On Succeeding Steve Jobs
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Reminds me of 'The Tablet' (http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/the_tablet) and others to just how different Gruber is from other tech writers, even apple-related-tech writers like Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, etc. He throughly thinks about the topic with tremendous insight and unique points of view.
This post is an interesting view on the world of tech, finance and journalism.
Glancing over the archive, imho Gruber's best posts in the last few months have been his iPad 2 review (custom benchmarks!); taking All Things D, Engadget, et al. to task for weak attribution; and taking non-Apple tablet reviews to task for grading on a curve.
Edit:
The above is in regards to Ive being a private person and not liking the public speaking gig. Of course for all we know Steve is a private person and may not like the public speaking gig but he does it because it's a necessary function.
The strongest argument for Ive of course is that what set's Apple apart from other companies is that it's design/product driven. See Steve's comments re: what happens when The Sales Guy ends up running the whole show.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf200410...
Obviously you can say "well Phil is The Sales Guy" (which is a bit of a dodge) and also that "Tim took over for Steve when he was totally unable to work" which is at least partially true (was he really doing everything Steve did?). So maybe Tim Cook can by a product visionary. Maybe Jon Ive can't.
But if you start from this one small and very arguable given that Steve wants Apple to be led by a product visionary and not the sales/operations guy that leads you to Jon Ive being the best candidate. There's other evidence too of course, reports are the two are quite close on Apple campus although I imagine Tim Cook would qualify based on that criteria as well.
This idea that Steve can't possibly share the spotlight with Ive is absurd.
It reminds me a bit of "Tactics of Mistake" -- an old SF novel by Gordon Dickson. No ONE person can replace Steve, but maybe two or three can.
The idea that Steve Jobs can't be replaced by a single person is based on the requirement that Apple would have to continue on the exact same way. It won't. When a new CEO is appointed, it will be more of a "new normal".
And I think took much is made of the "waking up and Steve is totally gone" scenario despite health issues. More likely (and hopefully for his health) it will be Steve voluntarily giving up more and more control as the successor is tried out. We may be seeing some of that now, although I would say wait for a major product launch without him.
That is how Gates did it when Ballmer took over Gates was still heavily involved doing what he had always done.
This is ... not obviously a recommendation.
I'd really love to see him more often in keynotes. I think he has a way of grabbing the audience's attention that's on par with Steve Jobs, but in a totally different way. It's like seeing a modest and friendly genius talking about his work, it totally sucks you in. <3
Jobs can't really be replaced, can he? Certainly Apple will continue to make heaps of money for the forseeable future, but without Jobs, the company will lose its essential nature. How can it not?
He probably won't be replaced (at least not completely by one person) but -- and this again ties back to the Apple University effort -- it will be even more impressive if the crux of what makes Jobs/Apple great is successfully imprinted on dozens or hundreds of Apple execs and engineers.
It's not just the decisions that Jobs makes that are important, but the fact that a decision coming from Jobs means something to every employee at Apple.
Ive+Forstall are within a couple of orders of magnitude from Jobs (the only people who are even in the neighborhood of reverence). But the fact that they're two people, with two egos will probably mean that the two together as the visionary aspects of the company won't be as unified as a single Jobs.
Essentially, Apple is a one product company. That product is "the mac". The "mac" comes in the form of a combination of software and hardware. OS X on Macintoshes is the past, iOS on iDevices is the future. All of that is Forstall (if I'm understanding things right.) And even then, the hardware is merely the box for the software. They make a very great box.
But Forstall is the "new jobs" in that regard. Ive can demand that it have fewer buttons, and Schiller can demand that marketing be on message, and Forstall has to listen to them, and if he doesn't then Cook should have their backs. Cook is thus well placed to be the "vision guy" (and yes, I think that is a legitimate description and that he'd be just as good as jobs at it) whose got his finger on the daily operations but also is looking 5, 10 & 15 years into the future.
Apple University is the glue that holds these four guys together and keeps them on the same page. Plus, of course, The Writings of The Chairman from Jobs over the years.
In fact, I would bet good money that there literally is a book within Apple, that probably only has a dozen or fewer copies, written by Jobs about the Apple Way and presenting his vision for the Apple Way. In a way, his living will to the future.
