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How Apple's Story Is Like Breaking Bad
theodp writes "Over at CNN, Omar L. Gallaga explains how Apple's story is like Breaking Bad, the TV drama whose protagonist — high school chemistry teacher Walter White — decides to use his science skills to cook methamphetamine to provide for his family after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Walter takes shocking, out-of-character risks but reinvents himself as a brilliant, feared meth chemist who grows more ambitious, ruthless and cocky with each victory. 'Like Steve Jobs,' writes Gallaga, 'Walter White's cancer awakens a panic in him to hurry up and leave a legacy through his work.' Gallaga continues: 'Like Walter White, it [Apple] has mixed the proper elements at just the right amounts to create highly pure, addictive products. The products have been made within secretive working conditions. The skill employed to design and manufacture them tends to make what competitors put out seem like cheaper, cloudier, less effective imitations.'"
Google is Hank.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It is shocking how putting effort into producing a good product actually pays off from time to time.
Nowdays it takes a real outlaw to put significant effort into appealing to customers.
Short answer: no.
Recently on Slashdot, somebody called Neil Armstrong "one of the greatest men of the last century". (I think Armstrong would have been livid at that description; like you, he hated minimizing the contributions of a lot of nameless people.) When I pointed out the absurdity of that description, I got flamed up the wazoo.
People need heroes.
Little manufacturing secret: making a perfect cube (all angles 90 degrees) is nearly impossible to manufacture. It's easy to do near-cubes (91/89 degree trapezoids), but a perfect cube will not slide out of the mold, and requires extremely expensive technology to do. Every single other computer that looks like a cube will have a very shallow angle to it for those reasons. After all, why jack the price up a ludicrous amount for something you'll never really notice unless you regularly go around measuring angles on your things.
Jobs insisted on a perfect cube, which (from what I've read) only a single foundry in the United States could manufacture at the time.
No one said he was perfect. There's a big difference between cultivating great ideas and coming up with great ideas. He seems like the type that was good at seeing the greatness in someone else's rough idea and helping them to polish it until it truly was great, but wasn't always so good at coming up with it on his own, since there are plenty of stories about him making utterly ludicrous suggestions and thinking they were the best thing ever. Thankfully, most of his stupid ideas (though not all of them) were shot down by those around him, since he apparently tried to make a point of surrounding himself with people who weren't yes men.
And your second paragraph is not factual. For one, Apple was down to around 3% when they nearly went out of business (they only got back up to 10% within the last year or two). For another, Jobs hadn't even been at the company for over a decade when all of that was happening, since he was booted out back in the mid-80s, as you'll recall. Blaming the near-collapse of Apple on Jobs is like blaming Julius Caesar for the fall of the Roman Empire. Of course, unlike Caesar, Jobs actually returned later on and saved the thing he had started.
And what Mac developer rules are you talking about? Stuff that happened back in the '90s when he wasn't there? Stuff that happened recently? I can't think of anything causing issues recently, other than some minor growing pains with sandboxing and the Mac App Store.
Easy. Apple stories sell. Why did you think Gawker Media went apeshit two years ago with the iPhone 4 prototype they purchased? They probably made tons of money off that series of articles that they kept rerunning it for months afterwards. (Alas, they seem to have decided to waste that money on site redesigns that are worse than ever before and even unfriendlier to users which has steadily decreashed until the only ones left are trolls and such).
Slashdot knows that any Apple article would generate 300+ comments, even if it's something along the lines of "Apple announces nothing today, again." That's guaranteed advertiser gold. (It's Apple's turn - even all the flamewars and generally pro-Android sentiment still generates enough page views to be profitable. Enough that even pro-Android articles don't make so much money.).
Well, Microsoft's investment was $150M. Apple bought NeXT for $430M. The money Microsoft put in could be far less (they could've bought Be for half that or so, which was using Gassee's inflated value of the company).
No, what Jobs did with Microsoft was basically pure investor relations. Investors tend to be like sheep - if a company is going downhill, investment money may not flow even if you come up with a killer product. By naving Microsoft BUY $150M worth of Apple stock (Microsoft never put money into Apple, they just bought stock), it signalled the markets that Apple was a company worthy of investment.
In addition, by having Microsoft re-invest in their Mac business unit, it signalled developers that the Mac was worthy platform to develop for, not another one to ignore.
