Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [66]
The PC’s first golden age, the age of productivity, started around 1980, with the invention of the spreadsheet, word processing, and desktop publishing. The golden age of productivity lasted almost fifteen years and drove the industry, Jobs said as he paced the Macworld stage. Then in the mid-1990s, the second golden age of the PC, the age of the Internet, began. “The Internet propelled the PC both in business and personal uses to new heights,” Jobs noted.
But now, the computer was entering its third great age: the age of digital lifestyle, which was driven by an explosion of digital devices, Jobs said. He noted that everyone has cell phones, DVD players, and digital cameras. “We are living in a digital lifestyle with an explosion of digital devices,” he said. “It’s huge.”
Most important, the computer was not peripheral to this digital lifestyle, Jobs argued, but at the very center of it. The computer was the “digital hub,” the central docking station for all the digital devices. And hooking digital devices to the computer enhanced them: the computer loaded music with an MP3 player, or edited video shot with a digital camcorder.
Jobs explained that he first began to understand the idea of a digital hub after Apple had developed iMovie, a video editing application. The iMovie application allows raw camcorder footage to be edited on the computer, which makes the camcorder much more valuable than it is alone. “It makes your camcorder worth ten times as much because you can convert raw footage into an incredible movie with transitions, cross dissolves, credits, soundtracks,” Jobs said. “You can convert raw footage that you’d normally never look at again on your camcorder into an incredibly emotional piece of communication. Professional. Personal. It’s amazing . . . it has ten times as much value to you.”
This all seems obvious now, but at the time, few people were using their computers for such tasks, and it definitely wasn’t mainstream. Jobs wasn’t alone in recognizing that the computer was becoming a lifestyle device. Bill Gates had discussed the “digital lifestyle” the same week during his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Intel CEO Craig Barrett was also giving speeches noting that the computer is “really the center of the digital world.”
But Jobs’s articulation amounted to a mission statement for Apple. The “digital hub” was the recognition of a major trend in the computer industry and a prescription for Apple’s place in it. It allowed him to look at emerging technologies and consumer behavior and formulate appropriate product strategies.
Products as Gravitational Force
Part of the process at Apple is to focus on products, the end goal that guides and informs innovation. Wanton innovation is wasteful. There must be a direction, something to pull it all together. Some Silicon Valley companies develop new technologies and then go in search of problems for those technologies to solve. Take the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. The bubble was defined by this kind of thinking. It was a carnival of worthless innovation—half-baked business ideas pumped into vast money-burning concerns in a misguided attempt to get big quick and beat the competition. Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet food over the Net, or built giant warehouses for delivering groceries by van, before there was any inkling customers wanted to shop this way. And it turns out they didn’t. No one wanted to get their groceries delivered from Webvan’s automated warehouses. The Internet bubble burst, taking with it businesses that had developed solutions to problems that didn’t exist.
“You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company,” Jobs said. “Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together.”11
Jobs notes that before he returned, Apple had lost