or now on various products - I see a big set of geeks just not GET IT. By it, I mean the popularity of Apple products, by doing a checklist feature comparison like the back of a software box - as if all checkmarks indicated the same quality. Not all checkmarks are created equal;)
Anyway, I would suggest that Apple look at how Fashion powerhouses handle succession, and not the typical technology company. Perhaps it would give them a better idea how to handle transistion in a creative enterprise and not just a purely technical one.
He's an excellent businessman, but let's look at what brought Apple back, in order:
1) The iMac, which was just a heavily consumer-oriented Mac desktop. This wasn't really a big innovation for Apple, but was the sort of smart business move they needed.
2) The iPod--which wasn't Jobs' idea.
3) MacOS X
4) The fairly high quality of the MacBook and MacBook Pro Line
5) The transition to Intel
6) The iPhone
I love my Apple TV, but it's not a very successful product, over all. Time capsule is probably about the same. The Cube was a failure, and quite frankly the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it (otherwise it is so hellaciously overpriced that it's like a time warp back to the mid 1990s for Apple).
I don't really see a whole lot in that list that is unique to Jobs. What Apple needs is competent management that are aggressive and willing to take risks. That is what has made Jobs a success, more than anything else. People tend to forget that some of his ideas have't gone anywhere, but many of them have because they were calculated risks that only a non-risk averse CEO would make.
I don't know how fair TFA is but...
Apple would do a lot better in my department (one of the biggest departments at one of the biggest universities in the world) if they would get serious about enterprise support.
My gripes:
1) If my Xserv fails, I need to call Apple, they will possibly send parts or repairmen but they really want me to fix it myself using my spare kit. I just don't feel that is optimal compared to IBM server support.
2) Their volume discount is a total rip-off. Again, I am at a major university and our discount is basically the same as the Apple Education Store discount. It is really hard for me to justify my purchases and commitment to Apple.
3) On a related topic, I know months in advance what machines are coming out and can thus plan accordingly. Apple, with its flair for the dramatic, wants to keep all this hidden and secret. Again it really hurts my efforts when compared to IBM, Dell, and HP.
4) The Apple support network is a total joke compared to Microsoft or even Novell. Basically I have the same support that non-enterprise Linux has. My best sources are AFP548, MacEnterprise, and sometimes the Apple Support forums.
5) For those of us that have to integrate with a Microsoft world, AD-OD integration still has a long way to go. Apple seems to break their AD support with every other service pack. I can't believe this couldn't be done better. I know Microsoft has issues with their service packs, but honestly, does it have to be this bad?
Basically I feel that Apple is such a consumer company rather than enterprise. This hurts Apple penetration, bottom-line sales, and future buy-in from potential customers who want to use the same platform at home that they use at work.
Steve Jobs just can't get out of his own ego's way to let the correct thing happen. Matt Feeman, our sales rep, is a total waste yet has carried his job for many many years now. There really is no fun left in Apple and only diehard fanboys (myself?) can continue to run what is, IMHO, the Unix-like distributions.
The iMac did a lot for Apple too.
It was a significant part of computer sales for a season, and Apple's first real stab into non-design for years.
The iMac is part of how Apple has been so profitable, market at every price point, but have your low end lack features, so nobody can make do that need a little more. The iPod shuffle for example has less features than the original MP3 player (no screen), yet it is Apple, and cheap.
If you want a real MP3 player, you need to buy the overpriced Nano (well it fluctuates between reasonable and overpriced, depending on where it is in life cycle).
The iPod already dominated before the color screens even, it was just better looking, and smaller. There essentially isn't even a competing HD based MP3 player market anymore.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It may go against the typical Slashdot mentality, but being closed hasn't hurt them at all since Steve's return. It seems as though the general public, and tech crowds in particular, have a hard time getting it when it comes to putting a finger on the thing(s) that make Apple successful. What you describe as unhealthy and unholy (talk about zealotry) have given Apple a reputation of excellence in user experience and now in consumer electronics. They're far from perfect, and yes they don't always offer checkbox-to-checkbox parity when it comes to features, but they're very good at figuring out the core functionality of a product or workflow and making it as easy and unobtrusive as possible - and users respond to that.
To say they're completely closed is not entirely true either - they do use, and contribute back to, open source projects. That they don't do it in exactly the way that a vocal percentage of posters here would want them to doesn't mean they're putting themselves in an unsuccessful position. If anything, Apple has demonstrated that they're willing and able to use whatever tools are most appropriate in delivering the kinds of products they want - and that a lot of other people want, too, judging by the sales numbers.
