Raising the Bar, Learning from Failure, and Other Lessons from Steve

After a crazy couple of weeks in the consumer electronics/smartphone/computer/telecom mega-industry (it’s really all one now), another bombshell arrived yesterday with the news that Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO and is taking on role of chairman of the board. In reality, it probably means he will be in an advising capacity not unlike what he’s probably been doing for the last year while on medical leave. But still, a shock to the system.

The fact that he’s been able to carry on having any significant executive role at Apple is testament to how passionate and dedicated he is to the company. For quite a long time now he’s had another full-time job (and I’m not talking Pixar or being on the board of Disney): fighting cancer. Best wishes to you in that challenge, Steve.

There’s a lot of speculation on how Apple will do now that Jobs is no longer at the helm. I for one think it will do just fine for quite a while - it’s got a very solid culture that will endure, huge momentum in the market, no debt, probably the strongest brand in the world, and the upper hand in almost every market it’s in.

Setting the Bar Crazy High

All of us in the design and innovation biz have a lot to thank Steve Jobs for. He opened up the play space for us by setting the bar so ridiculously high. This did several things:

• It set a standard for quality, invention, and consistency that inspired others (including us at frog), and allowed much greater latitude for pushing the boundaries of form, materials and interactions. A staple of client requests in the last decade has been “I want the iPod of [my category]” (which became “I want the iPhone of…” and then “iPad of…”). Meaning of course that they didn’t want a literal iPod, but they wanted the same kind of game-changing product, business opportunity, and user experience which these devices came to represent. Most companies, however, underestimate how difficult that is to do from a cultural, technical, organizational, and business perspective (especially if you want to do this repeatedly, not just a one-off).
• It changed people’s expectations for design, products and experiences even in categories far beyond the ones Apple plays in. A good example is the current trend of consumerization of IT, where expectations about ease of use, flexibility, and joy of use from consumer applications are now being forced onto staid IT systems. Why does the online expense-filing application my company pays a lot of money for have to suck so bad, when the free site I use for sharing photos handles so much more complexity so much more easily?

Failure Can Make You Stronger

In 1965, the Apollo 1 spacecraft caught fire while still on the launchpad, killing all three astronauts. It was a televised, very public failure for NASA as it desperately tried to overtake the Russians for the race to the moon. While it was tragic, it also prompted a critical reassessment of the program that ultimately made it better. Retired astronaut John Young said, “I can assure you if we had not had that fire and rebuilt the command module … we could not have done the Apollo program successfully. So we owe a lot to Gus, and Rog and Ed. They made it possible for the rest of us to do the almost-impossible.”

Jobs has been quite open about the fact that after he was fired from Apple, he went through a difficult period. But ultimately this made him a better leader, and he returned to the company after eleven years quite a different person than he had left it. I think it’s fair to say that Apple is a better and more successful company now than if he’d been at the helm for the entire time.

In his humble, inspiring speech to the graduating class at Stanford, he put it this way:

So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. […]

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. […]

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Spend a lunch break watching the whole thing if you haven’t, it’s worth your while:

Google and Motorola: Will it Blend?

 

The shockwaves of the recent announcement that Google is buying Motorola Mobility, the handset and device division that spun off from the Motorola mother ship not long ago, will continue to ripple far and wide. There are several reasons why this could be a great boost for Android, but also some major concerns about getting the two companies and their product lines to blend well. 

There’s much debate about the reasons behind the acquisition. Was Google looking to boost its patent portfolio to create a Mutually Assured Destruction/Mexican Stand-off scenario (pick your metaphor) in the midst of the tit-for-tat patent suits going on right now? There are arguments on both sides about how worthwhile this gambit is (Yes it is! No it’s not!). There are also arguments that patents are only a piece of the puzzle, and that Moto’s hardware business was also a major part of the logic. I fall into this camp.

