Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [85]
“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want to see his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers,” wrote Dan Farber, ZDNet’s editor in chief. “It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song.”1
Jobs is a control freak extraordinaire. He controls Apple’s software, hardware, and design. He controls Apple’s marketing and online services. He controls every aspect of the organization’s functioning, from the food the employees eat to how much they can tell their families about their work, which is pretty much nothing.
Jobs’s controlling tendencies go all the way back.
In 1984, Steve Jobs’s baby, the first Macintosh computer, shipped without an internal cooling fan. The sound of a fan drove Jobs nuts, so he insisted the Mac didn’t have one, even though his engineers strenuously objected (and even sneaked fans into later models without his knowledge). To prevent their machines from overheating, customers bought a “Mac chimney”—a cardboard stovepipe designed to be placed on top of the machine and draw heat up and out by convection. The chimney looked preposterous—it looked like a dunce’s cap—but it prevented the machines from melting down.
Jobs is a no-compromise perfectionist, a quality that has led him and the companies he’s founded to pursue the same unusual modus operandi: maintain tight control over hardware, software, and the services they access. From the get-go, Jobs has always closed down his machines. From the first Mac to the latest iPhone, Jobs’s systems have always been sealed shut to prevent consumers from meddling and modifying them. Even his software is difficult to adapt.
This approach is very unusual in an industry dominated by hackers and engineers who like to personalize their technology. In fact, it’s been widely regarded as a crippling liability in the Microsoft-dominated era of cut-price commodity hardware. But now consumers want well-made, easy-to-use devices for digital music, photography, and video. Jobs’s insistence on controlling “the whole widget” is the new mantra in the technology industry. Even Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who pioneered the commodity approach, is switching gears and emulating Jobs’s line of attack. Gates is starting to build hardware as well as software—with Zune and the Xbox at the heart of Microsoft’s own “digital hub.” Controlling the whole widget may have been the wrong model for the last thirty years, but it is the right model for the next thirty—the digital lifestyle age.
In this new era, Hollywood and the music industry are supplementing CDs and DVDs with Internet delivery of music and movies, and consumers want easy-to-use entertainment appliances like the iPod to play them on. It’s Steve Jobs’s model that will deliver them. Apple’s trump card is that it is able to make its own software, from the Mac operating system to applications such as iPhoto and iTunes.
Jobs as a Control Freak
Before Jobs returned to Apple, the company was famously laid-back. Employees arrived late and left early. They lounged around the grassy central courtyard, playing hacky-sack or throwing Frisbees to their dogs. But Jobs soon imposed new rigor and new rules. Smoking and dogs were barred, and the company had a renewed sense of urgency and industry.
Some have suggested that Jobs keeps tight control at Apple to avoid being ousted again. The last time he ceded control to his supposed friend and ally, John Sculley, Sculley had him expelled from the company. Perhaps, some have speculated, Jobs’s controlling tendencies are a