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
The most efficient form of governance is a dictatorship. This is not to say that it is a universally ideal form of government -- for every example we have of an autocrat who was able to get what he wanted and happened to be correct, we can find many other examples of autocrats who got what they wanted and were dead wrong.
It is easier for a man of singular vision, foresight, and ambition to stand out as a dictator than as one of a committee but men of singular ignorance and venality tend to do less harm in committee form because they're like crabs in a bucket and it's hard for one to rise to preeminence and control.
By all accounts, Jobs is a bastard to work for. What makes it all the more galling is that is judgment calls are usually right so when your design needs more work, he'll tell you you're a fucking piece of shit, get the hell out of his sight, don't you fucking come back until you have something that doesn't make him want to vomit you cocksucker, you'll want to punch him in the throat. Yes, he could have been nicer about it, but by the time you finally come back with a design he likes, it'll also be the one the customers will go nuts for.
It's very rare to find that kind of person. When Jobs was booted out the first time, they brought in an airline executive as CEO. He didn't know anything about the industry and said all of Jobs' ideas weren't sticking to the knitting, were going out into left field and would waste money. Pragmatic business people agreed. Hell, I thought going into the music business when they were already struggling making computers was a bad idea. Looks like I was wrong.
What's driving Apple right now is a productive cult of personality. There's simply not a viable line of succession. Alexander the Great dies, the empire falls apart. Stalin dies, the empire lurches on but nobody in the party leadership will ever again risk letting someone gain that much power again. It's possible for a leader to rise up within the ranks of an existing organization and take it over with such force that you would think he was the founder. Jack Welch did that with GE. Because the market value went from $14 billion to $410 billion under his watch, he's lauded as a genius. Personally, I think he was more like an asshole who got lucky, got some breaks, and knew how to shaft the right people at the right time. He'd been picked as the golden boy to succeed to the leadership role by the previous CEO who later came to regret that decision because Jack poisoned the corporate culture much like a Carly Fiorina. Wall Street didn't seem to care because he made the trains run on time and that's all that mattered.
What's interesting is Microsoft seems to be struggling from both the lack of vision and the bureaucratic bloat that paralyzes large organizations and prevents meaningful action. This kind of strategic paralysis is usually the opening needed for a competitor to swoop in and steal the market. Apple would normally be in that position except for the huge questions concerning Jobs' prospects for this world. If both companies become wadded up with stupidity, will it finally become Linux's year for the desktop by default?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Jobs does not do anything magical. It might have been his idea to make a better phone, but he did not design the iPhone.
Rather, he had the vision of how a phone would fit into the ``iLife,'' he held designs to high standards, and he made sure that everyone focused on integration with existing products and the consistency of the experience.
Standards and focus are what most people view as his ``dictator'' personality.
This is pretty much what, I feel anyway, Microsoft has always lacked.
They have no vision. Remember Ballmer scoffing the very notion that the iPhone would have any success at all, let alone surpass WinMo as it just did.
I cannot say that they have low standards per se. Rather, their standard is to let the user design their software (the focus groups that designed Vista; something about which Gates was proud).
They lack any sort of focus. Vista is a prime example of this. It is obvious when using Vista that no one had a plan. No one provided any focus. Compound this with the myriad of products Microsoft makes which barely even work each other...even in the same product family (incompatibilities between Mac Office and Win Office).
So, yeah, those are the three qualities I want to see in a successor to Jobs. There should be plenty of people at Apple with those qualities. Actually, there are plenty of those people anywhere...people like Ballmer just do not recognize them or think they are important. I trust Jobs to find an appropriate person to replace him.
Also, let's not forget to embrace change. Even someone like Jobs needs to be replaced eventually. They just have to be replaced carefully.
IANYL, IANAL, TINLA, IANAMD, IANAP,
How could any company survive without an egotistic megalomaniac perfectionist anal retentive button hater at the helm? Well Jobs doesn't design the computers Jonathan Ive does, so designs are covered. He doesn't manage the hardware engineering, Bob Mansfield has that responsibility. Operating system is Bertrand Serlet and applications is Sina Tamaddon, with Scott Forstall managing iPhone software, so we're covered on those. Phil Schiller is the marketing brain behind Apple's recent successes, so that's okay. Retailing is covered by Ron Johnson and let's not forget that Tim Cook handles DTD operations. There's also a few 'heavy-set' bean counters around to rearrange the cash loaf they've acquired after Steve plays naked in the pile, so the money is okay, too.
