When Steve Jobs stepped down from the CEO position at Apple, many people began to reflect on the nature of his contributions. Under his leadership, Apple has become one of the most successful American companies of all time. Along with Intel, Microsoft, and Google, it has shaped much of what people experience as the new digital economy.
Steve Jobs contribution to Apple has been profound. Steve Jobs is not an engineer himself, yet he has guided Apple into being one of the great engineering companies, in the true sense of what it means to “engineer.” Apple did not invent personal computers, or the mouse and windows interface, nor did it invent digital music players, smartphones, or tablets. What it has done is to engineer products in these categories that are uniquely beautiful, efficient, easy to operate, and a joy to own and use.
This kind of design excellence is very difficult to achieve. It depends on a great many elements all working together and all working at a very high level. Like the excellence of a great film or work of music, the whole can be quickly ruined by a single false note. Steve Jobs’ special genius has been in holding to this very high standard and imposing it on the very talented engineers he has recruited to Apple. Competitors have raced to be first to market or to include the most features in their products, but have built products which are clunky and awkward in comparison to Apple’s.
To fully understand Apple, it is vital to look at the difference between its kind of excellence and cutting edge visionary technology. Back in 1993, CEO John Scully had Apple introduce a tablet called the “Newton.” It was visionary and advanced, attempting to recognize handwriting. Unfortunately, you cannot reliably do that, just as you cannot reliably implement voice recognition. When he returned to Apple in 1997, Steve Job’s killed the Newton. The secret of Apple’s excellence is not in living on the unworkable bleeding edge, but in doing exceptionally well that which can be done well with present technology.
Many people and companies want to emulate Apple and study what the company has done. I believe that in trying to learn from Steve Jobs and Apple it is very useful to pay attention to what he did not do. In compiling this short list, I have used ideas and phrases in common use by managers and business consultants:
- He did not “drive business success by a relentless focus on performance metrics.” Success came to Apple by having successful products and strategies, not by chasing metrics.
- He did not “motivate high performance by tying incentives to key strategic success factors.” Apple did not run a decentralized system based on pressuring individuals to deliver targeted business results.
- He did not have a strategy “built through participation by all levels to achieve a consensus which resolves key differences in perspectives and values.” Strategy at Apple is essentially driven from the top.
- He did not waste time on the delicate distinctions among “missions,” “visions,” and “strategies.”
- He did not use acquisitions to hit “strategic growth goals.” Growth was the outcome of successful product development and accompanying business strategies.
- He did not seek to engineer higher margins by chasing rust-belt concepts of “economies of scale.” He left such antics to HP.
Emulating Apple is not easy, but it is not impossible either. We are all surrounded by so-called high-tech products that promise much more than they deliver. I am writing this article on a Dell Inspiron 2305 that is a lovely all-in-one computer but which has a stereo sound system that cannot be heard three feet away. I expected my wife’s HTC Incredible 2 Android phone would provide a seamless interface to Google documents, but there is no such capability. RIM has built its market position on professional grade email, yet is trying to sell a tablet without email capability. Just two weeks ago I returned an HP 4500 Office Jet printer because its drivers refused to install on my Windows 7 64-bit system (a problem reported by many others over two years.)
The secret to emulating Apple lies in its efficiency at excellent design. Indeed, Apple has awakened many people to the value and joy of excellence in design. Not just the prettiness of the box, not just the simplicity of the interface, but the whole sense that a product is the best it can be, for the moment, at what it does.
Also see some of my comments in print and video at Apple Changed the Way the World Communicates.
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Steve Jobs has great ability to envision/recognize and manufacture designs that are enabled by the latest technologies. The latest processors, batteries, displays, cameras and software all enable what many great artists have shown in our future. Jobs is great at jumping on these design opportunities to deliver nearly perfect products as soon as the technology becomes available. Many of Apple’s designs have actually been copied from masters like Stanley Kubrick (who also had great design teams):
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/is-apples-ipad-copied-2001-227700
Apple is really good at taking these (Jobs-driven) product designs to market. They will need to replace Jobs with someone who envisions/recognizes what products are possible as soon as they become technically feasible.
Yes, for Jobs and a few other key technologists, there has been a fairly clear idea of what to build. The ideas of the mouse-windows interface and of the tablet computer were all developed in the late 1960s. Job’s vision of the Mac was sparked by seeing a working Star computer at Xerox Parc and the idea of a tablet computer derives from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As you say, although these design ideas were “in the air,” Jobs was the one to drive them through to elegant implementation.
I wonder how much Job’s has managed to teach those within Apple how to continue on what he did at Apple. I’m looking forward to the next few years to watch the response.
Other things that Steve Jobs did not do. He did not bring out a netbook, presumably because he could not see the opportunity for a breakthrough product.