Jobs' credit was basically counting on the ability of Apple fans to look the other way - this was a time when anti-Microsoft sentiment was high, that the Mac was merely the underdog in the Windows war, etc. So that keynote where Bill Gates towered over Jobs (on the large screen), it was a well-choreographed marketing moment - signalling developers and investors that Apple was viable, and hoping that the fanbase won't be alienated.
That would be all she wrote, except for being in the right place and right time with the iPod - being able to produce a device as big as a flash-based player, but the capacity of a hard drive player that could be loaded in minutes, not hours, and doing so just before MP3 players became commonplace, effectively being there from the get-go when the market took off. (Then having the RIAA embrace digital album sales...).
The switch to Intel came after Apple basically got spurned by both Motorola and IBM over PowerPC chip supplies (PowerPC AIM Alliance - Apple, IBM, Motorola). Motorola found it far more profitable to sell lower-end chips to the military, and IBM for embedded systems, and Apple always couldn't buy enough.
From TFA:
'Like Walter White, it [Apple] has mixed the proper elements at just the right amounts to create highly pure, addictive products. The products have been made within secretive working conditions. The skill employed to design and manufacture them tends to make what competitors put out seem like cheaper, cloudier, less effective imitations.'
I am no Apple fanbois, but I had spent past few decades in the tech field
What TFA has forgotten to list are the following:
I. Vision
Almost everyone in the Silicon Valley, since the 1980's, have gone through similar experiences, and have used similar gadgets.
What Steve Jobs got, which others unfortunately didn't have, is a vision.
From hardware (Mac to NeXT to iBook to iPhone / iPad), to software (MacOS to OS X to iOS), Mr. Jobs opted for his own path
That takes vision.
II. Attention to detail
We can't deny that the one thing that makes Apple different from the rest of the crowd is their attention to detail.
From the way MacIntosh can create smooth curvy fonts to the "feel" of the original iPhone when it first came out (as versus the offering from the rest of the cellphone industry), Mr. Jobs had taken great pain in making sure that the products that have the "Bitten Apple" mark on it come with as few bugs as possible
As I said, I am no Apple fanbois, and I do not own any Apple product
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A better analogy would be that Apple is like the Little Red Hen.
"Who will dare to make a computer that gets rid clunky serial ports and is USB-only to drive development of USB as a platform?" asked Apple.
"Not I" said Dell.
"Not I" said Gateway
"Not I" said Compaq.
"Not I" said Acer.
"Then I'll do it myself" said Apple. And she completely broke backwards compatibility to make the iMac.
"Who will make a minimalist music player without a billion clunky extras that product managers want to add and that has a really neat jog-wheel that give people a great user experience?"
"Not I" said Phillips.
"Not I" said Diamond.
"Not I" said Mitsubishi.
"Not I" said Sony.
"Then I will" said Apple. And they made the iPod.
"Who will spend large sums of money to have design engineers experiment for months molding a block of clay into a non-clunky shape that works great for cell phones?" asked Apple.
"Not I", said Samsung.
"Not I", said Nokia.
"Not I", said LG.
"Not I", said HTC.
"Then I will" said Apple. And she designed a phone with rounded corners.
"Who will spend lots of money and take some risk designing cell phones with a revolutionary slide-to-unlock feature and the first really non-clunky mobile web browsing experience that includes pinching and swiping gestures?" asked Apple.
"Not I", said Samsung.
"Not I", said Nokia.
"Not I", said LG.
"Not I", said HTC.
"Then I'll do it myself" said Apple. And she designed the iOS UI.
And when the iPhone was released, the tired little company in Cupertino asked her competitors "who will help me use my designs to make billions in revenue I've earned by taking all sorts of marketing and design risks and putting in so much efforts to do what competitors didn't to move a stagnant and complacent industry forward like I've always have had to do?" asked Apple
"I do" said Samsung.
"I do" said Motorola.
"I do", said LG.
"I do" said HTC.
"No, I'm going to keep all of those designs to myself" Apple said, and she happily sued them into oblivion. The end.
How soon they forget. When Steve Jobs came back Microsoft was having to prop up the company to avoid monopoly charges and Apple was still trying to sell slower technology for twice the money. Say it takes a team all you want, without Jobs Apple would have likely gone bankrupt so I'd give him some credit for their success.
Microsoft made a token payment, and signed a contract to continue developing and selling Microsoft Office for five years - the tons of money that Office for Macintosh makes was one reason, the fact that Apple had them by the balls for having code copied from Quicktime inside Windows was another.