Steve Jobs n’Apple

I recently read a book about Steve Jobs, entitled “The tranformation of Steve Jobs, from a rebel to a visionary leader”. It has been quite a while that I’ve been curious about all the fuzz about iMac’s, Macbook Pro’s ,iPad’s and iPhone’s. They all have one thing in common, they all numb my logic thinking and push me forward to buy them even as they are overpriced for their spec’s compared to a PC. I wanted to find out why and how this man shaped Apple so this is a part of their culture reaching out to they customers.

I’ll assume however’s reading this know’s about the beginning of Apple, the partnership between Wozniak and Jobs, and how Jobs had the vision that Computer’s could be personal and accessible to everyone and not just a specific industry.

As I finished the first chapter the only thing I could think about Steve Jobs was that this guy was an asshole. He needed Woz to make the first 2 Apple computers and as he went to work on his Macintosh he just ditched his genius friend and gathered a small group chosen by him to work on another building, kinda apart of all the rest of the co-workers, this same group also had protection from Steve that would differentiate them from the rest of the co-workers.

I kinda understand why he did that, they were doing something unique as the Macintosh, he needed to form a cohesive group around him with special privileges so he could keep pushing them to their limits in order to build the impossible things that he wanted to. And that is why people still talk of him as someone that would often shout to his employees and provide low feedback as “It’s a crap”, to someone they were motivated to work with because he better than any one of them could present their work and ideas to the world in a simple yet elegant way.

One thing that I understood is that as he got older, he got to be a better person. He wouldn’t micromanage everything, instead he would point people he trusted to key roles and they would report to him, but if one of those people would leave him and go to another company he would take that personal and probably never going to speak to that person again. He believed that however leaved Apple to another company was doing an act of treason, this show’s that he wasn’t just Apple CEO, he loved the company that he and Woz founded.

But it’s life wasn’t always so magnificent as it’s last years, he was fired from Apple by a man he so desperately hired (in 1986), he then started his own company, NeXT.

At NeXT he was continually working on the next big thing, but thing’s didn’t turned out that way. He never did the next big thing, it’s cube shaped computers were a failure, with a lack of programs that would work in it’s OS and lots of hardware problems due to his vision that a computer shouldn’t be noisy and therefor he banished the use of fans as he did on the first Macintosh. Curiously it’s was NeXT not so big things that were successful, they developed a kit that would assist in Web Developing and at that time as the internet was taking baby steps so it was much appreciated and sold. Another thing was the graphical interface of the NEXTSTEP OS , a thing he saw while working at Apple in a visit to Xerox PARC, a research department. The graphical interface had already been seen on the Macintosh, but at NEXTSTEP it was upgraded and tweaked. As a part of trying to make some money at NeXT, Steve ordered it’s engineers to begin testing NEXTSTEP OS on various architectures as the PowerPC chipset’s and Intel’s, this may seem just a detail but the truth is that this speed up significantly the transition of Apple’s PowerPC’s to Intel’s in 2006.

Latter Apple needed a OS to support it’s new Macintosh’s and they bought NeXT because of it’s NEXTSTEP OS, Steve returned to Apple.

My point on this is that on the road to do the next big thing, he accidentally bumped upon thing’s that at that time weren’t the focus but as time went forward “the dot’s began to connect”.

A thing that I was well aware is that Steve never did anything by himself. The Apple I came out of the Wozniak mind and Steve just saw an opportunity where no one else saw, to make the computer a thing that wouldn’t be in every home helping people in a simple yet friendly way. Back then everyone saw the Computer as a geek thing and impossible for the common mortal to use, he didn’t. He even though of a feature, that instead of using floppy disks , people should use a kind of optical media that would be with them all the time and was small enough to fit in the pocket, doing so people could carry their data it them wherever they wanted to, today we call this a USB pen or a External hard-drive but back then there wasn’t anything similar.

The making of the iPod came, partially, by a visit it’s head of hardware did to Toshiba laboratories, he found a battery that was being developed that was so small, it could fit in the pocket. The iMac came by Steve visiting the design lab at Apple where Jony Ive worked and Steve saw a shell with a bondi blue that could be used to do something great as the iMac. This is why Steve Jobs was famous, he could see thing’s as a whole as they didn’t even existed. It wasn’t a genius in programming as Avie Tevanian or Wozniak, he wasn’t good at hardware as Jon Rubinstein, he did share a sense of design with Jony Ive but that was it all.

He was a strong marketeer, and that was how he shaped Apple. The campaign’s he did and the presentation’s were not only target to the consumer’s but to the employees. He often sold ideas and meanings less that spec’s of it’s products. If I want a high-end spec I would have a rather vast market of PC Clones to choose from, but at Apple I had the opportunity to taste what he called “The Apple Experience”.

The Apple Experience starts since I walked in into a Apple Store and the moment I found a problem with my device or computer. Ever sent a product to be fixed? At least in Portugal there is a 30 day limit in which most of the companies don’t exceed, but at Apple there isn’t such thing. If there is definitely a problem they will solve it in a day, mostly by trading the defective product for a brand new. Their OS is made to work with the specific hardware they put on every computer or device, and while isn’t always the latest technology, it run’s smooth and never get’s into the way.

The Apple Experience is also a excuse to charge a premium price. Steve had this though as he visited a Gucci store in Italy. It was all so clean and glamorous that even it was expensive it felt it was worth. Steve learnt and applied it to Apple.

But is it worth? Well I read a time ago a story somewhere on the Internet of a guys that worked for a Computer company and went to a factory to buy CPU chipset’s, they all are the same model but there is differences between them. Some are low quality and other’s of high that offer a bit more performance and durability. The guy at the factory presented him a list, and he noticed that the higher quality chip’s weren’t available, he asked why and the answer was merely “Apple buys them all”. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been able to buy a product from them as it goes out, neither I’m a fanboy but I’ve gotta give that to them, they know how to sell their brand and if it’s a lie that they sell the best, well they do lie really well.

Bottom line, I really liked to read this and learn’t that success is a matter of trying and push forward, sometime in time you’ll have the chance to connect the dots.

I’ve gotta end with the most common quote from him. Stay foolish, stay hungry. 

PS: I left lot’s of topics out like Pixar, relationship’s between other people that pushed forward the PC like Bill Gates , Andy Groove and Michael Dell. I wanted to keep this short maybe on a future article I’ll have the chance to write about that.

PS II : Thanks to Sergio Pinto, he gave me the book in which I based this article upon.