Blend the Ecosystem

It seems like years ago that Google’s first phone, the Nexus One, was launched, but it was only 18 months ago. I wrote at the time:

Google’s introduction of Nexus One, a phone to truly call its own, is a completely necessary move for the company. Only by taking ownership of the whole user experience will Google really be able to prove the value of its Android platform.… The lackluster success of the early Android phones has surely made Google realize that they need to take a much stronger role in order to bring all the pieces of the experience together. The catch-as-catch can approach they’ve had so far just isn’t going to cut it. Fragmentation is a death knell for a product like this at this stage of maturity. Google needs to lead the charge with an integrated platform until the experience gap is fully closed. Then it can afford to loosen the reins and let the handset manufacturers, carriers, and third party developers go do their own things independently, safe in the knowledge that they will all come together to create something interesting and valuable for customers.

The underlying rationale here, as I described in that earlier article, is that early in a category’s development (e.g. smartphones, tablets), complex devices, platforms, and ecosystems under-perform user expectations unless they are highly integrated. This creates a gap between the experiences that products can provide and what people want (see diagram). This gap can take time to close as the technologies and platforms improve, and instead of creating a finely blended smoothie, you get a lumpy concoction that’s unpleasant.

Making the platform or ecosystem modular and open too early prolongs the time that a gap exists. Microsoft’s phone OS always suffered from this until a sharp change of course with Phone 7, and Apple quickly trounced them with its integrated offering. The Nexus One was Google’s first step in rectifying its own initial misstep.

The Motorola Mobility acquisition is a huge step further along that progression. Google clearly still feels that the fragmentation and variability of third-party hardware makers (with the frequent intervention of carriers seeking special interfaces, additional apps, and in some cases removing Google’s native apps and services altogether) is leaving money on the table. To be fair, some of the Android handsets have been very good—the Motorola Droids have consistently been strong players—but then there are other products that just completely send the Android/Google brand into the toilet.

This is a cycle that gets repeated in many industries, and the integrated/proprietary vs. modular/open balancing act is one that many companies struggle with as they make strategic choices on investments, alliances, and how to deploy complex products and ecosystems. I devote a significant amount of time to this in my book, Innovation X, as it’s a fascinating area.

The Motorola acquisition also strengthens Google’s position in the new diversity of digital ecosystem touchpoints: set-top boxes, broadband connected TVs, home networking, and phone-based payments (digital wallet). Motorola Mobility already plays in these (mostly immobile) areas, which is interesting to Google because the lines between these products and phones and tablets, in terms of services and content, are increasingly blurred. It’s all about the multi-screen experience today, and making what happens in your home work seamlessly with your devices out on the move. Anybody’s who’s worked in the “smart home” market knows that it’s more dumb than smart, as getting devices to talk together well is really difficult today. Google would love to solve that problem, and is one of the few companies that has the scope and clout to pull it off – even more so now that it has a major player in the hardware endpoints.

Will the Cultures Blend?

Google has said that it will keep Motorola Mobility as a separate company. No doubt this is partly to assuage fears of its other hardware partners that they will be kicked to the curb in favor of the in-house brand. (HTC in particular finds itself in a tough spot now, as both its OS providers now have favored hardware partners—Microsoft/Nokia and Google/Motorola. This latest merger may well push some companies back into the Windows camp as they hedge bets.)

Should Google merge Motorola more fully into its existing business units? In a word: No.

As Google discovered with its early stumbles with Nexus, designing and selling hardware is a really different business than online services, advertising, and software development. Google is amazing at many things, but this does not appear to be one of its talents. Better to keep it under a different brand, with a different team working with the processes it needs to. Which is not to say they should not seek to influence one another, and that there aren’t things Motorola could learn from Google about innovation and development.

Michael Mace has a jaundiced view of this combination:

The same business practices that made Google good in software will be a liability in hardware.  Google’s engineers-first, research driven product management philosophy is effective in the development of web software, because you can run experiments and revise your web app every day in response to user feedback.  But in hardware, you have to make feature decisions 18 months before you ship, and you have to live with those decisions for another 18 months while your product sells through.  You can’t afford to wait for science.  Instead, you need dictatorial product managers who operate on artistry and intuition.  All of those concepts (dictatorship, artistry, intuition) are anathema to Google’s culture.  Either Google’s worldview will dominate and ruin Motorola, or worse yet the Motorola worldview will infect Google.  Google with Motorola inside it is like a python that swallowed a minivan.

