I can think of no more fitting tribute.
Death sucks.
Tag: Steve Jobs
Guy English on what Steve Jobs’ retiring means not just for Apple but for an entire industry:
There’s been a lot written about Steve leaving Apple. I’m more concerned about Steve leaving the industry. Apple being the best player on the field is different than Apple being the player every other player wants to be. Steve inspired his competitors.
The Jobsian Apple of the last fifteen years has been a leader in challenging the status quo. I hope Tim Cook and the Apple culture will continue to do that, but if they don’t, who will be the next disruptor of an often lethargic industry?
You should probably just skip what I have to say about it and go here and read the whole thing. It will take you about 15 minutes or so, but it’s worth every one of them because it’s a fascinating retrospective from a big turning point in the history of Apple.
A few choice quotes that really stick out from the interview:
On Jobs and design:
The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates — Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing.
Sculley’s opinion on what’s wrong with Sony today (compared with how Apple is succeeding, specifically):
The Japanese always started with the market share of components first. So one would dominate, let’s say sensors and someone else would dominate memory and someone else hard drive and things of that sort. They would then build up their market strengths with components and then they would work towards the final product. That was fine with analog electronics where you are trying to focus on cost reduction — and whoever controlled the key component costs was at an advantage. It didn’t work at all for digital electronics because digital electronics you’re starting at the wrong end of the value chain. You are not starting with the components. You are not starting with the user experience.
And you can see today the tremendous problem Sony has had for at least the last 15 years as the digital consumer electronics industry has emerged. They have been totally stove-piped in their organization. The software people don’t talk to the hardware people, who don’t talk to the component people, who don’t talk to the design people. They argue between their organizations and they are big and bureaucratic.
Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and looking at the entire end-to-end system.
I think that’s a pretty good way of explaining the deficits of the PlayStation platform, too.
A second-hand report of the difference in culture between Apple and Microsoft:
An anecdotal story, a friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day and this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple) and when he went into the meeting at Apple as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.
And a really astute observation regarding where Apple was when the decision was made to reach out to Jobs:
[…] the Newton failed. It was a new direction. It was so fundamentally different. The result was I got fired and they had two more CEOs who both licensed the technology but… they shut down the industrial design. They turned out computers that looked like everybody else’s computers and they no longer cared about advertising, public relations. They just obliterated everything. We’re just going to become an engineering type company and they almost drove the company into bankruptcy during that.
I’m actually convinced that if Steve hadn’t come back when he did — if they had waited another six months — Apple would have been history. It would have been gone, absolutely gone.
It really is a very good read with some key insights and the kind of regrets spoken aloud you don’t often hear from an executive.
I’ve recently been performing some research into so-called “social DRM” as it applies to digital files for my own knowledge bank. I’ve been very interested in the approaches to DRM shown by groups such as The Pragmatic Programmers and ebooks purchased from outlets like Lulu, where the name of the purchaser is automatically embedded within the purchased file in order to provide it with some measure of discouraging sharing/piracy.
iTunes has done this from the start, and even though they have dropped the traditional notion of DRM from their music files now, they still mark each and every file you download with the email address of the Apple ID used to purchase the song. It’s not used in any sort of enforcement application (that we know of to date), but knowing it’s there stops some people from posting the tracks publicly or sharing them with anyone who is not a close personal friend or relative (my conjecture).
In doing this research, I ran across a two year old blog post from Bill McCoy of Adobe. He has some words to say about the same, which is fascinating coming from the GM of their ePublishing department. His comments are in reaction to the Steve Jobs note from 2007 regarding music and DRM—something that ended up happening less than two years after the fact. I also ran into some more recent comments from McCoy, speaking to the establishment of a DRM standard that is cross-platform instead of complete advocacy for the removal of traditional DRM systems from ebook titles.
Let’s talk about why this isn’t feasible and how we can learn from the past.