Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [68]
Apple’s R&D spending is like the old distinction between pure science and applied science. Pure science is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Applied science is the application of science to particular problems. Of course, pure science is extremely important, and will sometimes lead to the kind of fundamental breakthroughs that applied scientists don’t even look at. But applied science, like engineering, is focused on more practical, pressing problems. The former head of Microsoft’s research labs, Nathan Myhrvold, gained fame for academic papers he wrote about dinosaurs. He may have contributed to the field of paleontology, but did Microsoft invent the iPod?
Jobs uses as his inspiration Hewlett-Packard, one of the first Silicon Valley companies and one that has always had a strong engineering culture—it was driven by engineers who made products. “The older I get, the more I’m convinced that motives make so much difference,” Jobs said. “HP’s primary goal was to make great products. And our primary goal here is to make the world’s best PCs—not to be the biggest or the richest.” Jobs said Apple has a second goal, which is to make a profit—both to make money but also to keep making products. “For a time,” Jobs said, “those goals got flipped at Apple, and that subtle change made all the difference. When I got back, we had to make it a product company again.”14
The Seer—and Stealer
Jobs keeps his eyes peeled for promising new technologies, or existing technologies that Apple can improve, like early MP3 players or, lately, smartphones. He has a reputation as a seer: he seems to have a magical ability to peer into the future and know before anyone else what consumers want. Jobs downplays his reputation as an oracle: “You can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going,” he told Rolling Stone. “And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.”15
Jobs has said he looks for “vectors going in time”—what new technologies are coming to market, which ones are ending their run. “You try to spot those things and how they’re going to be changing over time and which horses you want to ride at any point in time,” Jobs said. “You can’t be too far ahead, but you have to be far enough ahead, because it takes time to implement. So you have to intercept a moving train.”16
USB is a good example. Intel invented the now-ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus (USB), and Apple was one of the first PC companies to build it into its computers. Jobs recognized its consumer-friendly potential: it wasn’t fast, but it was plug-and-play, and it provided power to devices, eliminating an extra wire and power brick. It seems unremarkable now that USB is wildly popular, but Apple was one of the first companies to adopt it—and it may have never reached critical mass if it hadn’t.
Apple’s adoption of USB is a good illustration that innovation can—and often does—come from outside the company. There’s a long list of technologies that weren’t developed at Apple but that Jobs or his engineers recognized had innovative potential. WiFi wireless networking, developed by Lucent and Agere, didn’t get much traction until Apple used it across its entire line of computers and built it into its Airport base stations, ushering in the era of wireless laptops.
Some observers note that innovation at Apple has less to do with inventing brand-new technologies than taking existing technologies and making them easy to use. Jobs takes technologies out of the lab and puts them in the hands of ordinary users.
The first and best example is the graphical user interface, which Jobs first spotted