Millions try to learn business, but rarely does the world produce individuals that business learns a volume of lessons from. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc and one of the greatest businessmen-innovators to have ever lived, died at the age of 56 on October 5 after a long battle with cancer. His legacy will live not only in the industries he profoundly impacted (technology — both software and hardware, music, animation, telecom, design, etc) and the products that the tech-world shall churn out in the future, but also through his ideas on business and personal philosophy.
This time’s Weekend Reading column is dedicated to Steve.
Read about a list of 10 important products that Steve Jobs helped bring to the world. Often dismissed as an elite technologist who made i-prefixed devices that aren’t exactly a survival necessity, few people are aware that back in 1977, Steve Jobs along with friend Steve Wozniak produced the world’s first packaged-and-ready-to-use personal computer, replacing homemade patch-up jobs that only hobbyists used to put together until then.
“Launched in June 1977, the Apple II was the first successful mass-market PC. Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II, and it changed computing around the world. The first Apple II had specs you would laugh at now, but they were quite good for the time: a 1-MHz processor, 4KB of RAM and an audio cassette interface for programs and data storage. The machine had an external 5.25-inch floppy disk drive as well. The Apple II and its successors would later pave the way for business and consumer PCs.”
Even fewer people know that by buying out and leading Pixar Animation Studios from mid-eighties to the nineties, Jobs helped turn the company into one of Hollywood’s most successful movie studios, which not only produced an unbeaten streak of box-office hits and award winners, but also lay at the forefront of cutting-edge technology that animation had ever known. Daniel Terdiman writes on CNET,
“In the 1990s, Pixar was “not the only working on for movies,” said David Cohen, an editor at Variety. But “they were the ones that succeeded and showed everybody how to do it, both technologically and creatively, and the extent that changed the entertainment landscape is hard to overstate.””
Seven-time Tour de France winner cyclist Lance Armstrong — who has had his own personal history of achieving the unthinkable while battling cancer — wrote about his personal interactions with Steve Jobs in a column on ESPN.com. He describes his first meeting with Steve Jobs,
“It was an unforgettable two hours. Steve was a very tough guy, a tough character, ridiculously smart, very interested in the science of computers and the science of his disease. (I remember he ate a strictly vegan diet. I mean, strict. Looked awful.) You knew you were in the company of genius. You knew you were with a person who would be hard to get to know. He was, and forever will be, an enigma. You knew it would take a lot of lunches, a lot of conversation, a lot of emails to really crack this person’s shell. I respected that.”
While most businessmen settle at the “it’s good enough so let’s launch it” milestone for their products, Jobs was known to be maniacally obsessed with getting every bit of the product and the user experience around it perfect. My own first Apple acquisition was an iPod Touch, which came in the trademark little plastic box lined with white paper. Each component of the iPod — from the player itself to the earphones, cable, manuals and legal leaflet — was placed in that exact sequence which I as a user would have expected to find as I opened the box for the first time. Plastic wrappings around the components had thoughtfully-carved flaps that made their removal delightfully easy and intuitive. In contrast, non-Apple gadgets I had used always came in packaging that required much breaking, scissoring and effort. The iPod itself sought to celebrate the spirit of music using the same elements that hardcore music connoisseurs value. As an abnormally obsessive collector of CDs, tapes and LP records who likes to catalogue his treasure alphabetically on custom-made wooden shelves, I was thrilled to find that the iPod allowed me to archive my digital music in perfect order complete with high-resolution CD cover-art and mimic the same music library-like feeling of real life.
Jobs and Apple achieved this attention to detail by maintaining tight control over his products, from their inception and design in Apple’s offices to the moments that the end-users spent in unpacking it.
Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering at Google recalls an anecdote in an old blog post. One holy Sunday morning in 2008, he received a call from Jobs with the following demand from the other end,
“I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
His controlling obsession however had waned down during his second innings at Apple compared to his 1980s’ stint.
In a New Yorker article titled ‘How Steve Jobs changed’, James Surowiecki writes about the 1980s’ Steve Jobs,
“Jobss vision required Apple to control every part of the user experience, and to make everything it possibly could itself. Its hardware was proprietary: the company had its own Mac factory and favored unique cables, disk drives, and power cords, rather than standardized ones. Its software was proprietary, too: if you wanted to run Apple software, you needed to own an Apple computer.”
He contrasts this with Jobs post-1996,
Take the iPod. The old Jobs might well have insisted that the iPod play only songs encoded in Apples favored digital format, the A.A.C. This would have allowed Apple to control the user experience, but it would also have limited the iPod market, since millions of people already had MP3s. So Apple made the iPod MP3-compatible.
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The iPhone signalled a further loosening of the reins. Although Apple makes the phone and the operating system itself, and although every app is sold through the App Store, the system is far more open than the Mac ever was: there are more than four hundred thousand iPhone apps written by outside developers.
Forbes ran an article about the top ten lessons the world could learn from Steve Jobs. Of all the lessons, the following one is most interesting in the management education and practice context,
“There is a school of thought in management theory that if youre in the consumer-facing space building products and services youve got to listen to your customer. Steve Jobs was one of the first businessmen to say that was a waste of time. The customers today dont always know what they want, especially if its something theyve never seen, heard, or touched before.”
However, comparisons with inventor/scientists of the likes of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein have sparked off a debate whether Steve Jobs could indeed be called an ‘inventor’ or just an excellent ‘innovator’ in the league of Henry Ford and Walt Disney.
A CNN article notes a number of similarities between the management styles of Edison and Steve Jobs. According to the article, Edison was personally involved in the day-to-day activities of invention unlike Jobs, who was instead better at identifying and pushing a team of people to create great things. However, there were similarities too,
“At the start of his electric light research Edison described his vision for an entire electric light and power system and then used the knowledge of decades of research on incandescent lamps and generators to create the first viable incandescent lamp and the entire electric light and power system that made it commercially viable.
Similarly, before developing the Macintosh computer, Jobs envisioned how two decades of work on graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse could transform the way people used computers, and also how the development of touchscreens and miniaturization could be transformed into the smartphone.”
With Jobs’ death, the date of release of his only official biography has been advanced by a month. The biography will now be released on October 24th instead of the earlier November 21. I leave you with links to a few more of the best books that serve to illustrate his life and work.
- All About Steve: The Story of Steve Jobs and Apple from the Pages of Fortune
- iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business
- Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple
Those of you who haven’t watched it yet, here is a link to the legendary Commencement Speech by Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford University in 2005.