Yet more on Jobs

Rico says you'd think the guy had done something to change the world...

To start off, David Pogue has a column in The New York Times on technology:

When Steve Jobs resigned as the chief executive of Apple on Wednesday, his note to the public and the Apple board was short and classy. The gist was this: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” As you can imagine, this news is rocking the world, and not just the tech world. Jobs, after all, has almost single-handedly reshaped a stunning range of industries: music, television, movies, software, cellphones, and cloud computing. The products he’s shepherded into existence with single-minded vision read like a Top Ten list, or a Top Fifty list, of the world’s most successful inventions: Macintosh. iPod. iPhone. iTunes. iMovie. iPad. He’s done pretty well for Apple stockholders, too. Ten years ago, Apple’s stock was at $9 a share; today, it’s $376. Apple is neck-and-neck with Exxon Mobil for the title of world’s most valuable company. Most of the reactions online today read like obituaries— for Steve Jobs, if not for Apple. Is that appropriate? Well, only Jobs’ inner circle knows how sick he actually is. (He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, had a liver transplant in 2009 and has had health troubles ever since.) But nobody, not even Jobs, can say for sure whether Apple can still be Apple without him at the helm. There are three reasons that it might — and one big reason that it might not. The good news: Firstly, Jobs isn’t leaving Apple. He’ll remain as chairman of the Apple board. Tim Cook, who’s been Apple’s director of operations for seven years, will take over as chief executive. (He’s been acting CEO since January.) You can bet that, as chairman, Jobs will still be the godfather. He’ll still be pulling plenty of strings, feeding his vision to his carefully built team, and weighing in on the company’s compass headings. Secondly, the tech world doesn’t turn on a dime. Apple’s pipeline is already stuffed with at least a couple of years’ worth of Jobs-directed products. In the short term, you won’t see any difference in Apple’s output of cool, popular inventions. Thirdly, even if Jobs isn’t sitting at every design meeting, ripping apart or heartily embracing each idea presented to him, his tastes, methods, and philosophies are deeply entrenched in the company’s blood. In Silicon Valley, success begets success. And at this point, few companies have as high a concentration of geniuses— in technology, design, and marketing— as Apple. Leaders like the design god Jonathan Ive and the operations mastermind Tim Cook won’t let the company go astray. So it’s pretty clear that for the next few years, at least, Apple will still be Apple without Jobs as involved as he’s been for years. But, despite these positive signs, there’s one heck of a huge elephant in the room— one unavoidable reason why it’s hard to imagine Apple without Jobs steering the ship: personality. His personality made Apple Apple. That’s why no other company has ever been able to duplicate Apple’s success. Even when Microsoft or Google or Hewlett-Packard tried to mimic Apple’s every move, run its designs through the corporate copying machine, they never succeeded. And that’s because they never had such a single, razor-focused, deeply opinionated, micromanaging, uncompromising, charismatic, persuasive, mind-blowingly visionary leader. By maintaining so much control over even the smallest design decisions, by anticipating what we all wanted even before we did, by spotting the promise in new technologies when they were still prototypes, Steve Jobs ran Apple with the nimbleness of a start-up company, even as he built it into one of the world’s biggest enterprises. “I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it,” Jobs wrote in his resignation letter. That’s a wonderful endorsement. But really? Can he really mean that Apple’s days will be brighter and more innovative without him in the driver’s seat? Tim Cook gets rave reviews as an executive and numbers guy. But is he a Jobs-style visionary? Does he have Jobs-style charisma? Does he have a Jobsian reality distortion field? Before the iTunes Store opened, would he have been able to convince the record companies to sell their music for a buck a song? In 2005, would he have had the force of personality to make Cingular redesign its voice-mail system for the iPhone’s visual voice mail? In 2009, would he have been able to cow AT&T into offering a no-contract-required, month-at-a-time data plan for the iPad? Will he have the crazy confidence to kill off technologies he sees as dying, as Jobs has over and over again (floppy drive, dial-up modem, and, in Mac OS X Lion, even faxing)? Does he know where the puck of public taste will come to rest two years from now? Five years from now? There’s an awful lot of Steve Jobs in Apple, and an incredible amount of talent at its Cupertino headquarters. So, no matter what happens, Apple will not slowly sink into a directionless, uncharacterizable, spread-thin blob like, say, Yahoo or Hewlett-Packard or Microsoft. But what will happen when Jobs’ pipeline is no longer full, and when his difficult, brilliant, charismatic, future-shaping personality is no longer the face of Apple? It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever see another fifteen years of blockbuster, culture-changing hits like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, from Apple or anyone else. And that’s really, really sad. Thank you, Mr. Jobs, for an incredible run. The worlds of culture, media and technology have never seen anything like you. In your new role, we wish you health, rest and happiness and, whenever you feel up to it, the opportunity to let Apple know where the puck will come to rest.

