Sadly, Mr. Jobs is with us no more. Not too long ago I did a commentary on the state of Microsoft after the departure of Bill Gates so it seems only fair that I do one on Apple after Steve Jobs… Except we don’t know yet. We don’t know what the future holds for Apple. So instead I’ll present some challenges Apple will face as they move forward without the guidance of Steve Jobs.
But first a brief history –
I was fortunate to see Bill Gates in person twice. Once he bought me a beer (well, actually, he bought about 30 of us beer). I never met Steve Jobs but I ALMOST worked for him. I was leaving my job at Disney just as Walt Disney was acquiring Pixar – making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder of The Walt Disney Company.
While I always thought Bill Gates was a genius, I was not always a fan of Steve Jobs. In the early days the Apple ][ was a wonderful toy. You could plug in cards to add functionality and it seemed you could do ANYTHING with it. Then came the IBM PC that copied the open architecture idea… and then… came the Macintosh. Huh? They ruined it! You couldn’t plug in cards! What good was a closed computer? I wasn’t the only one who thought this and Apple lost market share.
Jobs left Apple and started NeXT – but the personal computer market was too crowded and NeXT struggled. At this point I thought Steve Jobs was “just the marketing guy” and the technical wizard, Steve Wozniak, made him rich.
Years go by and Jobs made Pixar a success. He came back to Apple and created the iPod and iTunes. I changed my mind. Steve Jobs apparently knew what he was doing and was on the verge of proving himself a bona fide genius and a true visionary. His dream had finally become a reality. Microelectronics and volume sales enabled the practicality of the closed computer. If your computer already does EVERYTHING why would you ever have to plug in a card?
While Steve Jobs was changing the world, I was working at a large number of companies on a really large number of projects. I flatter myself that my diverse background gives me a rare perspective on engineering innovation and what it takes to be successful. More specifically, I firmly believe I understand the critical components of failure. You see, most of the companies for which I worked no longer exist. There are several traits common to this pile of failures – and these are exactly the challenges Apple will face without the leadership of Steve Jobs.
- Lack of honesty – especially internally. Lying to yourself about schedules (to “motivate” the engineers), about potential sales volumes (being “optimistic”), and about needed functionality (“that feature will be in the next release”) are all poisonous to corporate morale and product success.
- Chasing the market instead of anticipating where the market will be by the time the product is ready. This usually occurs when the person in charge is afraid of being wrong about where the market is headed. Risk aversion leads to a defensive posture in the market (i.e. the loser).
- Playing market catch-up. Usually because of number 2, a competitor has a “must have” feature your product doesn’t have. To many managers this means – “rush something with this feature quickly to market”.
- Cost. Yes, money can be saved by leaving off a couple of buttons – but perhaps, though not required, they are desirable. Yes, wrapping the product in black velvet costs more than brown shipping paper – but it looks really good. Far too many executives are just not very good at knowing when a few extra pennies buys a lot – so they go as cheap as possible.
- Quality. I’ve seen so, so many companies ship junk. Important people say it is time to ship, so the junk gets shipped. So very few executives have the patience to get it right
Rest in peace Steve.
The secrets of your success are hidden in plain sight; but few will ever find them.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I think, if Jobs teached the managers of Apple well, I see no problems for Apple future.
Actually the Apple way sounds a bit like the Japanese Kaizen:Sell a product where _all_ the features work, and continue to develop noew features for the next release.
Instead many companies try to get out a product with _all_ possible features (the competing product has) and don’t care if they work correctly.
Just my two €-cent
Your background sounds like mine, most of the companies I worked for are now gone. To go beyond that, most of the projects I worked on never saw the light of day. My stuff worked, somebody up the chain changed their mind or didn’t know what they wanted in the first place. People are viewing Steve Jobs as one of the smartest people who ever lived and though I’m sure that he was smart, he didn’t design hardware or software. As far as I know he didn’t “make” anything. When I first tried a MacIntosh I thought it was the stupidest piece of garbage I had ever seen. I was used to CPM and DOS. The processor and the memory coupled with a floppy disk drive made the Mac useless as it was… then. With the software we have now coupled with the processing power we have a DOS model wouldn’t work. We have to have a GUI interface. I think that Steve Jobs was a smart, stubborn, and REALLY LUCKY man. I don’t know why a $250 mp3 player is that much better than a $50 one or why their tablet is brilliant when others that came before were stupid trash. Nothing explains it except brilliant marketing, snob appeal, new processing power, and incredible luck. I would have used a Mac a long time ago if it was close to the same price as a PC and lately I have tried running software on a PC that required me to run several operating system updates to use and one install wouldn’t occur until another was done first but that update won’t load because it thinks the update was already done and refuses to do it again. Now maybe I’m ready for a Mac. I’d try Linux but in a lot of ways, they are still DOS machines.