Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [4]
These days, Apple is in the zone. The company is firing on all cylinders, but its business model is thirty years out of date. Apple is an anomaly in an industry that long ago standardized on Microsoft. Apple should have gone to the big swap meet in the sky, like Osborne, Amiga, and a hundred other early computer companies that stuck to their own proprietary technology. But for the first time in a couple of decades, Apple is in a position to become a big, powerful, commercial presence—opening up new markets that are potentially much bigger than the computer industry it pioneered in the 1970s. There’s a new frontier in technology: digital entertainment and communication.
The workplace was long ago revolutionized by computers, and Microsoft owns it. There’s no way Apple is going to wrest control. But the home is a different matter. Entertainment and communication are going digital. People are communicating by cell phone, instant message, and e-mail, while music and movies are increasingly delivered online. Apple is in a good position to sweep up. All the traits, all the instincts that made him a bad fit for the business world are perfect for the world of consumer devices. The obsession with industrial design, the mastery of advertising, and insistence on crafting seamless user experiences are key when selling high tech to the masses.
Apple has become the perfect vehicle to realize Jobs’s long-held dreams: developing easy-to-use technology for individuals. He’s made—and remade—Apple in his own image. “Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives,” Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s former chief evangelist, told me.9 Few corporations are such close mirror images of their founders. “Apple had always reflected the best and worst of Steve’s character,” said Gil Amelio, the CEO whom Jobs replaced. “[Former CEOs] John Sculley, Michael Spindler, and I kept the place going but did not significantly alter the identity of the company. Though I have a lot to be angry about in my relationship with Steve Jobs, I recognize that much about the Apple I loved is tuned to his personality.”10
Jobs runs Apple with a unique blend of uncompromising artistry and superb business chops. He’s more of an artist than a businessman, but has the brilliant ability to capitalize on his creations. In some ways he’s like Edwin Land, the scientist-industrialist who invented the Polaroid instant camera. Land is one of Jobs’s heroes. Land made business decisions based on what was right as a scientist and as a supporter of civil and feminist rights, rather than as a hardheaded businessman. Jobs also has in himself a bit of Henry Ford, another hero. Ford was a technology democratizer whose mass-production techniques brought automobiles to the masses. There’s a streak of a modern-day Medici—Jobs is a patron of the arts whose sponsorship of designer Jonathan Ive has ushered in a Renaissance for industrial design.
Jobs has taken his interests and personality traits—obsessiveness, narcissism, perfectionism—and turned them into the hallmarks of his career.
He’s an elitist who thinks most people are bozos. But he makes gadgets so easy to use that a bozo can master them.
He’s a mercurial obsessive with a filthy temper who has forged a string of productive partnerships with creative, world-class collaborators: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, and Pixar director John Lasseter.
He’s a cultural elitist who makes animated movies for kids; an aesthete and antimaterialist who pumps mass-market products out of Asian factories. He promotes them with an unrivaled mastery of the crassest medium, advertising.
He’s an autocrat who has remade a big, dysfunctional corporation into a tight, disciplined ship that executes on his demanding product schedules.