I, apparently in agreement with Apple's investors today, have a little trouble with the notion that Steve Jobs stepping down will have no effect on Apple's success.
I'm afraid the Apple faithful are playing a little fast and loose with logic on this one. Let me see if we have this straight...
1) Steve Jobs was absolutely and almost singularly responsible for Apple's meteoric rise over the last 14 years. His vision, his taste, his standards, his business acumen, all of it - has driven Apple past competitor after competitor to become the most valuable company in the world. [By the way, I agree.]
2) Steve Jobs is also completely unnecessary for Apple's continued success. [Hmmmm]
I think I can agree with Gruber's wisdom in choosing to prognosticate no further than a month. What made Apple remarkable is going away today. From here on out Apple will be as likely as the next company to blunder in the marketplace by playing it safe. You will not see Tim Cook do anything half as insane/brilliant as Jobs was capable of.
Do you think that Steve Jobs was the entirety of Apple's QA and decision-making process? Far too much good stuff has come out of Apple in the past decade for Steve to get sole credit. While Jobs obviously had the power to veto any bad idea, he didn't have the time to veto every bad idea, or to suggest every good idea. He can only micro-manage some of the things some of the time.
He built and trained a system that, even with Steve still running it, is obviously capable of making good decisions without him. He may have been the primary motivator for the development of the iPad and iPhone, but he didn't create OpenCL, libdispatch, CoreAnimation, and Automatic Reference Counting. He didn't invent the unibody construction process or Gorilla Glass or LightPeak or multi-touch, and he's obviously not the only person at Apple who can recognize their value and figure out how to use them to make a better product. If that were the case, he would have been a huge bottleneck and Apple would never be able to ship more than one product a year.
You're confusing leading by example with doing it all yourself.
Over the last 5-8 years or so there's been a formula to what made Jobs such a successful leader of Apple. Smaller, faster, focus on human usability, make it look nice, control the supply chain so you can build it cheap and make lots of money, let your competitors make the mistakes and swoop in with your own product with what you learn from their failures, don't bother building cheap low margin junk, etc. It's almost a science at this point. Like any good scientist Jobs surely has a lot of disciples within Apple who will carry that tradition on and move it forward. Astronomy didn't die with Newton did it? Apple will undoubtably change but if they continue to follow the values that Jobs has drilled into them for the last decade they should be fine. Success is the best teacher after all.
Since they've had some time to prepare for this transition I would expect that Jobs put much focus and intensity into thinking about how you move forward without him. That shift in focus may be a large part of why he stepped down last year. If he's been working on a new product then it's not a new iPad or Mac but instead it's how you build Apple to last another 20 or 30 years.
You've basically said what he did has been/is condensed down into a basic formula which anyone given enough exposure can repeat. If business were that simple, we wouldn't need book after book written about everything: new methodologies, strategies, innovation, management, etc.
I just don't think we understand people that well yet, let alone that we are able to copy them so effectively. Is the analogy of astronomy to Newton a good one? No. Business isn't anywhere close to being a science like Astronomy. Other people can observe and repeatedly make tests that further our understanding of space. Can you do that to a person, especially after they are gone? Nope.
Sure, Apple will exist for a long while to come, it will probably follow a lot of the principles/ethos of Steve Jobs, but will it be as successful without Steve Jobs actually making those decisions? We'll see.
I think that what Steve Jobs has done with Apple is able to be condensed down into a basic formula which anyone given enough exposure can repeat. Just because it's repeatable doesn't mean that it's easy to do, though.
The problem is that you can't repeat it if you're going to do it by half-measures. Apple succeeds because it applies its formula 100%; others fail to follow Apple's example because they do "all BUT" some aspect or another.
That said, if another organization wants to do what Apple does, they will have to make some adjustments to acknowledge their reality -- but you really can't do part of what Apple does and say that Apple's process isn't repeatable.
Fair points. The timing happens to work out pretty well that we're just now in the period where SmartPhones and tablets are becoming mature consumer products so Apple can ride the formula for many years to come. It will get a lot harder when it's time to make the next big leap forward.
Problem is, technology outpaces longterm planning exponentially. Apple laying out a plan for 20-30 years would actually work against them as they would be planning, in large part, based on current, or foreseen technology and cost. It's a little like when a movie director attempts to predict the future.
