An extraordinary outpouring of emotion has greeted the death of the co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc
The bunches of flowers began arriving outside Apple stores as morning broke around the world: a potent symbol of the extraordinary outpouring of emotion that greeted the death of Steve Jobs,
the co-founder of Apple Inc. His death was announced by his family late
in the afternoon on the Californian west coast where he lived most of
his life.
"It's a dark day in Silicon Valley," Matt Drance, a
former Apple employee, remarked in an email. Anyone who thought that
technologists couldn't be moved to tears would soon realise, from the
tributes on Twitter and Facebook, that Jobs, who died at 56 from cancer
which he had held at bay for eight years, had inspired the strongest
feelings.
In Beijing a steady stream of mourners and admirers made
their way to lay flowers and light candles at the Apple Store. One
corner of the ground floor had been turned into a shrine of sorts with
photographs of Steve Jobs, bouquets and messages: "You have enriched our
lives. Thank you for changing the world," said one in English. "Go in
peace. We love you," said another.
It seemed as though there wasn't anyone who hadn't somehow been touched by his work. The tributes came from everywhere. President Obama called him visionary
and said "he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity" and that "he
transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of
the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees
the world."
Bill Gates, his longtime rival but also friend – born,
like Jobs, in 1955 – said that "the world rarely sees someone who has
had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt
for many generations to come … I will miss Steve immensely."
The fact is that for multiple businesses – computing,
film, music, mobile telephony and most recently mobile computing – Jobs
overturned the existing order. Again and again he refused to go along
with the conventional wisdom, and introduced his own instead. He lived
his life by the instruction he gave in a commencement address to
Stanford graduates: "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out
your own inner voice," urging them to keep innocently seeking the new:
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
Jobs, though, came across as anything
but foolish. He was often described as a tyrant able to throw a
"reality distortion field" around his immediate area, to make people
believe anything that he told them. The reality was simpler, but harder
for technologists used to comparing numbers to understand. Jobs was a
brilliant negotiator who had the rare ability to visualise exactly what
other people – whether singly across a table or by the thousand in an
auditorium or by the million in homes and businesses – wanted. He could
frame a price negotiation or a product launch to get the maximum benefit
at the minimum risk.
The single occasion on which he did this
best was in 1996, when he had recently rejoined Apple (the company he
co-founded in 1976) – which was on its knees. The management had lost a
billion dollars in the previous 12 months. Jobs knew that it was 90 days
from bankruptcy. So he flew north to Redmond to see Gates at Microsoft –
which was infringing a number of Apple patents. He needed investment,
but being confrontational would just make Gates, then richest man in the
world, obstinate – and Apple would have to turn the lights out.
Jobs
instead turned the discussion into one where the two companies had a
common purpose, in computing: "Bill," he told his old friend and rival,
"between us, we own 100% of the desktop!" Gates wasn't fooled – he knew
that Microsoft had 95% and Apple 5% – but even so was won over.
Microsoft bought $150m of non-voting stock; Apple was saved. Gates
observed afterwards: "That guy is so amazing. He is a master at
selling," recounts Alan Deutschman in his book The Second Coming of
Steve Jobs. (Had Microsoft held on to the stock, it would today be worth
130 times more than Gates paid, or $19bn – about a tenth of Microsoft's
present market value.)
Jobs could be ruthless. He fired people
who let information slip before an event and spoiled the surprise. He
was unforgiving of failure: when Apple's first effort at a "cloud"
service MobileMe suffered flaws in its early weeks he called the team
together into a hall and excoriated them for half an hour. Chuq von
Rospach, who worked at the company until 2009 (though not on that
project), characterised it as: "Imagine Steve walking up and down the
corridors with a flamethrower, stopping people at random and saying 'Do
you work on MobileMe? How about you?'"
Yet for all the claims of
tyrannical behaviour, Jobs also kept staff fiercely loyal. Former
employees speak of their devotion to their company with something
approaching amazement; they sound almost surprised at how hard they
worked and how demanding Jobs was. Yet the staff at the top of the company
have stayed almost unchanged since he returned there at the end of
1996, taking over the reins in 1997. Tim Cook, now chief executive; Phil
Schiller, head of marketing; Jonathan Ive, head of design. The core of
Apple's functionality flows from them.
His beginnings were
inauspicious. Jobs was the adopted child of a university lecturer and a
student (he was a quarter Syrian) raised by working parents who could
barely scrape together the money to send him to college. When he did go
to Reed College he soon dropped out, but stayed behind and studied
calligraphy and typography – which would later feed into the products
whose design he would oversee in microscopic detail.
