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:

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.

Apple is the Zeitgeist Company

The launch of the iPad yesterday put an exclamation mark on an increasingly obvious point: Apple is the company that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. The massive hype leading up to the event - apparently achieved in a groundswell with very little effort on Apple’s part - shows that they really are the “It” company right now.

Not so long ago, Google claimed that position. The amount of press ink (literal or virtual) that Google has been able to create every single day for the last decade is just astonishing - it is not uncommon to see two or three articles on the same day about some aspect of Google’s business, whether it be a new product or another story about the Googleplex’s free food. No other organization, save perhaps Obama’s election campaign, can claim such a blanket of coverage on such a consistent basis.

But the honeymoon is over and we are in the midst of a mild backlash against Google, and at the same time Apple’s cultural and financial stock has been climbing. No-one sees them as just a maker of over-priced niche products for designery types anymore. They are truly a mainstream mass-culture company that, while focused mostly on consumer electronics, touches into so many other areas of our lives simply because the boundaries between computers, electronics, media, communications and social life have all blurred so thoroughly.

Looking back over the decades, we can see a string of companies that have managed to go beyond being just successful business enterprises and have captured something special in the culture. GM perhaps epitomized this in the 1950’s and 60’s, summed up by the well-known phrase “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”. GM helped shape the aesthetic and cultural agenda in a way that reached far beyond the automotive realm.

IBM arguably held this position in the 1970’s, and Microsoft in the late 80’s and early 90’s, to be superseded by Google at the turn of the millennium. But none of the tech companies besides Apple have quite been able to win hearts in the same way GM did.

But one thing that all these companies have in common is strong leaders who are not just good business thinkers but are also active in the weeds of product development. Think of Harley Earl at GM, Thomas Watson Jr. at IBM, Bill Gates at Microsoft, Sergey/Larry/Eric at Google, and of course Steve Jobs at Apple. These men all recognized that there is a clear connection between a company’s strategies and the details of the products they bring to market. Ignoring the latter is a good way to scuttle the former.

The iPad is but the latest result of the hand of Steve (with help from a huge team of people of course). The apparent ease with which hype appeared around it is in fact no accident: Apple has invested enormous amounts of work over the years to build a reputation around its products and brand, and that investment is now paying off in spades. Jobs himself is well tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, he transfers that to Apple’s products and strategies, and in turn the company comes to reflect and even steer the zeitgeist.

It’s not magic, but it is hard to do. Very hard. If history is any indication, there is room for only one such company at a time to hold this pre-eminent position, and their time in the sun is temporary. Apple’s winning streak will come to an end, but in the meantime they deserve all the credit they get.

End of an Era: Apple Pulling out of Macworld

This will be Apple’s last showing at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and Steve Jobs will not be delivering the keynote in January, Phil Shiller will.

The company says it has many more ways to reach its customers now rather than just trade shows, which is true. And they have done non-trade show announcements in large settings more frequently. Still, it is a shame to lose the example of great stagecraft that the Macworld Expo delivers every twelve months.

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