Steve Jobs: Memories and Legacy
When he returned to the helm at Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs righted a foundering company. Upon his death fourteen years later, Jobs left behind a giant… and many questions: Could Apple pull off more miracles like the iPhone and the iPad? Would Tim Cook be more than a supremely competent operating executive?
Four years ago, on October 5th, 2011, Steve Jobs left us.
His demise triggered an outpouring of grief that’s rarely seen for political and religious leaders, let alone a mere CEO. Within minutes — literally — flowers and testimonials began to pile up at the door of his neighborhood Apple store in Palo Alto and, soon, around the world:
At the time, I felt that the breadth and depth of the sentiment was justified. There had never been such a successful company turnaround, such a string of successful products, such an arc of personal transformation from unruly young man to Grand Master of Management.
Four years later, I’m still moved by the reaction to Jobs’ death, and I wouldn’t change a word of what I wrote at the time. (If you’ve already read that Oct 9, 2011 Monday Note already, today’s words resume here •••>)
Too soon…
‘Humor is the politeness of despair’, an approximate, googlish translation of l’humour est la politesse du désespoir, a saying attributed to noted post-WWII Left Bank jazzman, writer, and engineer, Boris Vian, So, let’s start with the reverent, despairing humor of Chris Calloway in Wired Magazine’s memorial to Steve Jobs:
“Heaven got a major upgrade today…”
Yes, I can see Dear Leader in his new abode. Having climbed his last mountain, he summons Saint Peter and utters the words that he has heard throughout his life: “You’re doing it all wrong.”
“Look at the name above the door, the typeface sucks, the kerning is off. The furniture is out of style — get something cleaner, fresher. And the stairs… We need something airier…I don’t know, glass? Come to think of it, one of the founding partners of the architecture firm that designed the Apple Store moved in here a few months ago. Bernard Cywinski; look him up, get to work.”
…and then it’s Saint Peter’s turn to mourn Steve’s untimely demise, and his own lost tranquility.
[Update: I just found this picture of the New Yorker’s upcoming October 17th cover. Obviously, this is before Steve starts to take matters into his own hands.]
Back in our Valley of Tears, this Onion article provides just the right amount of serious thought wrapped in knowing derision. I can’t resist but quote the entire piece, it’s too good and, in a way, it’s a consolation:
“Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies
Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. “We haven’t just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we’ve literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on,” a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas — attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. “This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over.” Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn’t have the slightest notion what he’s doing anymore.”
The real Barack Obama didn’t disappoint. Rising above the official, persphinctery encomiums, he offered a well-worded and, I believe, heartfelt homage [emphasis mine]:
“Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs.
Steve was among the greatest of American innovators — brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.
By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.
And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike.
Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him.”
Just the right words, neither too many nor too few.
Praise for Steve has been plentiful, personal, and often insightful. But we also have the dissenters. Some of them are merely laughable: One unhinged dissenter, a Baptist Church leader named Margie Phelps, promised to picket Steve’s funeral for “teaching his neighbors to sin.” Her call to arms was tweeted from an iPhone.
We have Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman in a sadly tasteless post:
“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die — not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.”
You can read an excellent, balanced retort here.
Most irksome of all is Steve Jobs Wasn’t God, Hamilton Nolan’s heartless and crude opinion at Gawker.com. Commenters chimed in and piled on, disputing Jobs’ accomplishments, ascribing them to others, condemning him for lapses of judgment in his early adulthood. This earned Mr. Nolan, who claims to have never owned an Apple product, a stinging rebuke from the Macalope. It’s well worth reading, as are all his weekly posts.
I side with the Macalope, but let’s not forget that the objectors play a useful role in reminding us that we shouldn’t canonize Steve. He was a genius, with an ‘‘insane’’ drive that took him and his company to the pinnacle — and brought us with them–but he was no saint. The undeniable, manic drive admits a dark side. If you want the works of art, you’ve got to accept the real artist. As I wrote in my late August tribute (Steve: Who’s Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now?), Steve learned to ride the animal inside him and matured as a result.
So, indeed, Steve wasn’t God, but let’s give him his due. To those, such as Mr. Nolan, who belittle Steve’s achievements because he didn’t solve world hunger, invent a vaccine, or fight for civil rights, I’ll say this: Computers are one of mankind’s most important inventions, right behind the written word, symbolic language. Steve saw computers as an extension of mind and body. His unique contribution has been, time and again, to make computers more personal and more elegant, to make Apple stand at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
That’s what I’ve always loved about Apple: I remember how happy I felt when I joined the company more than 30 years ago and found it had commissioned a Ray Bradbury poem for the (unfortunately short-lived) Apple magazine. I only remember the title, Ode to the Quick Computer; and the last verse, So cowards, what are you afraid of?