The first
time he overturned the way the world worked was in 1984. In 1979, three
years after setting up Apple with Steve Wozniak, Jobs had visited
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre in California and saw its experimental
system which used "windows" and a "mouse" – an insane idea at a time
when all other computers (including Apple's) communicated via blinking
cursors into which you fed obscure commands such as CP: A: B:, rather
than by manipulating virtual objects on a screen.
"It wasn't
complete," he told Wired magazine later. "It wasn't quite right. But
within 10 minutes, it was obvious that every computer in the world would
work this way someday. And you could argue about the number of years it
would take, and you could argue about who would be the winners and the
losers, but I don't think you could argue that every computer in the
world wouldn't eventually work this way."
Jobs licensed the system
from Xerox (which took payment in Apple stock) and oversaw the
development of computers using the new "windowing" system. The first was
called Lisa, after his illegitimate daughter; the next, the Macintosh,
which went on sale in 1984, aimed to make windows ubiquitous. Jobs also
wanted it to be as simple to use, and as closed-in, as a washing machine
or other domestic appliance. Computers, he felt, were just too
complicated. Using window systems was much easier.
Microsoft
agreed, licensed and then extended the idea, and while Jobs wrangled
with John Sculley – hired from his presidency of Pepsi with the immortal
line "do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or
do you want a chance to change the world?" – Bill Gates extended the
idea of windows to Windows, which rapidly overtook Apple's products and
the most widely used desktop computer operating system in the world.
Jobs was kicked out of Apple in 1985, and over the next 12 years
Microsoft infiltrated and then took over personal computing. All the
computers used windows – in some form. Jobs had been right.
His
next target was the film business. Pixar, the company that he bought
from George Lucas (who was selling it as part of a divorce settlement)
in 1986, is a classic "people business": the talent walks out of the
door every day. It was also cutting-edge, making films entirely with
computers – actors, pictures, everything. Jobs was able to keep John
Lasseter and other key staff working there through thick and thin. But
it was his negotiation genius that pulled off the deal getting Disney,
the most powerful force in film, to distribute Pixar's first production,
Toy Story – the first feature-length computer-animated film. Pixar
never had a flop as an independent company; Disney bought it in January
2006 for $7.4bn (it was stock in Pixar, rather than Apple, which made
Jobs a billionaire).
At Pixar, Jobs discovered the importance of
managing people. He rehoused it at great expense – personally designing
the building with all the toilets in a central location so people would
meet there, mix and keep the creative juices flowing.
On returning
to Apple (which bought his other post-Apple business NeXT in 1996),
Jobs quickly took over and installed himself as "interim CEO" in 1997.
From NeXT and Pixar he had learnt the harsh lesson of inventory
management – keeping projects under control – and the finesse of
recruiting the right person. Tim Cook – now chief executive – may have
been the most important single hire he ever made. Cook turned Apple from
a bloated manufacturer into a slick one which had less stock tied up in
warehouses than its bitter rival Dell.
But as he nursed Apple
back to health, the music business – one of his oldest loves – came into
his sights. With online file-sharing rampant and revenues crashing
record labels needed a saviour. It came in the unlikely form of a
cigarette packet-sized white-and-silver object. And so Jobs changed the
world again.
The iPod was initially conceived by a team led by
then chief of hardware Jon Rubinstein, as a way to get more people
buying Apple's Macintosh computers. Jobs drove its designers to
distraction, again, and even on the day before the product's launch was
complaining that the "click" when he put headphones into the prototypes
on display wasn't satisfying. (An engineer had to polish the sockets by
hand.) But the iPod changed everything, first because of its tiny size –
with 1,000 songs in svelte enclosure – and for its simple, quick
synchronisation. There were already music players, but they were bulky,
had horrible software, and would take five hours to transfer 1,000
songs. The iPod would take 10 minutes.
Then Jobs pulled off yet
another audacious negotiation, and another revolution: persuading the
record labels to let him sell music digitally. He did this by playing on
Apple's tiny size: with the iPod still limited to Apple computers,
making only 5% of the market, he persuaded them that there was little
risk if anything went wrong. The labels reckoned they could license
their music to someone else if it went right. "Apple's target, believe
it or not, was to sell 1 million songs in the first year," the
journalist Robert X Cringely – aka Mark Stephens – told me earlier this
year. When the iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003 it sold the first
million songs in a week. Within a few months it was unstoppable, and
Jobs created a version of Apple's iTunes software for Windows which
accelerated it. Within a year it had sold nearly 100m songs, and the
iPod had 70% of the music player market.
But it was the design of
the iPod – small, appliance-like, simple – that most struck people. Jobs
had insisted that it should be able to get to any song within three
clicks. Design, as he explained in 2000, wasn't about how it looked. It
was about how it worked. "In most people's vocabularies, design means
veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and
the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of
design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends
up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or
service."
