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of Apple, advised his audience to avoid being trapped by dogma and to have the courage to follow their hearts and their intuition. "Stay hungry. Stay foolish," he said as he signed off. By following his own advice, Mr Jobs, who resigned as Apple's boss on August 24th, has turned the company from a basket case on the brink of bankruptcy when he returned to its helm in 1997 into a world-beater that is reshaping a big chunk of the technology industry. Earlier this month, Apple even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil, an oil giant, to become the world's most valuable company. No other boss in recent history has embodied and defined a firm as completely as Mr Jobs. So his decision to resign as chief executive has inevitably raised the question of whether Apple will remain as hungry and as wildly successful without its entrepreneurial maestro at the helm. Other giants in the tech industry have seen their fortunes fade after iconic leaders have departed. Microsoft has struggled to regain its mojo since Bill Gates stood down as its chief executive in January 2000. Could Apple suffer a similar fate? That seems unlikely for several reasons. One is that the company has had plenty of time to plan for this moment. Mr Jobs has stepped aside from day-to-day management at Apple on a couple of occasions before, after having surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004 (see timeline). Each time, Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, temporarily assumed his boss's responsibilities. That allowed Mr Cook, who is taking over from Mr Jobs as CEO, to get a taste for the top spot--and it gave Apple's board a chance to see him in action. On each occasion, Mr Cook kept Apple's moneymaking machine ticking over smoothly. An expert in manufacturing and logistics, he closed down almost all of Apple's manufacturing operations after he arrived at the firm in the late 1990s and outsourced much of these to Asia. Announcing his promotion, Apple's board said that he had shown "remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does." Talent is something that Apple also has an abundance of elsewhere in its ranks. Executives such as Phil Schiller, who oversees the company's marketing, and Jonathan Ive, a Briton whose domain is design, are part of a team that has worked closely together for many years. If Mr Cook can keep this group intact, then Apple's future should be bright. The firm also benefits from an intensely loyal and motivated workforce. Glassdoor, an online jobs and careers community, carries reviews of the company from almost 1,000 Apple employees. Most are glowing about the firm and in particular about Mr Jobs's impact on it. One post even calls Apple's former boss "the Thomas Edison of this century". Paul Saffo of Discern Analytics, a financial-analytics company, reckons that this depth of loyalty will mean that even though Mr Jobs is stepping down, the firm's employees will continue to ask themselves "what would Steve do?" when making decisions. (Of course, asking the question is easier than guessing the right answer.) At that time before his death Mr Jobs was taking up a new role as the chairman of Apple's board, to allow him to keep weighing in on important decisions for some time to come. Apple has a pretty clear product pipeline for the next couple of years, which is reassuring. The firm is due to unveil the
latest version of its hugely successful iPhone in the coming weeks and is expected to launch a new iPad early next year. But Apple is far more than the sum of the devices that it sells, impressive though they are. Its secret sauce lies in the integration of these with software and services such as its iTunes online content store and its recently announced iCloud online-storage offering. These form what tech types like to call an "ecosystem" that has proved so popular that it is forcing other companies to develop similar capabilities. Google, which has long excelled at developing software, recently splashed out $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility so that it could get its hands on the firm's smartphones, tablets and other devices. And Amazon, which has a huge cloud business, is planning to launch its own tablet computer to compete with Apple's iPad. The good news for Apple's investors is that the firm has been given a great head start in the battle for dominance of this emerging tech landscape thanks to Mr Jobs, whose vision of the future has been honed over a long and tumultuous career. After co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, he went on to pioneer the era of the personal computer in the following decade. He was then ousted from Apple after a boardroom coup in 1985. After that, Mr Jobs followed his heart and his intuition by building up Pixar, a film studio that specialises in computer-animated films. It has produced a string of hits, from "Toy Story" to "Finding Nemo". He returned to Apple as an adviser in 1996, when the firm was in dire straits. A year later he was made interim chief executive. Asked at the time what he thought Mr Jobs should do with Apple, Michael Dell, a rival computer-maker, helpfully suggested that he should shut it down. Mr Jobs ignored that advice. Instead he led the company on to its greatest triumphs. Among them were the creation of the iMac, which revived the firm's ailing computer business, and the development of the iPod, which ended up transforming the music industry. But just as important as what Apple did was what it did not do. Charles Golvin of Forrester, a research firm, says that one of Mr Jobs's greatest skills has been to decide which projects the firm should not undertake. It has been widely rumoured, for example, that engineers at Apple were urging its boss to create a tablet computer in the early part of the decade. But Mr Jobs turned a deaf ear to their entreaties and instead insisted that the company focus on producing a smartphone. The result was the iPhone, which transformed yet another market and is still minting money. In a creative cauldron like Apple, ideas are rarely in short supply. But the skill of choosing the right ones to focus on at the right time is rare. Mr Jobs has it. Apple's shareholders will have to hope that Mr Cook does too. Apr 1976 Co-founds Apple with Stephen Wozniak Jul 1976 Apple launches its first computer 1980 Apple stages IPO 1984 Launch of the Macintosh 1985 Ousted as CEO after boardroom coup
