Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [14]
Sony can’t release a product—any product—without multiple models at launch. This is usually perceived as good for customers. Conventional wisdom holds that more choice is always a good thing. But each variation costs the company time, energy, and resources. While a giant like Sony might have the means, Apple needed to focus and limit the number of variations it released just to get anything out the door.
Sony’s CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, has expressed envy of companies with a narrow product lineup. “Sometimes I wish there were just three products,” he has lamented.29
Of course, with the iPod, Apple now has a Sony-like lineup of products. There are more than half a dozen different models, from the bare-bones Shuffle to the high-end video iPod and the iPhone, priced at every $50 price point between $100 and $350. But to get there took Apple several years—it didn’t all happen at launch.
Personal Focus
At a personal level, Jobs focuses on his areas of expertise and delegates all else. At Apple, he is very hands-on in areas he knows well: developing new products, overseeing marketing, and giving keynote speeches. At Pixar, Jobs was just the opposite. He delegated the moviemaking process to his capable lieutenants. Jobs’s main role at Pixar was cutting deals with Hollywood, a skill at which he excels. Let’s break down these areas this way:
What Jobs is good at:
1. Developing new products.
He is a master at conceiving and helping to create innovative new products. From the Mac to the iPod and the iPhone, Jobs’s passion is for inventing new products.
2. Product presentations.
Steve Jobs is the public face of Apple. When the company has a new product, Jobs is the one who introduces it to the world. For this he spends weeks in preparation.
3. Cutting deals.
He is a master negotiator. He cut great deals with Disney to distribute Pixar’s movies and persuaded all five major record labels to sell music through iTunes.
What Jobs is NOT good at:
1. Directing movies.
At Apple, he has a reputation as a micromanager and a meddler, but at Pixar, he was very hands-off. Jobs can’t direct movies, so he doesn’t even try.
2. Dealing with Wall Street.
He has little interest in dealing with Wall Street. For many years, he trusted the company’s financials to his CFO, Fred Anderson. Until Apple’s stock options scandal in 2006 and 2007, Anderson was widely admired and respected for his handling of the company’s financials.
3. Operations.
Likewise, Jobs delegates the tricky task of operations to his veteran COO, Tim Cook, who is widely regarded as his right-hand man. Under Cook, Apple has become an extremely lean and efficient operation. Jobs boasts that Apple is more efficient than Dell, supposedly the industry’s operational gold standard.
4. Staying focused.
Over the years, the list of products Jobs hasn’t done has grown quite long, from handhelds to Web tablets and low-end, bare-bones computers. “We look at a lot of things, but I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as I am of the ones we have done,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal.30
Apple’s labs are littered with prototype products that never made it out the door. The product Jobs is most proud of not doing is a PDA (personal digital assistant), the successor to the Newton he discontinued in 1998. Jobs has admitted he’s done a lot of thinking about a PDA, but by the time Apple was ready—in the early 2000s—he’d decided the device’s time had already passed. PDAs were fast being superseded by cell phones with address books and calendar functions. “We got enormous pressure to do a PDA and we looked at it and we said, ‘Wait a minute, 90 percent of the people that use these things just want to get information out of them, they don’t necessarily