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Larry Ellison Believes Apple Is Doomed
Nerval's Lobster writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks that Apple will collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm. In a televised interview with CBS News, scheduled to air August 13, Ellison called the deceased Jobs 'brilliant' and compared him to iconic creators such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked about Apple's future now that Jobs is dead, Ellison didn't hold back: 'We already know, we saw — we conducted the experiment, it's been done.' Raising his hand above his head, presumably to indicate the rise of Apple's fortunes during Jobs' initial reign, Ellison said: 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs.' Then he lowered his hand: "We saw Apple without Steve Jobs." In other words, the period following Jobs' ouster, when the company's revenues declined and it launched whole portfolios of consumer products that failed. 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs,' Ellison continued, raising his hand above his head again — this time, to suggest that incandescent period following Jobs' return to the company, when it released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and a variety of bestselling PCs. 'And now, we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs,' he finished, and his hand fell."
Edison was a dick who took credit for work that his underlings did. Jobs is of the same cut.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
The main difference between Apple without Jobs the first time 'round and now is that The Apple Jobs left the first time wasn't shaped by him but by the people who ousted him. This Apple however has Jobs stamp all over it, it has the people he picked, he trusted and he trained. If you think Jobs was a genius, which Ellison does, then that has to count for something.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Jobs still did an excellent job even before the iPhone. From 1997 until 2007, Apple:
1. Stopped bleeding cash and made some immediate key decisions to allow the company the earn enough money to invest in R&D.
2. Finally got a pre-emptive multi-tasking operating system with OS X.
3. Dominated the portable music player industry with the iPod. The iPod has so thoroughly dominated the portable music player industry that the Sony's "Walkman" term to describe a portable music player has large fallen out of the vernacular.
4. Created iTunes and brokered a deal with the RIAA that's relatively fair to users to make a broad music library widely available.
It should also be considered that the iPhone didn't just magically appear. The design and implementation of all the hardware and software to create an iPhone probably took two years, meaning that Apple probably started working on iPhone in 2005.
Without Jobs, it's highly likely Apple would have sold itself off and returned the money, if there was any left, to the shareholders.
Let's see, we have the iMac, released in 1998, the iBook, released in 1999, and the iPod, released in 2001, which essentially created the market for portable music players. Jobs couldn't release the iPod immediately after his arrival because Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy, the technology wasn't available yet, and he needed some capital to invest in R&D. The iMac, iBook and revised PowerBook that didn't blow chunks allowed Apple to acquire the capital needed for their future R&D work.
For the past decade Apple has survived by introducing devices that have been market leaders, or in some cases even created markets were there were none previously (iPad/tablets). A rough version of their timeline is:
2001: iPod (portable music player)
2007: iPhone (smartphone)
2008: MacBook Air (including because it caused Intel/Microsoft to release the "Ultrabook" manifesto to ODMs)
2010: iPad (tablet)
Just as OP was lovingly bashing Sculley for his market failures, this will happen to Apple under Tim Cook unless they can invent a new market segment in the next few years. Looking back at Apple's history, they have never been wildly successful by incrementally improving product lines. Apple's explosive growth comes from creating products in new market categories and riding them until market saturation is reached, at which point they wash, rinse and repeat.
Let's see the iMac was 1998, OSX Server 1999, the iBook 1999, OSX Developer Preview 2000, iPod 2001, Win-compatiable iPod 2004, then of course the transition to intel. There are plenty of things to criticize Jobs over, his stewardship of Apple from 1997- isn't one of them.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Competitor? Nah. Ellison and Jobs were actually close friends, based on comments both of them made over the years. If anything, this is a case of one person thinking that their friend's life work simply can't exist without the friend. And, despite being an Apple fanboy, I have to admit that he's likely right.
I'm not with the doom-and-gloom naysayers thinking it'll happen immediately, but I do think that, as many other companies before them (e.g. Sony), Apple has had its day and will generally be going down from here (whether they've already peaked or are nearing it, I don't know, since they're expected to have some big announcements this autumn), and it's only a question of how steep the descent will be and when/if it will stabilize eventually (quick note: I'm not talking about the stock market when I talk about descent, so much as the distinguishing characteristics that separate Apple from an average company). I think that Jobs did a good job of getting the right people into leadership and inculcating a culture of excellence in the company that he left behind, so that should ensure that the descent will be a gradual one, rather than a rapid one, but eventually they'll start hiring bozos (to borrow Jobs' term) who will drag the company down.
When Tim Cook hired Browett as their Senior VP for retail, a lot of us assumed that Apple had already begun that process, since the guy looked like he was completely the wrong fit for the company, even though he may have managed to do decently well at the place where he was before. Kudos to them for canning him a few months later after he engaged in a series of highly-publicized screw-ups, but the fact that they hired him in the first place is actually one of the most worrying developments to comes out of the post-Jobs Apple, since their die-hard fans read it as an indication that the soul of the company is fragile and in danger of disappearing sooner than expected.