Then Claire Cain Miller has an article, also in The New York Times:

Steven P. Jobs— domineering, short-tempered, and anything but warm and fuzzy— has done something few business people in history have ever accomplished: engender genuine affection. His decision to step down as chief executive of Apple brought people to tears, inspired loving tributes to him on the Web, and even had some adoring customers flocking to Apple stores on Thursday to share their sentiments with other fans of Macs, iPhones, and iPads. “Through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer,” wrote Om Malik, the prominent technology blogger. “I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.” Andrew Baughen, a church vicar from London who paused during his San Francisco vacation to shop at an Apple store after he heard the news, said he was praying for Jobs. Apple, he said, “is not a corporation. It’s more like a family, a movement. I’d like to meet him in heaven and say, ‘Thank you.’” Business leaders, whether fictional like Ebenezer Scrooge and Gordon Gekko, or real like Rupert Murdoch or Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, are usually regarded with considerably less warmth, as rapacious rather than revered. “It’s unusual right here, right now, given that Americans’ feelings about business are just north of their feelings about Congress,” said Nancy F. Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School. That Jobs is seriously ill gave the tributes a poignancy and sense of foreboding. But the aloof man in a black turtleneck— who spent the last month on a yacht with his family, according to people with knowledge of his whereabouts— also managed to foster familial emotions among those who work in technology and business and ordinary people who use Apple products. “Every decade or so, an icon emerges who both has a Midas touch and is in an industry that is in our collective consciousness,” said Jon Kulok, co-founder of Edge Research, a marketing research firm for corporations and nonprofits. “However, unlike those figures, he goes out at the top of his game, and some of the commentary today reflects his going out on top.” There were hundreds of thousands of messages shared online about Steve Jobs after his announcement on Wednesday, nearly all of them positive, according to NetBase, which analyzes social media commentary. On Twitter, many of the posts expressed love for Jobs, an emotion that rarely surfaces in business chatter. Part of the reason, analysts said, is that people love Apple products in a way that they do not love other products they use everyday, whether toothbrushes, toasters, or BlackBerrys. And Jobs as a chief executive is uniquely connected to Apple’s creations. “What makes Steve Jobs particularly special is it’s as if he personally handed you an iPhone and an iPad. So to many consumers it feels like a gift from a family member,” said Jon A. Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University. As a result, Apple customers feel like they have a personal connection with the man, even though the company is highly secretive and Jobs is very private. While Jobs’ business style— he is well known for terse e-mails and browbeating tactics— has earned him critics over the years, even many of them stopped to praise him on Thursday. One sometimes critic, Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate agency, wrote on the company’s blog: “I still remember exactly where I was, standing in a Dolores Street apartment with a cereal bowl in my hand, when he came on television to say a competitor had no poetry. It made me think poetry had a place in business and that in turn made me think I had a place in business, too.” Dario Fiorillo, who went to an Apple store in San Francisco to buy an iPod while visiting from Italy, said: “Everyone I have spoken with about it is shocked and sad. We all feel like we have a relationship with Steve Jobs.” Apple’s aura of mystery makes Jobs that much more alluring, analysts and Apple fans said. His against-all-odds personal story also makes him sympathetic and admirable. He was fired from Apple before returning and transforming it into a juggernaut, and he has continued to work through pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant. Koehn of Harvard said that love for corporate chiefs, while unusual in its excess, was not unprecedented. Lee A. Iacocca, who created the Mustang before Ford fired him, and then joined Chrysler and saved it from bankruptcy, had a similar following three decades ago. His story, of a victorious second act and of products that captured Americans’ hearts, bears similarities to that of Jobs. Others compared Jobs to Thomas Edison. The outpouring of public admiration for Jobs resembles what the inventor and businessman received, said Paul Israel, director of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University. And, like Jobs, Edison was a master of marketing himself and his products. “People expected that the Edison technology, whatever it was, would be the best technology,” Israel said, “and I think that’s what Steve Jobs represents to a lot of people.”