So, why does Apple need ST_VE? Do they need him to run around all day screaming, "Your designs suck, Jon! Make them MORE minimal!", "Bob, your code is SHIT! Fix it!", "Ron! Sell more STUFF!", "The rest of you, if you can't make everything INSANELY GREAT, no more free Jolt Cola in the cafeteria!"? So Apple needs him, how, to survive? If they need a 'visionary', they can always find another crazy 'Steve', here. In the long run, the company is well manned to maintain it's position and 'grow the brand' even if Jobs is relegated to prowling the dark halls at 1IL in his bathrobe and Birkenstocks.
Sig this!
It's actually very few forms of cancer that can be completely cured, which is why people working in medicine talk about cancer survival rates rather than the percentage cured. You're talking about the percentage of patients who survive the first 5 years after being diagnosed - after that, all bets are off.
It's quite heartbreaking to hear people talking about fighting their cancer and how it has been cured - when you have been treated successfully, your cancer goes into remittance, but chances are that it'll be back; usually the best you can hope for is that you've postponed the inevitable for a few more years. And when it does come back, it's often more aggressive and systemic than before; frequently to the point that all that can be done is treat the symptoms to ease the patient's passing.
Even though Jobs' form of cancer has an extremely good survival rate, he wasted time before getting treatment, increasing the opportunity for it to grow and metastasize. I'm not saying it will definitely come back, and no doubt his prognosis is better than many other forms of cancer - but it has been 4 and a half years since he was diagnosed, so shortly the published survival rates will mean very little.
We the public are not privy to his medical records, so all we can do is talk about odds - and the odds are rarely good when dealing with cancer. Although planning his funeral may be premature, talk of the future of the company is only fair, especially for a company that appears to owe so much of its success to just one man.
Hire Willy Wonka!!! If there is any character that is on par with Steve Jobs and his showmanship, it is Willy Wonka... preferably the Johnny Depp version, but even the Gene Wilder version would suffice.
I worked for an organization which was carved out of the main organization by the sheer force of will and vision of a single manager who became it's head. She then made life impossible for every type-A person in her organization and put very skillful and considerate but not type-A people in as her subbordinates.
everything worked great till she left for the next job. Then for ten years nothing got done, no initiatives lasted longer than 6 months everthing was adrift. A succession of managers drawn from her subborindates got us no where. Finally someone from the outside was brought it and things got a bit better.
The thing about imperious leaders is that they really get the job done. It matters less that they make perfect decisions but that they make a series of connected decisions related to a driving vision. if some decisions are sub-optimal they still are part of the path forward because no one is second guessing the slow progress and everybody is working as a team.
Jobs had both visions, aggression and a sense of style. Apple sells style but does john Ives have the cojones to command?
I can only judge shiller and Ives by their brief appearances but they seem a bit too jolly to me.
It's also not enough to be a tough guy. You actually have to have skills too. That's what happened when Jobs got forced out by the mangerial power plays. Tougher guys without jobs skill and understanding took over and ran it into the ground.
You need the whole package. Jobs is that guy. The question is not if he's trained his subordinates, but if he scared off all the type-A guys with real skill?
What about that dude that wrote Beos? Maybe he'd be someone with some vision and force of personality? How about some of those Execs that started TransMeta?
Or maybe Fake-Steve.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ok, sure, Eddie Van Halen (Jonathan Ive) is making all the music and providing the real artistic genius behind the band. But David Lee Roth (Steve Jobs) made everybody listen to it.
Don't discredit the value of man with a vision and a big mouth.
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
Lance should have been dead. if Lance was literally anyone other than Lance he WOULD have been dead. The treatment plan IIRC was "we'll give you enough chemo to kill any two ordinary people and count on the fact that you're Lance Armstrong to keep you alive long enough for it work". Somewhat to everyone's surprise this turned out to be a highly effective plan. Lance's survival was mostly due to the fact that his cardio/vascular system practically qualifies him as an X-Man.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboy, I don't even like Apple, and the Cult Of Jobs makes me want to puke. But even I can see why the iPod ended up on top.