You just can't cut Jobs as a catalyst only. His mind is welded to the myriad of changing variables in technology and no plan is going to be able to emulate that.
If the repeatable method is, as mentioned above, "Smaller, faster, focus on human usability, make it look nice.." then we all win regardless of whether Apple does.
Try to do it better. It's inevitable that competitors are going to copy. I'm not sure Jobs could have stopped that either. Apple has some huge strategic advantages and big war chest which definitely helps.
Unless they can "start implementing" tens of billions of dollars sitting around to use for pre-purchasing heavily discounted parts for their devices to drive profit margins high as a kite and low as a rock for competitors, I don't think there's much to worry about.
It’s not that Steve Jobs is unnecessary; it’s that Apple will continue to make Apple-like products without Steve running the show day-to-day because his philosophy is so much a part of how Apple functions now.
In lots of ways, his work is done; certainly the product managers and C-level folks get what differentiates Apple from everyone else and that’s not changing because Steve Jobs’ title has changed.
The point of Gruber’s article is that Steve has been gone for large chunks of time already and Apple keeps cranking along—he’s been on medical leave for over 8 months now—and Apple hasn’t missed a beat. Not even close.
The roles Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have been in for almost all of 2011 have been formalized, with Cook being named CEO and Jobs now Chairman of the board.
So, no, I don’t see upcoming blunders or missteps. Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs, but remember that Apple wouldn’t be where they are today without Tim Cook either. He fixed Apple’s manufacturing and supply chain issues that plagued Apple for years prior to his arrival from Compaq. Without Tim Cook, there’s no way Apple could crank out the tens of millions of iOS devices that are just taken for granted nowadays.
Jobs' resignation comes as a surprise to no one, Jobs least of all. That is, this has been a long time coming and it seems safe to reason that Jobs has made it his primary duty over the last five years to ensure that an Apple without him will continue to thrive. And, as his letter makes a point of noting, he will continue on as the Chairman of the board and as "an Apple employee"--his final act, passing Apple on to others, is not yet complete.
He was the most important man in tech in 1978 and he is in 2011. The legacy he leaves is not just that of beautiful objects and sensational business intuition, but the generations of people he inspired. My first computer was a Mac, and it was love at first touch. Since that first moment I have always been profoundly fascinated with consumer electronics and computers in particular. I'm sure that I have kin, even among the haters.
And call me a fanboy, but any man who can relentlessly carve a path for passionately crafted objects in the face of largely monotonous, analytics; well, I'm glad he stuck to it.
The culture will change... it'll be slow and people won't notice it while it's happening. Then one day, you look back and go "man this is different."
It can change for the better... or it can change for the worse. There is no question that it will change.
I've always found it fascinating at how large companies, armies, or anything else really have a way of taking on the personality of their leadership. It's why CEO's make so much money. I hope that this will be a change for the better.
Agreed. Just look at Microsoft after Gates. Or Intel after Grove. In both cases, they turned things over to operational, #2 types in Balmer and Barrett and in both cases, the companies stagnated.
And in both cases, the transition was right before the industry-wide dot-com bust, and in both cases, the company is still huge and profitable and nearly a monopoly. So Apple's probably not doomed. They just might stop being the source of the next big thing. Apple's exponential growth has to end sometime, and somebody's going to be unlucky enough to be CEO at that time.
The difference is while apple has made a ton of money, they don't have the dominant control of a market the way a company like MS did when Gates stepped down. Monetarily sure they're stupid successful but it's still quite easy to leave most of their platforms, the biggest exception probably being iTunes due to people being used to using it to manage their music, no matter how shitty the app is.
Do you know Tim Cook and have some reason to believe that he is not half as good as Steve Jobs or are you just playing off of an assumption that Jobs is at least 2x better than everyone else?
Comments
I, apparently in agreement with Apple's investors today, have a little trouble with the notion that Steve Jobs stepping down will have no effect on Apple's success.
I'm afraid the Apple faithful are playing a little fast and loose with logic on this one. Let me see if we have this straight...