I think this book is Apple's equivalent to Cokes "secret formula", only Apple doesn't trumpet that they have a secret formula, they keep even the existence of it secret.
It depends on your definition of "product", but most would classify the iPhone as a different category of product from a mac, not just a different product. As different as a minicomputer is from a desktop. I think before long we'll see Apple launch yet another new category.
Even if we forget the special talents of Steve Jobs, most companies go downhill without their founder/s. Probably HP most famously. It's partly that others lack the unique clout of founder, as kenjackson says. In addition, founders tend to be insightful, energetic and bold (else they couldn't have succeeded as founders). Employees generally don't have that crazy extreme fire, or they'd be founders themselves.
But Jobs is unique beyond that, because it's rare for even founders to create more than one dominating industry. Jobs has done it with the Apple IIe, iPod, iPhone and iPad. It's that he can see what's important; and can make it happen.
I think his design talent/taste is in addition to this, and while yet another unique talent in its own right (and related), is not quite as important.
http://www.npr.org/2010/12/30/132488837/The-Behind-The-Scene...
Apple has some amazing designers and engineers in the likes of Ive, Forstall, etc. It doesn't need to promote one of them to the top spot in order to extract the genius from them.
This is why Cook wins by default. He's a CEO Wall Street and employees will accept, and nobody's expecting him to have a Jobsian design aesthetic or artistic vision. But they're expecting his lieutenants to carry that torch while he keeps everyone and everything unified.
Jobs is a time teller. He can look up at the heavens, see the positioning of the stars in the industry and tell you exactly what the time is and for what. It's extremely rare for such time tellers to exist, and it's doubtful anyone exactly like Jobs will ever come along.
However, for any great company to stand the test of time it needs to answer the question who tells the time after the time-teller is gone? That's why a company built to last is like a clock. It is a part of the ethos and the system for it to tell the time, and that's the bit that makes all of the difference.
So, if he has spent the last decade making a clock, then Apple will survive him and the loss of Tim Cook, Ive, Schiller and almost anyone you think is crucial to Apple's success, because the ability to predict and act on those predictions would have been built into the structure of Apple itself.
I hope that made sense.
Quote of the day right there.
Wow. Just goes to show the power of self-promotion.
Sort of. :)
And conversely, there's virtually no upside for any high profile CEO to take this job. You'll get none of the credit for keeping the company on a roll, and take all the blame if it begins to turn downwards.
With that said, Apple w/o Steve Jobs and MS w/o Bill Gates just aren't the same companies. They're the Magic Johnson/Larry Bird of my generation. You have to pick one to cheer for, but you respect them both.
You know very little about Microsoft. You're right there was a difference. Jobs was surrounded by engineers and designers. Gates was surrounded by engineers. Gates top business guy was a math geek from Harvard with not much in the way of business experience (Ballmer).
If you look at Gates's colonels you'll see they were mostly engineers. Allchin was a widely respected developer prior to MS. Silverberg was a dev on the Lisa project. Rudder, Muglia, Sinofsky, Maritz, all rose through the ranks at MS in enginnering.
It wasn't until Ballmer became CEO did "suits" start moving up the ladder.
If you look at the execs that Gates surrounded himself with, you'll have a hard time finding a stronger team of executive engineers than he did. It even puts Google's current execs to shame (w/ respect to engineering horsepower).
That P&G gig is pure business, and though I think Ballmer has some understanding of technology and engineering, he doesn't have the near the depth that gates has.
I also disagree with your comments re: the executive engineers, though I'm sure you could convince me otherwise.
Executive Engineers or Designers isn't important, it is a leader with a clear vision which is needed. Gates was able to envision the future technology and push to get it done, same with Jobs. Ballmer just doesn't have that, and Microsoft has missed that over the last few years.
I also disagree with your comments re: the executive engineers
I'm not really sure what you're disagreeing with. I agree that Ballmer is no Gates. My first post in this thread was how Apple/MS aren't the same companies w/o Jobs/Gates. The follow-up poster made the point that Gates was surrounded by suits, and my point about engineering execs was that Gates wasn't surrounded by suits, but rather by engineers.
