I just finished reading the biography
of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson. I am not proud to say that it is the
first biography book I ever read in my life. But I was curious to know about
the man that brought significant changes in my life through the products he
created. Yes I am already a fan of Apple products (iPod, iPhone, Macbook, iPad,
Time Capsule) so maybe my summary is a little bit biased but maybe not.
Nevertheless, I discovered that Steve Jobs was, in the opinion of most of the
people interviewed in that book, an asshole (sometimes an inspiring asshole) to
others but a genius in delivering products that conquer the heart of consumers.
I am going to emphasize the genius part and quickly go over the asshole part.
Steve Jobs: an asshole
but a genius
An Executive Summary of
the biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson
An asshole
Steve Jobs’s
intense personality encouraged a binary view of the world. For him a person was
either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit. Colleagues
referred to the hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other,
sometimes on the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food.
When VLSI
Technologies was having trouble delivering enough chips on time to Apple, Jobs
stormed in to a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless
assholes.” The company ended getting the chips to Apple on time and its
executives made jackets that boasted on the back, “Team FDA.”
Steve
attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training
that nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism. Unfortunately his Zen
training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm or inner serenity. He made
a point of being brutally honest. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet
also, to use the technical tern, an asshole at times.
Steve Jobs
was no doubt an asshole but as somebody said “It is the prerogative of great
men to have great defects”…
A genius
Steve Jobs
was also indeed a creative and visionary entrepreneur who revolutionized six
industries: personal computers (Macintosh), animated movies (Pixar and Toy
story), music (iPod), phones (iPhone), tablet computing (iPad), and digital
publishing (iPad). You might even add a seventh, retail stores (Apple Store),
which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine.
Apple’s
success is based on the following business strategy:
1.
Maintain
a simple product portfolio: Apple’s job was to make four great products: a
Desktop and Portable for the Consumer and Pro market.
2.
Create
consecutive home run products: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.
3.
Promote
those hit products with terrific marketing. We all remember the advertising for
the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad.
4.
One
P&L for the company: Apple does not have divisions with their own P&L.
It runs one P&L for the company.
Based on
that, Steve Jobs launched a series of products over three decades that transformed
whole industries and wholes lives of people (at least some group of people):
1.
The Apple II, launched in 1977, which was the first personal
computer that was not just for hobbyists
2.
The Macintosh, introduced in 1984, which began the
home computer revolution
and popularized graphical user interfaces (GUI).
3.
Toy Story and other Pixar
blockbusters, which
opened the miracle of digital animation.
4.
Apple stores, which reinvented the role of a store in
defining a brand. Steve Jobs personally selected the grey-blue
Pietra Serena sandstone (that comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone,
outside of Florence, Italy) of the Apple store’s floor. Manhattan’s Fifth
Avenue store, which opened in 2006, grosses more in square foot than any other
store in the world. It also grosses more in total – absolute dollars, not just
per square foot – than any store in New York. That includes Saks and
Bloomingdales’s.
5.
The iPod, launched in November 2001, which
changed the way we consume music and transformed the music business. In January 2007
iPod sales were half of Apple’s revenues. The iPod began the transformation of
Apple from being a computer maker into being the world’s most valuable company.
6.
The iTunes Store, which saved the music industry. As the
iTunes Store sold videos, apps, and subscriptions, it built up a database of
225 million active users by June 2011, which positioned Apple for the next age of digital
commerce.
7.
The iPhone went on sale at the end of June 2007
at a cost of $500, the most expensive phone in the world. The iPhone turned
mobile phones into music, photography, video, email, and web devices.
8.
The App Store, which spawned a new
content-creation industry. The App Store created a new industry overnight. In dorm rooms
and garages and at major media companies, entrepreneurs invented new apps.
9.