See, I actually wanted to buy an MP3 player waay back then, and honestly, the iPod was the only sane choice. I actually got a CD-based one instead, but if I had decided to go with a HD based one, it was iPod or nothing.
Let me tell you some of the other offerings were as big as a freaking brick, for a start. (I seem to remember an Archos like that, for example.) They looked like two 3" HDD's stacked on top of each other. It made my old high-school cassette player look positively sleek by comparison. And I'm not even talking about one of those newfangled small Walkmen, but about a big old thing.
Some had an interface that was plain old crap and unintuitive. E.g., it took Creative _years_ to fix their bloody interface into something actually usable.
A lot were actually more expensive than the iPod. Some could actually justify it by having included some extra features... that nobody wanted, or not at that price. Some were more expensive than a freaking laptop. For some, I'm not even sure WTF was their excuse. They seemed to be just bigger, uglier, clunkier and more expensive for it. That was a tendency that continued for _years_: trying to be the iPod killer by costing $1000 or close to that. Heh.
Etc.
The iPod may not have been the absolute best in any one given category. But on the whole it sucked the least. As debatable compromises went, Apple hit the sweet spot with their product. It was the compromise that looked the most palatable.
Basically, sure, you can blame it on fashion and (thus) ubiquity _now_, but think of it this way: it had to start from zero at some point. You can't use your market leader position until you actually win that position in the first place. And back then, IMHO Apple won it fair and square.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Woz and Jobs formed an almost ideal partnership, with Woz creating sublime technical solutions and Jobs knowing how to work people to make them sell.
The industry and Apple itself have changed. I'm not sure Woz would fit in at Apple. If Woz was born a couple or few decades later he'd probably be more inclined towards an open architecture platform more like a PC-style system running something like Linux. Woz made engineering an art form--his designs were efficient, elegant works of art for those who appreciates them.
Alas, it wasn't only his accident that forced him to leave--had he not had the accident he would've left of his own accord anyways. By 1984 Apple was a 2-headed beast: There was the Apple II camp, with a simple and familiar but aging open system, and the Mac camp, who were revolutionaries tasked to design an "appliance" that was friendly but totally closed. Jobs made it clear the Mac camp was the "new apple" and that the "old apple" of the II line was a legacy destined to fade away.
In designing the Apple II platform, Woz made deliberate design decisions that were completely counter to what Jobs envisioned (with Raskin's inspiration) for the Mac. For example, The Apple I (and early Apple II IIRC) came with full hardware schematics so hobbyists and third parties could create hardware interfaces. The original Mac rivaled the Apple I and II for elegant, simple design but those inner workings were a closely held secret (especially the software/firmware on which so much of the original Mac's functionality relied).
It goes on from there: The Apple I was a bare board and the Apple II had a user-removable panel to access the mainboard and add cards. The Mac was completely sealed and cracking the case open voided the warranty. Woz deliberately added expansion slots to the Apple II because he saw the Apple I's lack of expansion slots as a shortcoming. Jobs issued a strict edict that expansion slots--especially internal slots but even external ones--were banned from the original Mac design.
Woz was essential to the company's early success for his engineering talent--he could make amazingly capable hardware that was amazingly simple and low cost. Jobs provided the motivating force to make it friendly. He insisted on an Apple II case with rounded corners with a colour similar to the inside of an apple. He presented challenges to Woz, who loved to take on challenges.
The thing is--there isn't a Woz-type engineer at Apple anymore, nor does there need to be. From an engineering standpoint, absolutely NOTHING Apple sells today is the least bit groundbreaking. The Mac is just a very attractive looking PC with DRM measures locking the software to it. The iPod is no more technically capable than the Zune or Archos or whatever.
Apple is primarily a leading marketing and industrial design firm. It makes beautiful products and successfully convinces people they are "cool". That is "Jobs territory" and is why engineering talent at Apple is secondary. Departure of Jobs will be painful for Apple, and the degree of pain will depend on whether a handful of VP-level people with "design" and marketing talents will stick around. Even if everyone sticks around when Jobs retires it will be painful. Jobs didn't come up with any of the successful products Apple now sells--he didn't design them or even come up with the idea. Crucially, however, he had an eye for picking winners. If Scully were at the helm, he'd have shut down the iPod project because music players were not Apple's focus, and macs would have all the style of a Dell with none of the compatibility. If they pick a Jobs replacement that lacks his talent for picking winning ideas Apple will flounder for years.