Wiki says he did maths and economics at Harvard - sounds business oriented. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer#Early_life and magna cum laude seems to mean 2A/2nd class/B/Distinction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_cum_laude#Types
Magna cum laude typically represents about the top 20% of a class, with summa cum laude often around the top 5%. Although I'm unclear why the distinction mtters in this discussion.
Although he's a maths geek in that sense, and he also went to Harvard, I think combing those two as "math geek from Harvard" suggests the theorem proving meaning.
To clarify: that wikipedia article says he graduated magna cum laude. I think to be a maths whiz, you need to be really good at it.
One of Jobs's much underrated talents was (and presumably still is) supply chain negotiation -- Apple's first billion came from a combination of brilliant negotiation (getting floppy drive mechanisms at an incredible price) and engineering (Woz created a brilliantly simple and inexpensive floppy drive controller for less than a tenth of the cost of competing equivalents).
> If Apple is to continue, it will be with a tastemaker at the top. And there are no serious candidates besides Ive.
(He remarks on Twitter[2] to Gruber, "I think we had this debate briefly over email many years ago, but nice to revive it in long form in public".)
[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/howappleworks [2] https://twitter.com/#!/aaronsw/status/94550094199783425
Can anyone raise Apple like Jobs? Probably not. Does that mean Apple is doomed? No, it doesn't. Anything beyond is speculation.
Apple needs a design-oriented CEO. Tim can balance that and make the company amazing from an operations-perspective. I don't know who the person is, but I do think he (or she) exists.
Unlike most other technology companies, design is king and it should stay that way.
Maybe somebody from Pepsi?
Where the WSJ seems to have black-box-trusted someone else's expertise, Gruber seems to depend only on facts that he has a good command of. In other words, yes, it's easy to side with Gruber here (I know I do), but the problem is that even if he has actually named the correct successor, in at least one crucial aspect of the debate, he is still wrong: it is a disservice to the transformation Apple will have to undergo to simply name the CEO. Who's next is an important fact, but it is not the most important fact.
One thing to notice here is that Apple is a huge and complicated machine, and from the perspective of the CEO who knows all of this, it must seem absolutely precious that people like Gruber, and organizations like the WSJ believe they have a firm grasp on what's going on internally. In a lot of ways, this seems to have inspired the "Hogwash" comment, and on a darker note, it suggests something about the discussion as a whole: that the important bits, the descriptive and interesting bits, the more useful bits, lie in a discussion about what Apple should decide to be post-Jobs. What goals are realistic? What can and can't it be?
The work here is paving the way for who's next, and ensuring that there are clear objectives. THIS is the discussion worth having; points about who the next CEO are subsidiary, and only useful insofar as they give us information about these important questions.
[1] Particularly with his "Hogwash" comment.
"Edwin Land was brilliant, prescient, prickly, and demanding, and hounded his employees into doing great things they might never have accomplished otherwise. That sounds like Steve Jobs. Land described photography as “the intersection of science and art.”
Jobs likes to cite Land’s quote and says that Apple’s work sits “at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology,” a location which is surely in the same neighborhood. Land demoed new Polaroid products himself at corporate events that were famous for their hypnotic effect. Jobs carries on the tradition.
And both Land and Jobs were forced out of the companies they founded, in two of the more preposterous decisions in business history."
Dell, Samsung and others could have learned something already but amazingly they keep manufacturing crappy hardware locked to crappy software, probably just a tiny bit better than before the MBP era, but overall their approach and philosophy hasn't changed.
Sony looks good compared to them, but unfortunately it's too expensive (you'd rather buy a Mac for that money, wouldn't you?) plus Sony has never been a company that designs stuff with users in mind. Their hardware can be solid looking but there is usually nothing new or exceptionally well executed for the user.
Now that's the saddest part of the story for me, rather than when and who will replace Steve Jobs.
The fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs on "medical leave" is doing a much better job of managing Apple than quite a few other tech companies where the CEO shows up each day and is in perfect health.
>I can’t see how a speculative and sketchily-sourced story such as this, published 30 minutes before Apple announced overwhelmingly positive financial results, was not intended to dampen, to some degree, the positive effect of those results on Apple’s stock.