What I would like to know more about is how Jobs guided product development and how he decided whether to bring out a tablet or a netbook. The Monday morning product meetings seem to be a critical part of this process, but it would be nice to know more.
Andrew
Andrew, I think one of the considerations was that he wanted hardware and operating systems that were totally independent of the Intel/Microsoft nexus. I too would like to know more about exactly how he shaped the product development and design process.
One other thing, he did not nickel and dime the development process. Apple’s products are the results of endless prototyping lots of mechanical and software interface sample, trial, mockups. This costs money in many tech companies the finance side is constantly trying to eliminate extra prototypes. This results in sub optimal design if its seems good enough you ship it. At Apple under Jobs it wouldn’t ship unless it was at least good enough for Jobs and he was picky.
It will be interesting to see if Apple reverts to the industry trend in reducing development costs by reducing prototyping.
Another facet of Apple’s focused strategy has been holding on launching products until they were believed to be ready for mass adoption. For instance, the tablet was worked on first but priority was given to the iPhone. It takes a special talent though to get the timing right that would be hard to reproduce by strategy alone.
One thing he did do though is bolt on acquisitions. Siri is one example.
Some thoughts on Apple and Jobs. Getting it right rather than almost right really matters. When the iPhone was launched, the Economist reported that executives at Nokia, Motorola and Erikkson were baffled by the sight of people queueing up to get one. A reflection, perhaps, that they really didn’t understand what Apple does and does well.
Jobs provides an inspiration and a template for doing it right. However, without the particular confluence of attributes that made him who he was, (boldness, self-efficacy, intelligence, drive, etc…) that template may not be appropriate. Simon Hall, a consultant and frind from my MBA days, has the raw intelligence to see the essence of a business problem immediately. There are very few, however, who have his brains, far fewer than there are CEOs. For those who lack his (and Jobs’) raw horse power, metrics and frameworks may be the substitute that ensures regression to the mean. And like many fund managers, that’s better than making a big outside bet and loosing.
This man had several major contributions:
He helped develop small scale computing into what we have today – his first stint at Apple.
He helped transform the way motion pictures are made today – Pixar.
He helped transform the way modern computers “think” – NeXT
And yet he is mostly renowned for how he managed the marketing of i-gadgets: i-pod, i-phone and i-pad.
To me it is equally baffling how Apple’s significant financial success came only after the marketing of ‘toys’ and didn’t occur 25 years ago, when it was selling the best computers available at that time.
Steve Jobs was focused on his tastes. The look and the feel has to suit him, but what was is input? What I have been able to read, Steve improved things, things that others had come up with. He was not an ideas man, but would present these to the world as his creations and that these are unlike anything else. The Apple computer was the only things that was “unlike anything else” at that time, but the iPhone came after mobile phones, the iPad came after the tablet. Steve just repackaged these and told the world they were totally new. Steve Jobs was a salesman, not technical and not truely creative.
He was into himself and thought he knew it all. Well he missed the boat with IBM, Windows, GUI, LISA, NEXT. He built his fortune by standing on the shoulders of others. But like so many men that have made it, they try so hard to tell us that it was all their own doing.
It is all fine and go to tell people you want the best from them, that we can change the world, but recogize their part in the results. Did Steve develop the hardware and software at Pixar -NO. He pushed people to do better and claimed the credit for himself.
What ever Steve was into, the purpose was to be able to use it to get want he wanted. His life is dotted with people that tell the same story of a man uses people to get what he wants.
Apple must now not try to emulate him, but deliver on the sales babble – deliver to the customer something that works, looks good and easy to use. This approach could be used with TV’s, remote controls, Clocks, etc – just look at what is packed into a TV remote and ask yourself can everyone use this easily? So Apple has a wealth of future products.
No two ways about it, he was not nice. One way to look at his focus on “taste” is that he served as Apple’s internal customer.
Everyone there had to satisfy him, not just the marketing department or a consumer research consultant.
No denying that Jobs was a master when it came to excellent design – his trademark over the past 25 years. However, the recent financial success did not come only from excellent product design.
This time around it also came from selling content – music and apps/content – through an ecommerce cloud to the excellent devices. In the early days of Apple the mass market content was missing and excellent devices and proprietary software was simply not enough.
So I would contend that Apple’s recent strategy has been to create a mass-market content platform that is seamlessly integrated to and fully leverageso its “core business” – the design of excellent devices. It also is for this reason that its competitors are struggling to keep up. As competitors rapidly copy the device innovations it will interesting to see whether Apple can also maintain a content lead as its point of differentiation, and whether post-Jobs it becomes a second “core business”.
Today’s announcement for the education sector for the provision of text books at $14.99 to students via the iBooks2 app on iPads simply extends Apple’s new strategy – selling excellent integrated content, apps and devices. In this case they have stayed with one of their original markets – education and academia.