Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [15]
There have also been calls for Apple to sell to big business, the so-called enterprise market. Jobs has resisted because selling to companies—no matter how big the potential market—is outside of Apple’s focus. Since Jobs’s return, Apple has focused on consumers. “The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations,” Jobs has said. “The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.”32
Lessons from Steve
• Get busy. Roll up your sleeves and get to work straight away.
• Face hard decisions head-on. Jobs has to make some hard, painful decisions, but faces the situation head-on.
• Don’t get emotional. Assess your company’s problems with a cool, clear head.
• Be firm. It couldn’t have been easy, but Jobs was firm and fair when he stepped back into Apple and began his drastic reorganization. He knew what had to be done. He took the time to explain it, and he expected the staff to fall in line.
• Get informed; don’t guess. Make a thorough inspection of the company and base your decisions on data, not hunches. It’s tough but fair.
• Reach out for help. Don’t shoulder the burden alone. Jobs asks for the company’s help, and he gets it. The managers help shoulder the burden of any cuts.
• Focus means saying “no.” Jobs focuses Apple’s limited resources on a small number of projects it can execute well.
• Stay focused; don’t allow feature creep. Keep things simple, which is a virtue in a world of overly complex technology.
• Focus on what you are good at; delegate all else. Jobs doesn’t direct animated movies or woo Wall Street. He concentrates on what he’s good at.
Chapter 2
Despotism: Apple’s One-Man Focus Group
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
—Steve Jobs, on Mac OS X’s user interface, in Fortune, January 24, 2000
Before Jobs returned to Apple, the company had spent several years fruitlessly trying to develop a modern version of the Macintosh operating system. Since its debut in 1984, the old Mac OS had turned into a bloated, unstable patchwork of code. It had become a nightmare to maintain and upgrade. For users, it meant constant crashes, freezes, and restarts—and lots of lost data, frustration, and rage.
Because large portions of the Mac OS were still based on creaky old code, Apple decided that it had to start from scratch. In 1994, programmers began a ground-up rewrite of the operating system, code-named Copland, after the famous American composer. But after a couple of years of effort, it became apparent the project was a gargantuan effort and would never be finished. The Apple executive team at the time decided it would be easier (and wiser) to purchase a next-generation operating system from another company rather than develop one itself. The search eventually led to the purchase of Steve Jobs’s NeXT.
Apple was interested in NeXTstep, a surprisingly advanced and sophisticated operating system that Jobs had developed during his wilderness years away from Apple. NeXTstep had everything the old Mac OS lacked. It was fast, stable, and almost crash-proof. It had modern networking features—essential in the Internet age—and a modular architecture that was easily modified and upgraded. It also came with a collection of great programming tools, which made it very easy for software developers to write programs for it. Programming tools are a huge competitive advantage in the tech industry. Computer platforms are doomed unless they can attract talented programmers to create applications for them, just like game consoles are doomed unless they can attract great games. From the Mac to the Palm Pilot and the Xbox, the success of a platform is primarily determined by the software that can run on it. In some cases this is the so-called killer app—an essential piece of software that guarantees