1) Steve Jobs was absolutely and almost singularly responsible for Apple's meteoric rise over the last 14 years. His vision, his taste, his standards, his business acumen, all of it - has driven Apple past competitor after competitor to become the most valuable company in the world. [By the way, I agree.]
2) Steve Jobs is also completely unnecessary for Apple's continued success. [Hmmmm]
I think I can agree with Gruber's wisdom in choosing to prognosticate no further than a month. What made Apple remarkable is going away today. From here on out Apple will be as likely as the next company to blunder in the marketplace by playing it safe. You will not see Tim Cook do anything half as insane/brilliant as Jobs was capable of.
Do you think that Steve Jobs was the entirety of Apple's QA and decision-making process? Far too much good stuff has come out of Apple in the past decade for Steve to get sole credit. While Jobs obviously had the power to veto any bad idea, he didn't have the time to veto every bad idea, or to suggest every good idea. He can only micro-manage some of the things some of the time.
He built and trained a system that, even with Steve still running it, is obviously capable of making good decisions without him. He may have been the primary motivator for the development of the iPad and iPhone, but he didn't create OpenCL, libdispatch, CoreAnimation, and Automatic Reference Counting. He didn't invent the unibody construction process or Gorilla Glass or LightPeak or multi-touch, and he's obviously not the only person at Apple who can recognize their value and figure out how to use them to make a better product. If that were the case, he would have been a huge bottleneck and Apple would never be able to ship more than one product a year.
You're confusing leading by example with doing it all yourself.
Over the last 5-8 years or so there's been a formula to what made Jobs such a successful leader of Apple. Smaller, faster, focus on human usability, make it look nice, control the supply chain so you can build it cheap and make lots of money, let your competitors make the mistakes and swoop in with your own product with what you learn from their failures, don't bother building cheap low margin junk, etc. It's almost a science at this point. Like any good scientist Jobs surely has a lot of disciples within Apple who will carry that tradition on and move it forward. Astronomy didn't die with Newton did it? Apple will undoubtably change but if they continue to follow the values that Jobs has drilled into them for the last decade they should be fine. Success is the best teacher after all.
Since they've had some time to prepare for this transition I would expect that Jobs put much focus and intensity into thinking about how you move forward without him. That shift in focus may be a large part of why he stepped down last year. If he's been working on a new product then it's not a new iPad or Mac but instead it's how you build Apple to last another 20 or 30 years.
You've basically said what he did has been/is condensed down into a basic formula which anyone given enough exposure can repeat. If business were that simple, we wouldn't need book after book written about everything: new methodologies, strategies, innovation, management, etc.
I just don't think we understand people that well yet, let alone that we are able to copy them so effectively. Is the analogy of astronomy to Newton a good one? No. Business isn't anywhere close to being a science like Astronomy. Other people can observe and repeatedly make tests that further our understanding of space. Can you do that to a person, especially after they are gone? Nope.
Sure, Apple will exist for a long while to come, it will probably follow a lot of the principles/ethos of Steve Jobs, but will it be as successful without Steve Jobs actually making those decisions? We'll see.
I think that what Steve Jobs has done with Apple is able to be condensed down into a basic formula which anyone given enough exposure can repeat. Just because it's repeatable doesn't mean that it's easy to do, though.
The problem is that you can't repeat it if you're going to do it by half-measures. Apple succeeds because it applies its formula 100%; others fail to follow Apple's example because they do "all BUT" some aspect or another.
That said, if another organization wants to do what Apple does, they will have to make some adjustments to acknowledge their reality -- but you really can't do part of what Apple does and say that Apple's process isn't repeatable.
Fair points. The timing happens to work out pretty well that we're just now in the period where SmartPhones and tablets are becoming mature consumer products so Apple can ride the formula for many years to come. It will get a lot harder when it's time to make the next big leap forward.
Problem is, technology outpaces longterm planning exponentially. Apple laying out a plan for 20-30 years would actually work against them as they would be planning, in large part, based on current, or foreseen technology and cost. It's a little like when a movie director attempts to predict the future.
You just can't cut Jobs as a catalyst only. His mind is welded to the myriad of changing variables in technology and no plan is going to be able to emulate that.
A repeatable method can be copied. What does Apple do when one of their competitors figures it out and starts implementing it?