1986 Founds Pixar, a maker of animated films 1996 Returns to Apple as an adviser 1997 Made interim CEO 1998 Launch of the iMac 1999 Launch of the iBook 2000 "Interim" dropped from CEO title May 2001 Opens first Apple Store Oct 2001 Launches iPod 2003 Launches iTunes Aug 2004 Takes one month's medical leave 2006 Apple admits to backdating options 2007 Launches iPhone Jan 2009 Takes medical leave again Jun 2009 Returns from medical leave Jan 2010 Launches iPad May 2010 Apple overtakes Microsoft as most valuable tech company Jan 2011 Takes more medical leave Jun 2011 Announces iCloud Aug 2011 Steps down as CEO dies in October 2011 WHEN it came to putting on a show, nobody else in the computer industry, or any other industry for that matter, could match Steve Jobs. His product launches, at which he would stand alone on a black stage and conjure up an "incredible" new electronic gadget in front of an awed crowd, were the performances of a master showman. All computers do is fetch and shuffle numbers, he once explained, but do it fast enough and "the results appear to be magic". Mr Jobs, who died this week aged 56, spent his life packaging that magic into elegantly designed, easy-to-use products. The reaction to his death, with people leaving candles and flowers outside Apple stores and the internet humming with tributes from politicians, is proof that Mr Jobs had become something much more significant than just a clever moneymaker. He stood out in three ways--as a technologist, as a corporate leader and as somebody who was able to make people love what had previously been
impersonal, functional gadgets. Strangely, it is this last quality that may have the deepest effect on the way people live. The era of personal technology is in many ways just beginning. Apple of his eye As a technologist, Mr Jobs was different because he was not an engineer--and that was his great strength. Instead he was obsessed with product design and aesthetics, and with making advanced technology simple to use. He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed idea--the mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer--and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly. Rival firms scrambled to follow where he led. In the process he triggered upheavals in computing, music, telecoms and the news business that were painful for incumbent firms but welcomed by millions of consumers. Within the wider business world, a man who liked to see himself as a hippy, permanently in revolt against big companies, ended up being hailed by many of those corporate giants as one of the greatest chief executives of his time. That was partly due to his talents: showmanship, strategic vision, an astonishing attention to detail and a dictatorial management style which many bosses must have envied. But most of all it was the extraordinary trajectory of his life. His fall from grace in the 1980s, followed by his return to Apple in 1996 after a period in the wilderness, is an inspiration to any businessperson whose career has taken a turn for the worse. The way in which Mr Jobs revived the ailing company he had co-founded and turned it into the world's biggest tech firm (bigger even than Bill Gates's Microsoft, the company that had outsmarted Apple so dramatically in the 1980s), sounds like something from a Hollywood movie--which, no doubt, it soon will be. But what was perhaps most astonishing about Mr Jobs was the fanatical loyalty he managed to inspire in customers. Which other technology brand do you ever see on bumper stickers? Many Apple users feel themselves to be part of a community, with Mr Jobs as its leader. And there was indeed a personal link. Apple's products were designed to accord with the boss's tastes and to meet his obsessively high standards. Every iPhone or MacBook has his fingerprints all over it. His great achievement was to combine an emotional spark with computer technology, and make the resulting product feel personal. And that is what put Mr Jobs on the right side of history, as the epicentre of technological innovation has moved into consumer electronics over the past decade. A world without Jobs As our special report in this week's issue (printed before Mr Jobs's death) explains, innovation used to spill over from military and corporate laboratories to the consumer market, but lately this process has gone into reverse. Many people's homes now have more powerful, and more flexible, devices than their offices do; consumer gizmos and online services are smarter and easier to use than most companies' systems. Familiar consumer products are being adopted by businesses, government and the armed forces. Companies are employing in-house versions of Facebook and creating their own "app stores" to deliver software to smartphone-toting employees. Doctors use tablet computers for their work in hospitals. Meanwhile, the number of consumers hungry for such gadgets continues to swell. Apple's products are now being snapped up in Delhi and Dalian just as in Dublin and Dallas. Mr Jobs had a reputation as a control freak, and his critics complained that the products and systems he designed were closed and inflexible, in the name of greater ease of use. Yet he also empowered
millions of people by giving them access to cutting-edge technology. His insistence on putting users first, and focusing on elegance and simplicity, has become deeply ingrained in his own company, and is spreading to rival firms too. It is no longer just at Apple that designers ask: "What would Steve Jobs do?" The gap between Apple and other tech firms is now likely to narrow. This week's announcement of a new iPhone by a management team led by Tim Cook, who replaced Mr Jobs as chief executive in August, was generally regarded as competent but uninspiring. Without Mr Jobs to sprinkle his star dust on the event, it felt like just another product launch from just another technology firm. At the recent unveiling of a tablet computer by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, whose company is doing the best job of following Apple's lead in combining hardware, software, content and services in an easy-to-use bundle, there were several swipes at Apple. But by doing his best to imitate Mr Jobs, Mr Bezos also flattered him. With Mr Jobs gone, Apple is just one of many technology firms trying to invoke his unruly spirit in new products. Mr Jobs was said by an engineer in the early years of Apple to emit a "reality distortion field", such were his powers of persuasion. But in the end he conjured up a reality of his own, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped entire industries. The man who said in his youth that he wanted to "put a ding in the universe" did just that.