You've no doubt heard about the passing of Steve Jobs, legendary former CEO of Apple Inc. and the architect of that company's return from near obscurity to--depending on the day--literally the most valuable company in the world.

His "turnaround job" is, by all measurements, a singular feat, accomplished by a unique individual. What, exactly, will happen to Apple now is hard to know. I think the company is in extremely competent hands in its current management, but whether or not it will continue to innovate and grow and change the world seems a bit less certain with the all-too-early passing of its iconic Pied Piper.

I remember the first notes Jobs played on his magical flute upon his return to Apple--Donna Ladd and I were sitting in the audience of the 1997 keynote at Boston Macworld during which Steve (we all called him Steve, eventually) made his triumphant return.

At the time, Steve wasn't yet CEO of Apple (he told us then that the company was going to "search" for a CEO... riiight ...) but he was announcing that he had replaced all but two members of the board of directors and was just inking a deal with Microsoft to settle long-standing patent disputes and invest $150 million of Microsoft's money in Apple.

(Note: Microsoft's money didn't "save" Apple, which was considered a hostile-takeover target because of its relatively large cash reserves. The bigger deal was Microsoft's public commitment to five more years of Microsoft Office for the Mac platform, which was important for Apple to maintain share in the creative departments of larger corporations. The deal also helped Microsoft's case with the U.S. Department of Justice that it had competition in the personal computing sector.)

It was a crazy time for Apple fans. I was bought into the "Mac thing"--I like to joke that I was one of the top five authors of Macintosh computing books at the time because there were only four of us left. (Donna was into Macs, too, and as an education writer for MacHome magazine, she was a huge proponent of the eMate 300, a fabulous Newton OS-based device that Steve summarily killed.

Like a lot of Mac people, we saw ourselves as outsiders and iconoclasts trying to hold on to something that was important to us--the freedom to use these tools that we felt made us more productive and creative. Sure, not every application was available for the Mac--and models like the Apple Performa 630 weren't exactly shining beacons pointing a new way to the future--but we were still anchored in a universe of excitement and innovation and creation that revolved around Apple.

And then Steve came back.

The business case study is legendary--first, he killed off product lines that weren't core, even if they were appealing, like the star-crossed Newton PDA and the little eMate clamshell. (Still, Steve saw inspiration in those clever products, and he recycled some of the best of those ideas, in later devices such as candy-colored iBooks, PDA-killing iPhones and ultra-portable Macbook Airs.)

He shrank the company to save it--telling us all that he was going to have to bring revenues down to about $6 billion while he re-focused the company like a laser on four product areas--consumer desktop, consumer portable, pro desktop and pro portable. To this day, Apple follows essentially this model in its Mac line, which, by the way, continues to grow market share, despite its higher prices and the Great Recession.

Within months of his return, Steve reported something remarkable--a profit. His plan was working. Even more than that, he was telling us folks at these Macworld keynotes (aka "SteveNotes") not only about the amazing products that he was selling, but also walking us through the fiscal success that the company was having and the simple plan he had for building the company, changing industries, and serving more and more customers. In some ways, Steve treated his customers as more important than his shareholders; an attitude that is all too infrequent in today's corporate "America."

As an Apple watcher, I've got to mention the bad with the good. Steve built profits by off-shoring all of Apple's manufacturing; I remember visiting the Fountain, Colo., Apple plant in the late 1990s and meeting the proud workers there making Apple laptops. (It was a cool company even back then, and those folks were making some awesome laptops.) Well-documented problems at Apple's Chinese subcontractor in recent years include questionable conditions and even suicides by workers.

While many of those U.S. manufacturing jobs at Apple may have been replaced with the relatively high-end service jobs at Apple Retail Stores, it's not the same folks, and I'm disheartened when I turn over an Apple box and see "Designed in California; Assembled in China." How fabulous would it be to see "USA" on those products again? Apple can do better, and I'd love to see them innovate at re-patriating manufacturing jobs.

In some ways, Apple is the quintessential American company of the early 21st century with fewer manufacturing jobs and more service jobs. Steve Jobs and Apple are widely and roundly praised for their capitalistic successes by the likes of Rush Limbaugh while, at the same time, offering employees generous same-sex benefits and, now, in CEO Tim Cook, fielding perhaps the most prominent gay executive in the country (and, another point of pride, southern-raised in Alabama).

In other ways, the company has room to improve. The company's nearly all-white board has one woman, Andrea Jung of Avon; the admittedly accomplished executive leadership is all male and white, something that Steve's notoriously cantankerous style and personal friendships may have affected.

Still, Apple is a remarkable story of grabbing the future, telling a compelling story, and believing in your values and your ideas.

Many different pearls of Jobsian wisdom are floating around in these days of tribute, but the one that sticks with me comes 
from the remarkable "Think Different" ad Apple debuted in the months after that keynote in Boston.

The last line goes like this: "Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world ... are the ones who DO."

Don't be afraid to be a little crazy, to challenge the status quo, to change the world.

And always, always ... Think Different.

Previous Comments

ID

165198

Comment

Steve Jobs was that 1%. Will never forget playing on the Mac 512 when I was barely 4-years-old and thinking "it can never get better than this." How right I was.

Author

jbreland

Date

2011-10-16T19:43:47-06:00