If the repeatable method is, as mentioned above, "Smaller, faster, focus on human usability, make it look nice.." then we all win regardless of whether Apple does.
Try to do it better. It's inevitable that competitors are going to copy. I'm not sure Jobs could have stopped that either. Apple has some huge strategic advantages and big war chest which definitely helps.
Unless they can "start implementing" tens of billions of dollars sitting around to use for pre-purchasing heavily discounted parts for their devices to drive profit margins high as a kite and low as a rock for competitors, I don't think there's much to worry about.
It’s not that Steve Jobs is unnecessary; it’s that Apple will continue to make Apple-like products without Steve running the show day-to-day because his philosophy is so much a part of how Apple functions now.
In lots of ways, his work is done; certainly the product managers and C-level folks get what differentiates Apple from everyone else and that’s not changing because Steve Jobs’ title has changed.
The point of Gruber’s article is that Steve has been gone for large chunks of time already and Apple keeps cranking along—he’s been on medical leave for over 8 months now—and Apple hasn’t missed a beat. Not even close.
The roles Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have been in for almost all of 2011 have been formalized, with Cook being named CEO and Jobs now Chairman of the board.
So, no, I don’t see upcoming blunders or missteps. Tim Cook isn’t Steve Jobs, but remember that Apple wouldn’t be where they are today without Tim Cook either. He fixed Apple’s manufacturing and supply chain issues that plagued Apple for years prior to his arrival from Compaq. Without Tim Cook, there’s no way Apple could crank out the tens of millions of iOS devices that are just taken for granted nowadays.
Jobs' resignation comes as a surprise to no one, Jobs least of all. That is, this has been a long time coming and it seems safe to reason that Jobs has made it his primary duty over the last five years to ensure that an Apple without him will continue to thrive. And, as his letter makes a point of noting, he will continue on as the Chairman of the board and as "an Apple employee"--his final act, passing Apple on to others, is not yet complete.
He was the most important man in tech in 1978 and he is in 2011. The legacy he leaves is not just that of beautiful objects and sensational business intuition, but the generations of people he inspired. My first computer was a Mac, and it was love at first touch. Since that first moment I have always been profoundly fascinated with consumer electronics and computers in particular. I'm sure that I have kin, even among the haters.
And call me a fanboy, but any man who can relentlessly carve a path for passionately crafted objects in the face of largely monotonous, analytics; well, I'm glad he stuck to it.
Thanks Steve. I hope you're well.
The culture will change... it'll be slow and people won't notice it while it's happening. Then one day, you look back and go "man this is different."
It can change for the better... or it can change for the worse. There is no question that it will change.
I've always found it fascinating at how large companies, armies, or anything else really have a way of taking on the personality of their leadership. It's why CEO's make so much money. I hope that this will be a change for the better.
Agreed. Just look at Microsoft after Gates. Or Intel after Grove. In both cases, they turned things over to operational, #2 types in Balmer and Barrett and in both cases, the companies stagnated.
And in both cases, the transition was right before the industry-wide dot-com bust, and in both cases, the company is still huge and profitable and nearly a monopoly. So Apple's probably not doomed. They just might stop being the source of the next big thing. Apple's exponential growth has to end sometime, and somebody's going to be unlucky enough to be CEO at that time.
The difference is while apple has made a ton of money, they don't have the dominant control of a market the way a company like MS did when Gates stepped down. Monetarily sure they're stupid successful but it's still quite easy to leave most of their platforms, the biggest exception probably being iTunes due to people being used to using it to manage their music, no matter how shitty the app is.
Apple aren't even trying to make it hard to leave their platforms, they're trying to make you not want to leave them.
Well, they're definitely failing with iTunes. It's the one Apple program I use and, bluntly, it's rubbish.
Do you know Tim Cook and have some reason to believe that he is not half as good as Steve Jobs or are you just playing off of an assumption that Jobs is at least 2x better than everyone else?
As of right now, AAPL is down 1.24%. The market index is down 1.29%. I'm not sure the investors agree with you.
25AUG closed at less than 1% down.
Apple/Steve has done this transition well, and the market is (mostly) satisfied that Apple has competent leadership.
I predict this news, like previous such news (like Tim Cook as interim CEO), will soon be eclipsed by other relevant events (like iPhone5 launch).