To put it another way, I think Google has about as much chance of successfully managing a device business as Nokia had of running an OS business.

I’m not as skeptical as this, but in my view, assuming that Google is not just going to flip Motorola and spin it off again after it’s got the patents, this brings up the biggest question: can the two cultures get along? Motorola is famously stodgy, slow to make decisions, conservative. How will this blend with the more freewheeling West Coast intensity of Google? Maybe the Mobility division was already the wild-and-crazy-guy of Motorola, but I still find it hard to believe that there won’t be significant challenges here.

So far I haven’t seen anyone mention this, which is odd since cultural fit is a) usually one of the first things brought up in large corporate mergers, and, b) the leading cause of them failing.

Things will become clearer in the next few months about what Google plans to do with this acquisition. I think there are some compelling benefits for both brands, but the culture blending question is going to be as big a challenge as anything.

Why iCloud Will be as Important as the iPod

Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference keynote last week will be remembered for two things: the bloodbath of disrupted developers and apps it left in its wake, and that it was as important for cloud services as the iPod was for digital music, and that the iPhone was for smartphones.

The Developer Bloodbath

Despite the many cheers from the crowd of developers at the keynote, I reckon there were several hundred third party developers and apps collectively put on notice (and maybe put out of business) by the various announcements. As the NY Times wryly put it, “How do you know if you’ve created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business.” (The Times provides a handy list of apps now scrambling for a second act.)

In truth, quite a few of the things that Apple announced - such as a basic to-do list app, and ways of storing web articles offline for later reading - have become such fundamental needs for so many people that they deserved to be part of the core OS. Unfortunately they are also the bread and butter of many niches developers who saw the same need and leapt to fill it in the intervening years. They will have to rethink and improve what they do, and many of them will I’m sure.

Such is life in the shadow of an ecosystem behemoth. Apple giveth (App Store to give independent developers more visibility and access) and Apple taketh away (obviating the need for those apps in the first place).

Apple has been pretty consistent in adopting good ideas from third parties into its core offerings. Perhaps most famously, Apple introduced the Dashboard feature (a precursor to the iconized app view on the iPhone), to loud complaints of it ripping off a third party developer, Konfabulator who had created something very similar.

As problematic as this can be, it’s all part of Apple’s plan. Chetan Sharma put it succinctly: “Apple’s goal is to commoditize the software, Microsoft’s goal is to commoditize the hardware, Google - both”

Apple has high tolerance for making software free, even if it makes life painful for its developers, because it makes almost all its profit on hardware. For the time being at least, Apple has enough strength and/or momentum relative to Google, Microsoft, media companies and service providers that it can thrive with this approach.

The Mainstreaming of Cloud Services

The announcement of iCloud was met with both enthusiasm and incredulity.

Apple has been firing on all cylinders for years with hardware and software, but has consistently stumbled with services, whether it be the expensive and lackluster MobileMe (the launch of which even Jobs had to admit at the keynote was “not our finest hour”), or the weak reception to its music “social networking” service Ping. (This isn’t a new phenomenon - anyone remember eWorld?) The only service area where Apple has really sung is with its retail stores.

With iCloud, Apple is cinching up the ecosystem it has painstakingly built up, cinching it so tight that it will become increasingly difficult for others - even ones as big as Google - to crack open.

MobileMe was an expensive, under-performing sideshow, but iCloud aims to reach deep into all the other Apple devices and make them all work together better. What was announced on Monday is surely only a hint of what lies ahead in the next 18 months for iCloud, iOS, and OS X all finally getting in sync.

Ironically, iCloud aims to improve on what was arguably the worst part of MobileMe - iDisk, a basic cloud storage feature. Given Jobs’ obvious frustrations with MobileMe, I can’t believe he would let yet another half-baked attempt out the door, especially not one that is now a major strategic piece of the puzzle. Based on the massive data center Apple has invested in, they’re not joking around.

