Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [94]
In the early days, controlling the whole widget gave Apple an advantage in stability and ease of use, but it was soon erased by the economies of scale that came with the commoditization of the PC industry. Price and performance became more important than integration and ease of use, and Apple came close to extinction in the late nineties as Microsoft grew to dominance.
But the PC industry is changing. There’s a new era opening up that has the potential to dwarf the size and scope of the productivity era of the last thirty years. Jobs’s third golden age of the PC—the era of the digital lifestyle—has dawned. It’s marked by post-PC gadgets and communication devices: smartphones and video players, digital cameras, set-top boxes, and Net-connected game consoles.
The pundits are obsessed with the old Apple-versus-Microsoft battle for the workplace. But Jobs conceded that to Microsoft a decade ago. “The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations,” he told Time. “The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.”12 Jobs has got his eye on the exploding digital lifestyle market—and the iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV are digital entertainment devices. In this market, consumers want devices that are well designed and easy to use, and work in harmony. Nowadays, hardware companies must get into software, and vice versa.
Owning the whole widget is why no other company has been able to build an iPod killer. Most rivals focus on the hardware—the gadget—but the secret sauce is the seamless blend of hardware, software, and services.
Now Microsoft has two whole-widget products—the Xbox and Zune—and the consumer electronics industry is getting heavily into software. Jobs has stayed the same; the world is changing around him. “My, how times have changed,” wrote Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal. “Now, with computers, the Web and consumer electronics all merging and blurring, Apple is looking more like a role model than an object of pity.”13 The things Jobs cares about—design, ease of use, good advertising—are right in the sweet spot of the new computer industry.
“Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget,” Jobs told Time. “Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing. It turns out that that, in my opinion, is Apple’s greatest strategic advantage. We didn’t have a plan, so it looked like this was a tremendous deficit. But with a plan, it’s Apple’s core strategic advantage, if you believe that there’s still room for innovation in this industry, which I do, because Apple can innovate faster than anyone else.”14
Jobs was thirty years ahead of his time. The values he brought to the early PC market—design, marketing, ease of use—were the wrong values. The growth of the early PC market was in selling to corporations, which valued price above elegance and standardization over ease of use. But the growth market is now digital entertainment and home consumers, who want digital entertainment, communication, creativity—three areas that play to Jobs’s strengths. “The great thing is that Apple’s DNA hasn’t changed,” Jobs said. “The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it’s not like we’re having to cross the river to go some where else; the other side of the river is coming to us.” 15
In a consumer market, design, reliability, simplicity, good marketing, and elegant packaging are key assets. It’s coming full circle—the company that does it all is the one best positioned to lead.
“It seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry,” Steve Jobs told Rolling Stone in 1994. “It hasn’t happened that often.”
Chapter 9
Steve Jobs’s Battle with Cancer
On August 1, 2004, Steve Jobs sent a rare companywide memo to Apple employees. “I have some personal news that I need to share with you,” he wrote, “and I wanted you to hear it directly from me.” Jobs rarely sent memos to the