Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [65]
Jobs has also developed his own share of innovative business models. Take the iTunes music store. Until Jobs persuaded the music labels to try selling songs individually for 99 cents, no one had found a formula for selling music online to compete with the illegal file-sharing networks. Since then, the iTunes music store has become the Dell of digital music.
And then there are Apple’s retail stores, which are so unlike anything else in retailing, they’ve been called “experiential innovation.” Modern retailing is all about the shopping experience, and Apple’s low-key, friendly stores have added a new dimension to the experience of shopping for a computer (more on this later in the chapter).
Where Does the Innovation Come From?
Jobs appears to have an innate talent for innovation. It’s as though ideas occur to him in a flash, a bolt from the blue. The lightbulb goes on, and suddenly there’s a new Apple product.
It’s not quite like that. That’s not to say there are no flashes of inspiration, but many of Jobs’s products come from the usual sources: studying the market and the industry, seeing what new technologies are coming down the pike and how they might be used. “The system is that there is no system,” Jobs told Business Week in 2004. “That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.”
He continued, “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”10
Part of the process is Apple’s overall corporate strategy: What markets does it target, and how does it target them? Part of it is keeping abreast of new technology developments and being receptive to new ideas, especially outside the company. Part of it is about being creative, and always learning. Part of it is about being flexible, and a willingness to ditch long-held notions. Part of it is about being customer-centric. And a lot of it is trying to find the simplest, most elegant solution through an iterative, generate-and-test design process. Innovation at Apple is largely about shaping technology to the customer’s needs, not trying to force the user to adapt to the technology.
Jobs’s Innovation Strategy: The Digital Hub
The keynote speech Jobs gave at Macworld in San Francisco in January 2001 is remembered for the “one more thing” surprise ending: Jobs dropped the “i” from iCEO and became Apple’s full-time leader. But earlier in his speech, he laid out Apple’s vision—a vision that would inspire more than a decade’s worth of innovation at Apple, and would shape almost everything the company did, from the iPod to its retail stores and even its advertising.
The digital hub strategy is possibly the most important thing Jobs has laid out in a keynote speech. The idea, which seems somewhat obvious now, had far-reaching implications in almost everything Apple did. It shows how adherence to a simple, well-articulated idea can successfully guide corporate strategy and influence everything from the development of products to the layout of retail stores.
Clean-shaven and dressed in a black turtleneck and blue jeans, Jobs began his speech by painting a rather bleak picture of the computer industry. He noted that the year 2000 had been a difficult year for Apple and the computer business as a whole. (In March 2000, the dot-com bubble began to burst, and purchases of computer equipment fell off a cliff.) Jobs showed the audience a slide of a gravestone inscribed with Beloved PC, 1976-2000, R.I.P.
Jobs noted that many people in the computer industry were worried that