Since the iPad launched, its lack of a file system has meant it’s not a true laptop replacement. One of the brilliant ideas about Dropbox is that it essentially puts the file system in the cloud and moves it off the device entirely. iCloud apparently opens the door for the same thing, and with even superior integration. Today with near ubiquitous broadband and 4G/LTE networks starting to roll out that offer home broadband speeds while mobile, this suddenly becomes a workable solution. (Bandwidth caps, tiered pricing, disappearance of all-you-can-eat data plans? Yes, there are flies in the ointment, but the longterm trend is clear.)

Linking Cloud, Apps, Devices, and OS’s

Consider two things that were discussed separately in the keynote: journaling in the next rev of the OS, Lion (which means no more saving - a file is continuously saved as it’s worked on), and continuous cloud syncing. Voila - you have your most up-to-the-second work constantly saved to the cloud, and made available on every other device.

My feeling is that iCloud will prove to be similar to IBM launching its PC in 1983. Prior to that point, the PC market was highly fragmented and dominated by niche players, and had little mainstream appeal. The arrival of IBM on the scene gave PCs a stamp of credibility and stability, and they gained sharply more acceptance. IBM made PC’s “easy” to get into, made them relevant, and created the archetype which others would mimic for decades.

Apple pulled off the same feat with mp3 players and smartphones, for largely the same reasons. So it will be with iCloud. Cloud services are not new (neither were mp3 players or smartphones), and the fact is that much of our critical data already lives in the cloud, via various web apps, service subscriptions, and email. But until now the various services have been poorly integrated, and offered by startups that many people don’t feel comfortable handing their data over to, whether for security or long-term availability/stability reasons.

They haven’t been ready for the mainstream, and iCloud will come to be seen as the turning point which changes that. For consumers who don’t yet get the relevance of cloud, the media syncing across devices provides the carrot to get into the concept.

MG Siegler looks at the different approaches to the cloud being taken by Apple, Google and Amazon, and notes that “Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works.” Exactly. This is what Apple does best - take complicated things that most people don’t care about, and makes them easy and understandable for a mainstream audience.

Why Apple is the Master Craftsman

Whatever you may think about Apple there is no denying that they continue to set new standards for craft. Craft? Yes, that seemingly old-fashioned word that many confine to quilting, scrap-booking and other pursuits often disparagingly categorized as women’s activities. My alma mater, the California College of the Arts, dropped the word craft from its name years ago, feeling that it was dragging the image of the school down. But craft as a concept has made something of a comeback in recent years, and no-one in the mass-production realm is doing it better than Apple.

That’s no accident. It’s the result of enormous amounts of hard work and financial investment, much more than most companies are willing to stomach. Apple’s head of design, Jonathon Ive, said in a recent rare interview with design site Core 77 about the iPhone 4:

“A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials. [At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material—and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.”

High quality craft comes about from an interplay between a material and a person, whether they be a woodworker, metal-smith, designer, engineer, or production-line worker. Good craft comes from intimate familiarity and ongoing hands-on manipulation of the material and the forms it can make, not from abstractly visualizing the form as is often done through CAD renderings. They can be highly photorealistic, but often not usefully informative to the design process as they lack tangibility. Ive goes on to say:

“The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form. It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying ‘that’s wood’ and so on. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.”

Forty years ago, design philosopher and master wood craftsman David Pye argued that design is always limited by budget, not technique. The ideal form promised by superior technique, he said, will always lose out to affordability, and therefore design will always be compromised. What is remarkable about Apple is that they have navigated around this paradox to a large extent. Obviously they don’t make the cheapest computers around, but they have brought a incredibly high level of quality to everyday products at prices that many people can afford and an increasing number are happy to pay. It used to be that you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an object with this degree of precision, whether it was jewelry, a car, or a fine watch.