The iPad, launched in May 2010, started tablet
computing and offered a platform for digital newspapers, magazines,
books, and videos. The iPad was not just the device per se, but about what you
could do with it. Indeed its success came not just from the beauty of the
hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge
in all sort of delightful activities. You could track your stocks, watch
movies, read books and magazines, catch up the news, play games. With the iPad
and its App Store, he began to transform all media. From publishing to
journalism to television and movies. In less than a month Apple sold one
million iPads. That was twice as fast as it took the iPhone to reach that mark.
By March 2011, nine months after its release, fifteen million had been sold. By
some measures, it became the most successful consumer product launch in
history.
10.
iCloud, which demoted the computer from its
central role in managing our content and left all of our devices sync
seamlessly.
11.
And
Apple
itself, which Jobs considered his greatest creation, a place where imagination
was nurtured, applied, and executed in ways to connect creativity with
technology. So he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined
with remarkable feats of engineering. At most other companies, engineering tends
to drive design. The engineers set forth their specifications and requirements,
and the product designers then come up with cases and shells that will accommodate
them. For Jobs, the process tended to work the other way. Jobs approved the
design of the case of the original Macintosh, and the engineers had to make
their boards and components fit. Design dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.
Great artist like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at
science. Steve Jobs simply created a
corporation crammed with A players.
But most of
all Steve Jobs did all those things because he had a very special personality,
very strong skills, and a unique philosophy:
A Product Person
He had a hypnotizing
salesmanship; unlike any other CEO, he was totally engaged with the product, he
was a product person and he was involved in every aspect of the business:
naming (iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPad), design, packaging (Steve understood that
people do judge a book by its cover – and therefore made sure all the trappings
and packaging of Apple signaled that there was a beautiful gem inside. Whether
it’s an iPod Mini or a MacBook Pro, Apple customers know the feeling of opening
up the well-crafted box and finding the product nested in an inviting fashion),
what glass strength to use for the iPhone, even the font size of the brand logo
such as iPhone 3GS, including whether the letter should be capitalized and
italicized. Steve Jobs is listed as one of the inventors for 212 different
Apple patents in the United States as of the beginning of 2011.
He had an
uncanny ability to cook gadgets that we did not know we needed, but then
suddenly can’t live without. “Some people say, “Give the customers what they
want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going
to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers
what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!” People don’t know
what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on
market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page”.
End-to End Integration
The core of
Apple’s philosophy, from the original Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad a
generation later, was end-to-end integration of hardware and software. Indeed,
Steve Jobs’s quest for perfection led to his compulsion for Apple to have
end-to-end control of every product that it made. “We’re the only company that
owns the whole widget – the hardware, the software and the operating system. We
can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things the
other guys can’t do”
This
instinct for integrated systems put him squarely on one side of the most
fundamental divide in the digital world: open versus closed. In the short run, that approach did not help
gain market share but in the longer run, there proved to be some advantages to
Jobs’s model. Even with a small market share, Apple was able to maintain a huge
profit margin while other computer makers were commoditized. In 2010, for
example, Apple had just 7% of the revenue in the personal computer market, but
it grabbed 35% of the operating profit. In
May 2000 Apple’s market value was one twentieth that of Microsoft. In May 2010
Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technological company,
and by September 2011 it was worth 70% more than Microsoft. In the first
quarter of 2011 the market for Windows PCs shrank by 1%, while the market for
Macs grew 28%.
Design: Simplify!
Simplicity
is the ultimate sophistication. Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes
from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. For example, to have no screws
on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so
complex. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be
able to get rid of the parts that are not essentials.
Jobs even
refused to wear an oxygen mask when he was hospitalized for cancer treatment
because he hated the design. He also hated the oxygen monitor they put on his
finger. He even suggested ways it could be designed more simply.
There are no
formal design reviews within Apple, so there are no huge decision points. Instead,
the decisions are made fluid. Since they iterate every day and never have
dumb-ass presentations, they don’t run into major disagreements. One of the
first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. “People
would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage,
to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who
know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
Goodbye Steve:
In August 2011, right before he
stepped down as CEO, the enterprise Steve Jobs started in his parents’ garage
became the world’s most valuable company. He did not invent many things
outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways
that invented the future.
