Jobs helped enormously, of course, but if Apple was still trying to sell classic MacOS in 2005 I'm not sure even Steve Jobs could have kept them afloat long enough to ship an iPhone.
No, bottom line is Apple have forgotten they're a company that sells awesome - or at least tries to - and have become a company that sells branded stuff, just like every other company selling branded stuff.
That (IMO) was the Jobs difference. He wanted game-changing awesome in everything - the PR, the advertising, the packaging, the launches, the personal story, the ecosystem, the design, and the product internals.
Sometimes he got that very wrong. Mostly he didn't. But I always felt that Jobs was absolutely consistent about the goal, even when his idea of awesome was as much of a miss than a hit. (As at NeXT.)
Cook doesn't understand awesome in the same way. He understands useful, more or less, and he understands incrementally better. But he's not obsessively and addictively dedicated to making things that are unexpectedly cool and insanely great - or at least as insanely great as they can be, given what's possible. Mostly he seems to want to make money by cutting production costs to raise margins - which is fine for a company, but not very exciting for anyone else.
The problem for Apple is that Jobs was one of a kind. Not only is there no one at Apple who can replace him, I'd be surprised if there's anyone in the entire industry. The only two people who are similarly obsessive, effective and obnoxious are Bezos and Musk, and they both have other plans.
And I'm not saying that as a fanboi, because Jobs was clearly an obnoxious asshole for far too much of his life. But credit where it's due - he was uniquely smart and talented.
Apple's best hope might be to keep a very close eye on the AI startup scene and see if they can talent-spot the next major player before he/she gets to billionaire status.
I think the idea that Jobs had "great taste" is a myth. What he was good at was implementing an all-encompassing product strategy that established Apple products as status symbols. I don't think it's an accident that Apple "arrived" in the late 90s. Why? Because that's when their experience with education enterprise could be combined with the broad marketing lessons to be learned from products like Air Jordans.
Apple products were visually-distinctive, but I wouldn't call them beautiful; they were relatively easy to use, though I wouldn't call them intuitive. But because they passed the bar in those two respects - in other words, because Apple products were not ugly nor difficult to use, and therefore not completely repellant on their face - the way was opened for Jobs to execute his coup de grace: positioning (through advertisement, third-party association, and pricing) the iMac, iPod, and eventually iPhone as markers of one's own affluence and taste. Everything else coalesces around that kernel of desirability, whether it's warranted or not. The "unifying sense of taste" of the products themselves is an illusion; what matters is that everyone agrees that Apple is the premium choice, in a society where premium (not necessarily fit) is of utmost importance.
This is why Apple stores and support are so crucial. Every generation of Apple product has a competitor that's more elegant, better-performing, more durable and reliable, better integrated within its own ecosystem, etc. But, again, what Jobs understood was that humanity always trumps engineering in the way our social and cultural hierarchies are constructed. Concierge and community are more desirable - more premium - when problems inevitably arise or UX inevitably fails. They maintain the illusion of usability when usability itself breaks down.
It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets, made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple.
Apple can be aggressive about its tech today (such as Lightning and Thunderbolt; anyone know what they charge for those?), but back then they were much more of a niche player.
Pardon my momentary astonishment there, but you are talking about one of the most successful people in the industry. That alone should give you cause for pause in your analysis, which you seem especially confident of ("totally correct").
You seem to discount the possibility that Sculley et al were the problem.
Let's look at the history: While they may have temporarily boosted revenues at first, uncontroversially the "sales guys" ran Apple into the ground in the 90s. Drove it almost bankrupt. Jobs came back and indisputably saved the company from the brink of disaster, not by trying to play the same game as Microsoft, but again by pursuing visionary projects.
Jobs' refusal to compromise and "work with" the sales guys who ran Apple into the ground... is maybe, just possibly, one of the reasons he ended up being one of the most successful guys in the history of the computing industry.
Maybe. Actually, I don't disagree with you, Jobs is good at what he does. Very good.
But I think things like how their strategy interacted with the timing, stages of maturity in markets, technology & such, they played a role.
At the moment, Apple has a range of potential, growing or existing product classes that they are ideally positioned to take advantage of: netbooks, tablets, whatever else becomes the next computer.The only worry is spreading too thin.