In 2006 Microsoft tried to imitate it with the Zune – coloured brown. It was a flop.
Computers?
Film? Music? Now Jobs had one of the biggest businesses, the booming
mobile industry, in his sights. The iPhone was the result of a
two-and-a-half year project to use touchscreens to manipulate a
computer. "We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary
user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel [on the
iPod], and now multi-touch," he said in January 2007. "Each has made
possible a revolutionary product – the Mac, the iPod, and now the
iPhone.Today we're going to show you a software breakthrough. Software
that's at least five years ahead of what's on any other phone."
Not
only was the phone different; Jobs also beat the mobile operators,
formerly the rulers of the business, and used Apple's growing brand
power to drive deals which offered iPhone owners unlimited data. After
the iPhone, everyone needed a touch screen: Google, and then Microsoft,
and then market leaders Nokia and RIM followed suit as quickly as they
could. But not fast enough: in mid-2011 Apple became the world's biggest
mobile phone maker by revenue, an idea that would have been nonsensical
four years earlier. Jobs's revolutions were coming faster and faster.
For
Drance, then working at Apple trying to recruit outside developers to
write Mac software, the unveiling of the iPhone was a stunning moment:
an internal project that had run for two and a half years, yet he hadn't
heard about it? "There's a competitive thing to Apple's secrecy,
because you want to keep competitors guessing. But also Apple has built
so much around the event, around the reveal, the announcement, and you
really lose the magic if people know what's coming; if people know
what's behind the curtain, it's not as magical an event."
The final candidate for disruption? Computing, once again. Though Bill Gates introduced tablet computers
in 2001, they went nowhere – but Apple took them up as a research
project, and dusted them off for the January 2010 launch of the iPad. A
computer you could carry, operated by touch, with a 10-hour battery
life, that ran on "apps" – none of it was like the past. And Apple sold
them by the tens of millions, while would-be rivals struggled. "Our
competitors are looking at this [tablet market] like it's the next PC
market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC
devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive," he
said, pacing the stage in one of his last public appearances in March.
"The hardware and software need to intertwine more than they do on a PC.
We think we're on the right path with this."
The iPad is changing
how people work and play; newspapers and magazines are desperate to
find ways onto it and to make money. The latest forecasts suggest Apple
will dominate the market at least until 2014 – even with Microsoft,
which as in the mobile market and music player market, is following its
lead with a new iPad-like "Metro" interface for its next version of
Windows, due next year.
All the devices had one crucial thing in
common: people fell in love with them. They felt passionately about
them, in a way the world had never seen before. "Touch is a very
important sense; a lot of human emotion is built around touching
objects, other people, touching things," Don Norman, co-founder of
Neilsen/Norman Group, said. "I think that we've lost something really
big when we went to the abstraction of a computer with a mouse and a
keyboard, it wasn't real, and the telephone was the same, it was this
bunch of menus and people got lost in the menus and buttons to push and
it felt like a piece of technology. Whereas the iPhone felt like a piece
of delight. It really is neat to go from one page to the other not by
pushing a button but by swiping your hand across the page … it is more
intimate. Think of it not as a swipe, think of it as a caress."
The
one challenge Jobs couldn't beat was life's finite span. "No one wants
to die," Jobs told the Stanford graduates in 2005. "Even people who want
to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it
should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of
life. It is Life's change agent."
The cancer that eventually
killed him was initially diagnosed in October 2003. At first, the
doctors thought it was pancreatic cancer – which typically kills in six
to 12 months. "My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in
order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die." But it was
neuroendocrine cancer, a more treatable form. Yet – ironically for
someone working in a company working on the most advanced engineering –
Jobs, a lifelong pescatarian (eating fish and vegetables) didn't seek
medical intervention until summer 2004. That seemed to have quelled the
problem – but in 2009 he needed a liver transplant, and the
immunosuppressant drugs required appear to have let the cancer back.
In
January 2011 he took extended medical leave from the company he had
co-founded, saying plaintively in his departure note "I love Apple so
much".
The questions now will turn to Apple, and its future –
though they are exactly the same as those which were posed when Jobs
stepped aside, finally acknowledging his illness, in August. Can it be
the same creative force without him? Can those in charge find new
industries to revolutionise, in the way that Jobs did with personal
computing, films, music, telephony and most recently newspaper and
magazine reading through the iPad?
Put like that, it is the
tallest of tall orders; in retrospect it seems amazing that it happened
at all. Much may depend on whether those inside the company can stay
true to Jobs's parting advice to the Stanford graduates. "Stay hungry,"
he said. "Stay foolish."
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