Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [62]
Jobs had badly misjudged the market. The Cube was the wrong machine at the wrong price. In January 2001, Apple reported a quarterly loss of $247 million, the first since Jobs had returned to the company. He was stung.
The Cube was one of Jobs’s few missteps since returning to Apple, and he learned a valuable lesson from it. The Cube was one of the few products he’s overseen that was entirely design led. It was an experiment in form over function. The cube has always been one of Jobs’s favorite forms. The computer he sold at NeXT—the NeXT Cube—was a pricey, laser-cut cube made of magnesium (which, funnily enough, was also a market failure). The underground Apple store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue is topped by a giant glass cube that Jobs helped to design (which is not a failure). The Register called the G4 Cube a “glorious experiment of aesthetics over commonsense.”2 Instead of focusing on what customers wanted, Jobs thought he could give them an elegant museum piece, and it cost him.
Jobs usually pays very careful attention to the customer experience. It’s one of the things that has earned him a reputation for innovation. One of the central questions about Jobs and Apple is: Where does the innovation come from? Like any complex phenomenon, it comes from many places, but much of it is informed by Jobs’s meticulous focus on the customer experience. From the scroll wheel on the iPod to the box the iPod comes in, Jobs is alert to every aspect. His instinct for the experience of using his products is what drives and informs Apple’s innovation, and the Cube was one of the rare occasions when he took his eye off the ball.
An Appetite for Innovation
One of the hottest topics in business these days is innovation. With ever-increasing competition and shortening product cycles, companies are desperate to find the magic key to innovation. In the search for a system, workers are sent to innovation workshops where they play with Legos to unleash their creativity. Companies are hiring chief innovation officers or opening innovation centers where managers brainstorm, free associate, and “ideate” surrounded by boxes of Legos.
Jobs is scornful of such ideas. At Apple there is no system to harness “innovation.” When asked by Rob Walker, a New York Times reporter, if he ever consciously thinks about innovation, Jobs responded: “No. We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative! Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!’” Jobs said trying to systemize innovation is “like somebody who’s not cool trying to be cool. It’s painful to watch. . . . It’s like watching Michael Dell try to dance. Painful.”3
Nonetheless, Jobs has an almost mystical reverence for innovation. As described earlier, his heroes are some of industry’s greatest inventors and entrepreneurs: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Edwin Land. Former CEO Sculley wrote that Jobs often spoke of Land. “Steve lionized Land, saw in him one of America’s greatest inventors. It was beyond his belief that Polaroid ousted Land after the only major failure in Land’s career— Polavision, an instant movie system that failed to compete against videotape recording and resulted in a near $70 million write-off in 1979. ‘All he did was blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him,’ Steve told me with great disgust.”4
Sculley recalled a trip he and Jobs took to see Land after he was kicked out of Polaroid. “He had his own lab on the Charles River in Cambridge,” Sculley recalled. “It was a fascinating afternoon because we were sitting in this big conference room with