What I am saying is that the world really did come back to them to an extent. It's not just Ninja leadership & it's hard to tell what is responsible for what exactly.
Steve Jobs deserves a great deal of respect but I do think you're forgetting the less great parts. They had lackluster updates, products which went years too long without a meaningful update (e.g. all laptops for the half decade prior to the Intel switch), the iTunes UI started getting worse in every release around the early 2000s, until a few years ago their attitude about security was borderline negligence, they shamelessly ignored long-standing customers who kept them alive through the dark years[1], and every cloud service they offered until the last year or two was a user-hostile disaster.
The key, of course, is that a few big wins make up for a lot of that but the other side of that lesson is that most people will do better with consistent solid execution rather than spreading themselves too thin trying for a huge win. Apple could easily have been Palm or SGI if one of those long-shots hadn't paid off.
1. Our Apple higher-ed rep used to respond to critical bug reports by asking how many Macs we couldn't purchase due to that bug.
This analysis is astonishingly shoddy, for all the reasons that tabbyjabby pointed out and more. But worse, it doesn’t even get close to the root-cause for why Apple may decline in the post-Steve Jobs’ era.
Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishments are not Apple I, Apple II, Mac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone or iPad. It's Apple, itself.
Depending on how one tallies, Apple has been through three successful major technology and business transitions, combined with three minor ones within the Mac family, and two minor ones within the iOS family: Apple II > Mac [Mac (68K) > Mac (PowerPC) > Mac (OS X)] > Mac (Intel)] > handhelds [iPod > iTouch(iOS) > iPhone (iOS) > iPad (iOS)]. Combine that with the development of new business/sales platforms (virtual Apple Store, physical Apple Stores, iTunes, App Store, etc.) that enhance the consumers’ Apple experience. Each one of these required the insight to recognize a particular opportunity (and the discipline to ignore others), the investment of resources to develop those opportunities, and wherewithal to follow through on the execution, even if that means cannibalizing from the sales of incumbent products. Without these pivots, Apple would not be in dominating position it is in today.
Consider that companies with longevity are able to execute strategic pivots when required. IBM is an example of a tech company that has done so at least four times over its long, 100+ year old history. Apple has done three within 30 years.
What is the one link between the major initiatives? They all occurred while Steve Jobs was in a position where he could significantly influence Apple. It is interesting to note that two significant new Apple tech platforms that failed - the Apple III and Newton - and the one significant new Apple business platform that failed - licensing Mac clones - were not initiatives that Jobs was affiliated with. (Before moving on, let’s acknowledge that the Lisa failed under Jobs’ purview, and that the 68K > PowerPC transition was successful carried out during his absence,)
We see how Apple's success if predicated on an ability to pivot to address new opportunities in the market, even if those opportunities cannibalize an existing profit center. Jobs’ value to Apple extends beyond being a visionary, design auteur, or talented business negotiator. None of those things would have meaning if he didn’t also have the force of personality and strength of credibility to compel dramatic changes within Apple.
So, then, the question becomes, who can fill in for Jobs in this capacity? If no one can, Apple is very likely to decline, much as Sony has in the post-Morita era.
This is just silly. Firstly, when Jobs was in charge Apple brought out the iPhone which is basically what drove Apple's value even to this day. On the flipside when Steve Jobs was in charge a plucky young man name Tim Apple became SVP for Worldwide Operations and built out Apple's supply chain in such a way that it became an enormous competitive advantage for them and that's drove a massive portion of Apple's value even to this day.
Like... we just don't have to attribute value to individuals...
When Jobs was ousted Apple was floundering an his departure was more drama than impactful. When he stepped down at the end he had a well running machine that could generally point in the right direction.
Besides that, it is also very likely that Apple would have remained stagnant (or worse) if Steve Jobs had not been brought into the fold. I am not into persona worshipping, but Jobs brought some well-needed focus to a sea of overpriced beige boxes.
The impression i have is that Apple under Jobs was about pitching products to one guy, Jobs. If he wanted to use it, it went on sale, if not then forget about it leaving the lab.
I have 0 knowledge in business world and how things work but wasn't Jobs basically Apple itself? Even if he does not have single-handedly vote percentage to make things reality for Apple, his reputation is not enough to force things?
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