What interest does the WSJ have in manipulating Apple stock? This is effectively what Gruber claims.
Steve Jobs is as unique as it gets and if that wasn't already obvious - the one line summation was more than enough to express everything written in preceding lines. "Proving" other people as not being Steve Jobs was optional.
Although it remains to be seen how much of Apple as we know it remains after Jobs (things may warrant a change who knows).
Apple with Jobs, but without Woz, is just an empty suit...a really, really well hand tailored $6000 fine Italian 3-piece suit...but still just a suit
Can you explain a little bit more what legacy you feel Steve Wozniak has left at Apple that persists to this day, along with why it has been important to the company's success?
My analysis of Apple's latter day success:
- Steve Jobs, demanding a high standard of quality and providing vision for ongoing products and strategy. Selecting and grooming smart people for crucial leadership roles. Requiring accountability and virtuous integration between product components and even different products.
- Tim Cook, optimizing industrial and business processes, ensuring high margins, protecting profits and structuring clever, unmatched deals for manufacturing and supply sourcing
- Jonathan Ive, designing the physical incarnations of Apple that create strong connections to the brand for customers
So is your position that software engineering has had an equally critical role to what's described above, and the engineering leadership has been Woz-esque? While Apple does make world-class software, I'm not sure I agree about the Woz bit, but I'm open to a persuasive argument.
edit: Especially when you consider how much of Apple's software engineering assets and talent came from NeXT.
That alone means a lot of authority. Woz embodies half of Apple's soul - the brilliantly unique hardware. It's true his half has been taken care by his successors, but it's still his half, although I suspect the PC-ness of current Macs would be offensive to him and he being on board would be our only chance of seeing an elegant x86-based computer, ever.
That said, he wouldn't probably be a good CEO. But he could be brought on board as an advisor. Apple has grown into a vastly different company since the Apple II days, but there is nobody else who can personify what Apple is all about.
Interestingly enough, every interview I see with him is mostly Apple-centric. Although he doesn't work there for about 24 years, this shows how closely associated with Apple he is in the eyes of the public.
In what ways do you find the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Air et al. to be inelegant or PC-like?
If you ever had the chance, take a look into the schematics of a 5150 and compare how clumsy, inefficient and plain inelegant it is when compared to a years-older Apple II. Then you will fully understand why I hold x86-computers in such low esteem.
And yes, I am typing this on a x86 laptop. I'd love to have an option.
But then Macs wouldn't be able to boot Windows. When that becomes irrelevant, we may see change.
Minor nitpick: Windows NT has been ported to MIPS, PPC, Alpha and Itanium, and was originally developed for the Intel 860 (though that version was never sold). Legend says there were Intergraph Clipper and SPARC ports too. If Microsoft pulls off the ARM release of Windows 8, that will be one more architecture with a Windows NT port.
If you have a relentless drive and a vision to make products better people will flock to you. It doesn't happen overnight but it does happen.
The next CEO will or won't embrace Steve Jobs' vision and the company's success will reflect that. It's inevitable, but the lesson has been learned and can be applied again and again by anybody who cares to.
What makes him a flake?
And, the Wall Street Journal turned into the Yellow Journal years ago. I wouldn't wipe a parrot's ass with it, let alone lend any credence to what's printed in it.
It's obvious why Gruber omitted this, but you know it crossed his mind, and I'm surprised no one here on HN has mentioned it: Apple should hire John Gruber to replace Steve Jobs as CEO.
On Seceding Steve Jobs
Succeeding means something totally different than seceding!
That bit of ugliness aside, I agree with the basic premise of this article. It would be tremendously risky for the board to bring in an outsider, and when you consider the structure of Apple's management, Tim Cook is the only reasonable choice to secede Jobs. However, Mr. Cook will have his work cut out for him as Jobs has an iconic stature, both within his company, on Wall Street and throughout the technology community.
However, on a strictly personal note, I feel sorry for whoever does eventually replace Mr. Jobs. There will inevitably be a few years when every time the new CEO makes an error, someone (either within the company, on Wall Street or within the media) will say, "If Steve Jobs were around this would never have happened."
In that regard, getting Steve Wozniak to firmly and publicly support the new CEO will be a major factor in his/her success.