The dissenters are entitled to their views and they have a right to broadcast them. But to The Rest Of Us, their postures show a deep failure of empathy for the many ways in which Steve touched so many lives, in an ever-expanding number of ways. The drive for beauty and elegance, for enchantment even, is profound. It’s what makes us human, it’s what Apple came to represent, and that’s why so many of us mourn Steve’s demise.
As John Stewart lucidly explained, there’s another reason for the outpouring: We feel cheated. Ford and Edison died old, they had enough time to give society all they were meant to give. With Steve, we’re tragically robbed of what he could have accomplished with more time.
[Update: I just found this beautiful October 17th New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker where he writes:
“Everyone who cares about music and art and movies and heroic comebacks and rich rewards and being able to carry several kinds of infinity around in your shirt pocket is taken aback by this sudden huge vacuuming-out of a titanic presence from our lives.” ]
I bow to the happy family man he became, to the Grand Master of high tech, to the once disheveled hippie who became the Manager Extraordinaire of one of the world’s best-run companies and, last but not least, the Editor In Chief of a large group of engineers and artists.
I leave you with a nice tweet quoting Dr. Seuss…
…and a newly unearthed version of the famous Crazy Ones video, this one narrated by Steve himself, instead of Richard Dreyfuss. Call me feeble-minded, but it moves me to tears. Weeks ago, right after Steve resigned as CEO, Adweek created a version of the famous commercial in which a picture of Steve, as a young man, is added to the end, a fitting inclusion in the procession.
Lastly, a reminder of Steve’s mark on Apple, powerful because it’s so simply elegant, the creation of a young Hong Kong designer named Jonathan Mak:
— — —
•••> This week, Tim Cook remembered Steve Jobs in a touching email to the Apple team. Job’s long-time colleagues Bud Tribble and Phil Schiller added their voices to the tribute, with Schiller providing an unusual peek into Jobs’ preparation for his legendary keynotes [emphasis mine]:
Steve worked so hard on each and every keynote and event. Harder than people could imagine. He would be working for months ahead of time on each and every show, and he made every slide himself. He sat at his computer, either at Apple or at his home office, creating each slide, agonizing over each font, each letter, each spacing, and each graphic. And he spent so many hours thinking about how to say something, how we could explain something, how people would like to hear it.
He cared so deeply. In fact, once in a while when he would get frustrated with some of us who weren’t as detailed or good at it, he would finally just say, “I’m going to hold a class! I’m going to run a class and teach everyone here how to use Keynote the way I do, so you can do this. Because it matters, every detail matters.”
Jobs’ ideas and accomplishments have not only influenced popular culture, he himself has become a subject of it. By “coincidence” yet another Steve Jobs biopic comes out this week. This one, the third attempt to capture Jobs’ character on film, promises more than its predecessors: It’s based on Walt Isaacson’s bio and scripted by Aaron Sorkin. Unfortunately, the near-unanimous warmth of this week’s remembrances was ruffled by the vaguely dissenting voice of the movie. Jobs’ family and friends strongly disagree with scriptwriter Sorkin’s portrayal — who replies, in Hollywoodspeak, that he was less concerned with facts than with “emotional truth”.
I’ve been close to many of the people and events involved and prefer not to wade into the controversy.
Instead, let’s turn to Jobs’s legacy four years later, to Apple under Tim Cook’s leadership.
For Apple’s new CEO, the early days of his tenure weren’t easy. Almost immediately, he stepped into the Apple Maps fiasco, and then had to deal with questions about Siri and iCloud. Cook removed Jobs-appointed execs such as Scott Forstall, and then hired-and-fired one of his own (Jim Browett).
All the while, critics attacked Cook for not being Jobs. Some of the jibes were ridiculous, such as the Fortune article How Tim Cook can save himself (and Apple) in which the head (if that’s the right body part) of a PR firm seriously suggested that Tim should buy a blazer. Others saw no hope for a Cook-led Apple. Here we had pundits such as George Colony, CEO of the Forrester research firm, who pompously declared…
“Apple will decline in the post Steve Jobs era. Here’s why. Sociologist Max Weber created a typology of organizations in his 1947 book The Theory of Social and Economic Organization…”
…and we needn’t read any further. (My reply at the time: Apple Is Doomed: The Phony Sony Parallel.)