Apple has done it by taking techniques and materials that everyone else uses for small-batch prototyping, and scaled them up to be mass-production ready, such as how it carves out aluminum blocks to create the shells for everything from iPod Nanos to MacBook Pros to the new Mac Mini. They work closely and over the long term with a small set of suppliers to hone the techniques and get the costs out, rather than doing what everyone else does which is to shop around every year to different vendors, always hunting for the lowest price. Apple isn’t afraid to “single source” a technique, technology or material from a vendor if it gives the right affect and advantage, while other companies avoid like the plague being locked into single vendors.

And of course Apple has famously fanatical attention to every detail that starts at the very top with Steve Jobs, and percolates out to the rest of the company. Apple is certainly not unique if you look across all companies in all industries, but very few - if any - of their direct competitors have it.

So it’s not magical how Apple does what it does with the quality of its products. It’s just that most other companies don’t have the patience, budget allocations, or sheer will to pull it off.

Microsoft Finds its Innovation Mojo

Microsoft is a bit like Tiger Woods at the moment - industry darling that became too dominant, then had a fall accompanied by a thick layer of schadenfreude, and now is trying a come-back. Microsoft is being replaced in the big-bad-wolf department by Google and Apple and finds itself in the odd position of being an underdog, and people love to root for underdogs. In fact I’d say that Microsoft is further ahead on the come-back trail than Tiger is if you look at some of its recent announcements: Bing,Windows Phone 7, the Courier journal concept, and the just-announced IE9. Something interesting is brewing in Redmond.

(And for context, I’ll say that I’m a Mac user for 20 years and in the past have been quite critical of Microsoft’s approach to innovation. But I also like to recognize credit where credit is due, and that’s the case here.)

There are two things going on with their recent announcements that are really interesting, and which hint at better things to come still.

Finding its Innovation Voice
There is a clear editorial voice to what they are doing. In the past Microsoft was often criticized for producing warmed-over versions of other people’s products (the perrennial Windows vs. OS X war), or for taking a “kitchen sink” approach that just stuck every feature imaginable into a product without thinking about how they gelled as a whole. Now they are creating products with distinct points of view that do not try to simply ape other successful ones, or out-do them on feature lists. You may or may not like exactly what each product does, but at least there is differentiation and an emerging personality to what they are doing, something Microsoft has long been lacking.

Systematizing Innovation
They have been able, to an extent, to systemetize an approach to innovation that began (it seems) with the Xbox team. The Xbox, especially the 360, established a fresh, distinctive approach to development that had been lacking at Microsoft. Innovating on behalf of customers rather than by linearly extrapolating what they say, consideration of a whole ecosystem, and then taking responsibility for the whole user experience in that ecosystem.

We see threads of this Xbox approach showing up in most of the new generation of products - Bing, Windows Phone 7, IE9, and Courier. (These are all products more or less at the edges of Microsoft’s business, Office and Windows have not yet been affected so heavily. In fact the Windows advertising campaign flaunts the notion of just doing what customers asked, which these other products are definitely not doing.)

It was looking for a while that the Xbox might just be a one-off innovation high-point for Microsoft. Motorola experienced this with the Razr - a game-changing product that they weren’t then able to convert into a broader portfolio and leadership of the industry. They could not systemetize the innovation process. After a couple of years, other phone manufacturers caught up to Motorola and today they are way back down in the rankings again.

Succeeding once at innovation is one thing, and can just be a matter of luck sometimes. Succeeding at it over and over again the way that Apple and Google do is a whole other ballgame. If current trends continue, this is what we are seeing going on at Microsoft. Given their size, resources, reach and clout, this could lead to some impressive stuff.

The Proof is in the Pudding
Windows Phone 7, Courier and IE9 all have one other thing in common - none of them have been released yet. They look at the end of the day there can be a lot of slip-ups between nice demo and game-changing shipping product. Microsoft has stumbled here before - look at what happened to Vista and Zune. But they’ve taken their lumps and perhaps now are ready. If so, we could be seeing a huge resurgence from the company which, after all, still has huge resources, dollars and reach. If they really can get their innovation groove back, from conception to implementation, then they will be a massive force to be reckoned with once again.