Wednesday, August 23, 2006 |
11:58 - Succeeding in spite of brilliance
http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/
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James Andrewartha points me at this interesting blog written by a disaffected ex-Apple insider. He introduces it thus:
To steal the blurb I wrote for
http://grahame.angrygoats.net/Lore.pdf#page=10:
"It's written by the former Director of Federal Sales for Apple, this blog exposes the inner workings of Apple. He documents how he succeeded in increasing his sales 60% one year despite Steve Jobs not believing in salespeople or the enterprise market. To reach the top level of management, one must subscribe to the cult of Jobs, which allows one to do no wrong, even to the point of one cult-member VP recommending Dell's laptops over Apple's in a conference call. In fact, a lot of the innovation in Apple is produced in spite of the cult which tries to clamp down on anything Jobs didn't think of first or doesn't like."
Anyway, the latest entry covers how rank and file Apple employees are often as in the dark as its customers, if not more so, which as you might guess is not great for serving the customer.
Anyway, it's well worth reading back a few entries to see while Jobs might be the best thing that's happened to Apple, in some respects he's also been the worst thing and is actively harming the company by his actions.
I daresay. Still, though, and while I'm not exactly one of those Apple-can-do-no-wrong types, I would have to say that even if Jobs is as much an obstacle to Apple's success as a cause of it, I still tend to think that from the perspective of the casual Mac nerd, that's just fine.
We don't love Apple because it's perfect. Indeed, we acknowledge its many faults, which sometimes perversely endear it to us. I don't think anybody thinks Steve Jobs is the world's greatest CEO. That should, in fact, be self-evident, because business is a world of copycat behavior and following well-established practices, and the fact that you see so few companies run by Steve Jobses ought to be ample demonstration that his style isn't some universally accepted standard. Otherwise everyone would be writing how-to-succeed books that tell you to wear turtlenecks and jeans and be vegan and throw alliance-rending tantrums over hours-in-advance inadvertent product leaks.
Most of the wildly successful companies out there have bosses who fit a certain mold: they rose through the ranks of marketing or sales (seldom development), and they were acquired in exchange from some other company where they'd established a reputation as being a CEO who has the expertise to pilot a company of a certain size, or bring a company from a certain size to another certain size (usually, hopefully, a larger one), and then are jettisoned by the board when the company no longer fits the executive's particular field of strength. The CEO-as-rock-star days of the mid-90s are gone, and notably the companies that survived the dot-com crash are the ones that ran using established principles of business and a level-headed, stay-the-course strategy that relied on solid business plans and not nebulous buzzwords and hype. Those kinds of companies continue to return solidly on their investments and chug along contentedly, helmed by empty suits that are as at home on the golf course as in the boardroom, playing the schmooze game and establishing those all-important personal contacts that are key to the flow of qualified personnel that makes tech companies thrive.
But those aren't the companies that garner throngs of cheering fans.
Apple could well be a much bigger company, if it were headed by someone other than Steve Jobs. It could well even be a more innovative company, ruling the world with benevolence and ubiquity. But oddly, I don't think anyone would cheer for it then. It'd just be another AT&T or Adobe or Samsung.
Apple fans like Apple because of what it represents: a maverick that goes in the face of convention, using tools that are so slick in principle that they make the ubiquitous tools everyone else uses seem dull and clumsy by comparison, at least if you don't use the latter ones every day. What's more, Steve Jobs represents a benevolent dictator, a concept that many people hold a secret longing for—everyone who's read Tolkien, for example, has felt the thrill of seeing a rightful, pure-blooded king ascend the throne, much though that might fly in the face of all we believe about democracy and racial equality. Why do we feel that affinity for the fantasy of a realm led by a wise and noble ruler? Do we all secretly want to be ruled as long as the ruling is just? I'm sure I don't know. But Apple is sort of like a fantasy novel sitting on a shelf full of business manuals. It doesn't follow any of the rules the other guys do, and because of that it's able to do things the other guys would never have dreamed possible. Granted, it has plenty of flaws and is inherently unrealistic. But Apple fans would be fans of Apple whether they're riding high in the headlines, as they are today, or whether they're wallowing in the doldrums, as they were in the mid-90s. Fantasy doesn't have to make sense.
It's more or less a happy chance for us all that Apple has managed to parlay itself into a successful brand again, with gleaming stores in the malls and white earbuds dangling from every bobbing head in the gym. We get to feel that secret thrill that Hey, we were right all along. But deep down we know how fleeting it is; the iPod could be unseated tomorrow, or OS X could be laid low by some nasty virus, or the Apple Stores could all suddenly start being money-sinks and the company might have to start shutting them down. But that won't change any Apple geek's feelings for the company or its products, even if the alternatives are demonstrably better. We've spent years forgiving Apple for ripping off its own third-party developers to bring out products like Sherlock and Dashboard—something we'd never stop lambasting, say, Microsoft for. What can we say? Love is irrational.
But Jobs is the key. Apple in the 90s went through a series of CEOs who gradually, one by one, let Apple steer more and more into the mainstream of business behavior, bringing out products like digital cameras and CD players and rebranded printers and video game consoles (remember the Pippin?), and a range of Macs with unmemorable names like "Performa 6118CD". It got awfully hard to love Apple in those days, and the people who did were those who remembered what it once was, not so much those who loved what it had become. Jobs' return, though, ensured that even if the company was destined to go down in flames, at least it would do so with products called "iMac" and "iPod" and "TiBook" and "Panther". At least it would do so armed with gear whose very visual design made people drool and took us all by surprise every time the cover was whisked from it on stage. The boxes could be empty for all we cared—Photoshop tests were nice, but we could tell they weren't exactly being honest. We couldn't lie to ourselves and tell us our OS X boxes were actually faster than (or even as fast as) our friends' new gaming PCs. But we ignored all that, because the story was being told once again.
Today we've got a line of computers that all have "Mac" in the name and Intel CPUs inside. We love the speed, yes. We don't care that we've switched to the hated enemy under the hood, no. What matters to us isn't that Apple is kicking ass in the marketplace, but that it is establishing a legacy—one that will allow Steve Jobs to remain at the helm for the foreseeable future, making his pronouncements of occasional brilliance and routine astonishing thickness, enforcing his rule of law and his cult of personality and demanding that Apple sell nothing that wasn't personally magicked from thin air on stage by the wizard-king himself.
In the end, that's what Mac fans tend to like about the company. The practical-minded ones use OS X because of its demonstrated utility and versatility; you can hardly argue with a UNIX laptop that can also run iTunes in Aqua or XP, and that sports a hip logo to boot. But the people who spend all their time writing Web pages about Apple and committing their every move to historical record in a way that nobody would dream of doing for Microsoft or Dell—those are the guys who harbor a secret enjoyment of seeing an impossible fantasy coming true right before our eyes, a company that breaks all the rules in order to give us a story and a spectacle.
There's good and evil in the world, even in the halls of business. Or so we would like to lead ourselves to believe. Geeks get their inspiration from all kinds of places, be it a cherished comic-book superhero or a starship full of UN diplomats in space. But it's irresistible when we see that kind of fantasy play itself out at the end of a grassy, manicured street in sunny Cupertino.
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