One of Tim Cook’s leadership skills, one I admire greatly for easily divined reasons of my own, is that he (almost) never takes the bait. Instead, Cook plays the long game and follows the spirit of Jobs’ spiritual testament: ‘Don’t try to guess what I would have done. Do what you think is right’. By abiding by this liberating edict, Apple’s CEO — and his team — have taken the company to new heights of revenue and profit. They’ve carefully updated all of the product lines — the flagging iPad included; they’ve opened an App Store for the Apple TV, and have added the Apple Watch to the product portfolio… to say nothing of a still hypothetical Apple Car.
Apple’s continued success is enabled by a management structure that’s unconventional for a company of any size, and nearly unthinkable for a business with such humongous revenue ($200B+). Apple is run as a functional organization, no business units, no separate P/L, fewer temptations to build the kind of fiefdoms that ultimately got Google to “liberate” Andy Rubin, Android’s fiercely independent creator.
In this Apple sec.gov document we see a clean, marketing-free statement of the company’s structure and underlying philosophy [light reformatting and emphasis mine]:
The Company is keenly focused on the relationship with its customers and their experience with the Company’s products and services. The Company’s goal is to deliver innovative products to its customers that operate seamlessly together (the “platform”) and the Company is continuously adding to its ecosystem of services for its customers that work seamlessly across these products. Towards this end, the Company is organized functionally, rather than divisionally, because its senior leadership believes a functional management structure is most conducive to innovation. [***]
The Company believes this functional management structure provides the following advantages:
- A singular vision for the platform. In the past that vision came from Steve Jobs, the Company’s former Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”), and continues under Tim Cook, the Company’s current CEO. The Company’s vision propagates down through the functions to the rest of the organization.
- Seamless interoperability amongst the Company’s products. Examples include:
• Handoff, which allows a customer to start a document, email, or message on one Apple device and pick up where the customer left off on another Apple device.
• iCloud, which allows a customer to take a picture with one device and the picture is then available across all other devices via the Photos app.
• iOS, which works on many of the Company’s mobile devices.
- Ideas and information shared across the organization. [***]
With this customer-centric focus in mind, the CODM assesses the performance and allocates resources based on the Company’s net sales on a geographic operating segment basis, focused on the location of its customers and distribution partners, as well as based on the Company’s consolidated operating margin, which reflects the costs associated with the functional management structure. [***]
(Some decoding is in order: CODM means Chief Operating Decision Maker; the [***] redactions refer to proprietary information deemed too sensitive to be included in publicly disclosed statements. These tasty morsels are exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) compliance and mailed under separate cover.)
Apple’s statement is a response to the SEC’s polite incredulity at the lack of more granular KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in the company’s quarterly reports, as revealed in a recent exchange between SEC Staff and Apple’s CFO Luca Maestri (with thanks to Venture Beat for the pointers). Where are the detailed revenue and profitability numbers for music, video, and apps? Same for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac models, and now the Apple Watch?
Apple’s response: It’s The Ecosystem, Stupid! Not in those exact words, its more like The Company respectfully advises the Staff… but the idea is there. (Just for fun, I’ll note that the respectfully adverb present in Luca Maestri’s April 2015 letter vanished from the August 31st missive.)
Elsewhere, Apple insists executive compensation isn’t based on the success or failure of any individual product, but on the company’s overall progress:
No group or individual within the Company is measured or compensated on product profitability, and the Company does not produce financial statements by product.
Which leads to one last thought for today’s long note.
So far, Apple has been viewed and valued by Wall Street as a kind of Hollywood studio: It’s too dependent on its next hit — or miss. Hence, for the same amount of profit, Apple gets a lower valuation than Google or Amazon. These companies are said to have built a “moat” around their business, they collect, in Horace Dediu’s words, “monopoly rents” from their well-protected businesses, just like Microsoft once did with its Windows-Office franchise. No such fortress for Apple — or so says the current lore. But, if you read Apple’s words, carefully vetted by attorneys and accountants, a fortress is precisely what the company is building with a functional organization singularly focused on its ecosystem.
We’ll revisit that topic after Apple’s numbers are released on October 27th.
