Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [1]
As well as the packaging, Jobs controls every other aspect of the customer experience—from the TV ads that stimulate desire for Apple’s products to the museum-like retail stores where customers buy them; from the easy-to-use software that runs the iPhone to the online iTunes music store that fills it with songs and videos.
Jobs is a control freak extraordinaire. He’s also a perfectionist, an elitist, and a taskmaster to employees. By most accounts, Jobs is a borderline loony. He is portrayed as a basket case who fires people in elevators, manipulates partners, and takes credit for others’ achievements.1 Recent biographies paint an unflattering portrait of a sociopath motivated by the basest desires—to control, to abuse, to dominate. Most books about Jobs are depressing reads. They’re dismissive, little more than catalogs of tantrums and abuse. No wonder he’s called them “hatchet jobs.” Where’s the genius?
Clearly he’s doing something right. Jobs pulled Apple from the brink of bankruptcy, and in ten years he’s made the company bigger and healthier than it’s ever been. He’s tripled Apple’s annual sales, doubled the Mac’s market share, and increased Apple’s stock 1,300 percent. Apple is making more money and shipping more computers than ever before, thanks to a string of hit products—and one giant blockbuster.
Introduced in October 2001, the iPod transformed Apple. And just as Apple has been transformed from a struggling also-ran into a global powerhouse, so has the iPod been transformed from an expensive geek luxury into a diverse and important product category. Jobs quickly turned the iPod from an extravagant, Mac-only music player that many people dismissed into a global, multibillion-dollar industry that supports hundreds of accessory companies and supporting players.
Quickly and ruthlessly, Jobs updated the iPod with ever-newer and better models, adding an online store, Windows compatibility, video, and then a touchscreen. The iPhone, an iPod that makes phone calls and surfs the Net, looks set to become another monster hit. Launched in June 2007, the iPhone is already radically transforming the massive cell phone business, which pundits are saying has already divided into two eras: pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.
It is already the bestselling series of digital audio players in history. At the time of this writing (March 2009) Apple had sold a whopping 163 million iPods, and is on track to reach more than 300 million by the close of 2009.
Apple has a Microsoft-like monopoly on the MP3 player market. In the United States, the iPod has nearly 90 percent market share: nine out of ten of all hard-drive-based music players sold is an iPod.2 Three quarters of all 2007 model-year cars have iPod connectivity. Not MP3 connectivity—iPod connectivity. Apple has distributed 600 million copies of its iTunes jukebox software, and the iTunes online store has sold three billion songs. “We’re pretty amazed at this,” said Jobs at a press event in August 2007, where he cited these numbers. The iTunes music store sells five million songs a day—80 percent of all digital music sold online. By 2009, the iTunes store had sold 6 billion songs and had become the largest music retailer in the United States, ahead of retail giants Wal-Mart and Best Buy. By the time you read this, these numbers will probably have doubled. The iPod has become an unstoppable juggernaut that not even Microsoft can compete with.
And then there’s Pixar. In 1995, Jobs’s private little movie studio made the first fully computer-animated movie, Toy Story. It was the first in a string of blockbusters that were released once a year, every year, as regular and dependable