I’d like to apologise to sensitive viewers as this post contains strong language. This post is dedicated to Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
Hello Internet. Two years ago we lost a remarkable person. And yet, he was not just a person. He built a company from scratch that is known worldwide. He was unceremoniously thrown out of it. He built another one, to compete with it. He made an animation studio. And when he was asked to return to his first company, everything was going down. He lifted it up. He took it further than what everyone expected. And so, with all these accomplishments, he revolutionised technology in so many ways. Ladies and Gentlemen, today we remember Steven Paul Jobs, founder of Apple Inc., NeXt, and Pixar.
Steve Jobs was all of this and much more. For most people that met him, he was an asshole. He screamed at his workers, at his equals, he told them their work was shit. And yet, he was a genius. He knew what people wanted before they knew. And, unlike other companies, he focused on design before functionality. He was usually criticised for making the design first and then making the engineers make the electrical components later, when it “should have been the other way around”. And yet, look at what he accomplished. Ever since he started with the Macintosh, everything was based on the design. In fact, he told the engineers that they had to make the electrical components fit into the computer. They couldn’t make it bigger. They had to make it fit, and make it look good on the inside. The iMac was the same. The iPod? The iPhone? The iPad? It was all based on the design. That’s what makes Apple different from other companies. They make the design before the electronic components, resulting in a much better looking product.
And now, two years later after Steve passed away, we have observed a certain decline in Apple. The products are not as innovating as before. Android is catching up. Microsoft has risen. And what is happening to Apple? I’d say it’s not exactly that the quality has gone down. I’d say it’s the innovation. I have personally read Steve’s biography, and in the last chapter, Walter Isaacson asked Steve what motivated him. Here it is, quoted.
” My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else, was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, where the motivation. Sculley (the guy that eventually betrayed Steve and took his company in 1985) flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want”. But that’s not my approach. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’.” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact, some of the best people working in the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to sculpt it.
People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.
At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google-and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on.
It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built-it’s impressive-and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humour. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal Arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t copy it well. They totally didn’t get it.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, eloquent, fantastic salesperson, but he didn’t know anything about the product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. it happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.
I don’t think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we’ve had some rip-roaring arguments, where we are yelling at each other, and it’s some of the best times I’ve ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying, “Ron, that store looks like shit” in front of everyone else. Or I might say “God, we really fucked up the engineering on this” in front of the person that’s responsible. That’s the ante for being in the room: You’ve got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California.
I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when Reed (Steve’s oldest son) was six years old, coming home, and I had just fired somebody that day, and I imagined what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard. But somebody’s got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent, and if I didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan (Bob Dylan was one of Steve’s favourite musicians, maybe the favourite) could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest. He would come on and do a set of acoustic guitar, and the audiences loved him. Then he brought what became The Band, and they would all do an electric set, and the audience sometimes booed. There was one point where he was about to sing “Like a Rolling stone” and someone from the audience yells “Judas!” And Dylan then says “Play it fucking loud!” And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do-keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or the mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how-because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.”
As it is mentioned by Steve here, he didn’t care so much about the profit. He cared about the product. And this is where I’m going. While Steve was at his weakest fighting cancer, he chose someone to replace him while he was recovering. He chose Tim Cook, and named him COO. In summer 2011, Steve named him CEO, so he would be his successor. Steve barely made it to see the iPhone 4S be unveiled. He died a day later. Ever since, I think we have all seen a difference in the Apple Keynotes. Usually Steve gave the complete conferences himself. In 2001, for example, he presented a few products, and the first ever iPod. He gave a complete presentation without anyone’s help. No one but him was on the stage. The first iPhone was the same. He was, as he said so himself, a man of the product.
Tim Cook, on the other hand, hasn’t been what Steve would have probably wanted him to be. He depends entirely on other people in the team to show a product. He might barely understand it. All I have seen him do on the keynotes is greet the people in the beginning, show how Apple has been doing, what new stores are available, show a few commercials, some stats, maybe show up halfway through the conference to say the name of the new product, and appear again to say goodbye to them. I have NEVER seen him give a complete keynote. I haven’t seen much innovation on Apple’s products. The iPhone 5 was good, but not exactly what I expected. The same with the iPhone 5S. As for the iPad, I haven’t been disappointed. Yet. The retina display on the iPad 3 was completely innovating, and increasing it on the iPad 4 and adding the new processors was a great move, making it a great product, but it still needs something for the next generation. This is where the stakes must flip. Apple must come up with something new. Supposedly, Steve approved all of these products before he died. But I have heard a few rumours that he left multiple blueprints of products that supposedly many engineers at Apple can’t even understand completely. This makes you doubt, would this have been what Steve really had in mind?
Now I speak directly to you Tim Cook. You have the power to make things change at Apple. You have in your hands about 20-30 years or more where you can change the world. You have in your hands a company that can change the world, with some of the best engineers and designers at hand. You must choose which Steve you want to be. Steve Ballmer, or Steve Jobs? Which one are you, Timothy Donald Cook? Which one are you?
Thank you, for reading and for remembering Steve Jobs today.
J.A.A.
javianleu 