Then Verne Kopytoff and David Streitfeld have an article in The New York Times about Tim Cook:

Proposition 1: Steven P. Jobs is a visionary who ranks among the greatest American inventors. Proposition 2: Apple will keep churning out the hits under his successor, Timothy D. Cook. These two notions, one indisputably true and the other somewhere between a prediction and a hope, dominated the discussion of Apple the day after Jobs stepped down as its chief executive, saying he could no longer effectively run it. Even Silicon Valley, long accustomed to seeing outsize personalities run a company one moment and be gone the next, has never seen a transition quite like this. Apple tried to stress that it was business as usual. Cook, the new chief executive, sent a message to employees, saying: “Apple is not going to change.” Not immediately, perhaps. Cook should have it relatively easy for the next couple of years, most commentators agreed. The company will keep putting out phones, tablets, and computers that are faster, thinner, and lighter than those that came before. As the former chief operating officer, Cook has plenty of experience in securing a supply of cutting-edge parts that will make this possible. But, at a certain point, if Apple wants to retain or even extend its $350 billion stock market valuation, the Apple executives must channel Mr. Jobs and think up a new product— like the iPod, iPhone, or iPad— that is in a different category altogether. They will have to see the future and make it real. Silicon Valley is founded on this notion, that kids in a garage can build something that will topple the existing order. Indeed, that is Apple’s own story. But it is much harder to take huge risks when you’re no longer in a garage, but running a 50,000-employee company. Cook knows this. At Apple, he once said, “we take risks knowing that risk will sometimes result in failure, but without the possibility of failure there is no possibility of success.” Now he will have the chance— probably many chances— to take those risks. Many who watch Apple closely say they think he is up to the challenge. “I would lean toward an optimistic view,” said Michael Maccoby, a management consultant and author of the book The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership. “Steve Jobs is a hard act to follow but not an impossible one. I see so many positive factors here. Apple has created a platform, a technology, patents, processes. It’s created the Apple stores. It’s created attitudes among customers.” Still, genius on the Jobs level is not exactly plentiful. “Steve could build something beautiful and take all of the fright out of it. What the early Macs did was say a computer is just a tool, anyone can use it,” said Jay Elliot, an early Apple executive. “He’s leaving Apple with a long-term vision that his successors will implement,” said Elliot, who has written a book on Jobs’ leadership style. “But in three or five years they’re going to have to find some other visionaries.” Investors seem not to be looking that far ahead. Apple’s stock, which slid in after-hours trading on Wednesday when the news was first released, fell only modestly Thursday, even as the overall market stumbled, closing down 0.7 percent, at $373.72. They may be drawing comfort from the fact that Jobs is still around as chairman. He was on the Apple campus on Wednesday for a board meeting, according to a person with knowledge of his whereabouts. Cook, with his soft-spoken demeanor, is at an advantage because his personality is the opposite of Jobs’, who was mercurial, said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. They would otherwise be compared, and Cook would inevitably be described as “Steve Light”.  “It’s better to be different than a second-rate version of what the last person was,” Pfeffer said. He compared the situation to that of Southwest Airlines, whose colorful co-founder, Herbert D. Kelleher, eventually stepped down and was replaced by a more sedate executive, Gary C. Kelly. Apple, continuing its tradition of being close-mouthed, did not make Cook, 50, available for an interview. In a commencement address at Auburn University last year, Cook, who graduated from the school, described his decision to join Apple in 1998 as the most significant of his life and one that allowed him to engage in “truly meaningful work”.  Joining Apple was not obvious at the time, he said, because of its precarious state, which made many people think it was on the road to bankruptcy. A chief executive, whom he did not name, told Cook that he’d be a fool to leave Compaq, where he was vice president of corporate materials. His ultimate decision was not an obvious one, he conceded, adding that engineers are taught to make decisions analytically and without emotion. But Cook, who speaks with remnants of a Southern drawl, said: “There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate— when a particular course of action just feels right.” Compaq, which seemed so solid to that friend issuing the warning, no longer exists. In 2002 it was bought by Hewlett-Packard, itself a troubled company these days. There are no sure things in technology for longer than about a month. Fortunately for Cook, Apple has a number of top executives in place who can help him carry on the Jobs legacy, as long as they stick around. “Steve was smart enough to surround himself with very strong talent to do things that he wasn’t as good at or to execute the vision he had,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee. “That team is intact. The challenge is to keep it in place.” Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, plays a critical role at the company in perfecting the look and feel of its products. British by birth, he joined Apple in 1996, and has led the team that designed the iPhone, iPad, and iMac. “He is responsible for everything down to the look and feel,” Wu said. “Steve helped him sculpt it to the end product.” Philip W. Schiller, senior vice president of marketing, is another important executive who helped lift Apple from near bankruptcy in the late 1990s. Apple has turned its image and sales around during his fourteen-year tenure. One top Apple executive has already announced his departure. Ron Johnson, who has been in charge of Apple’s thriving retail stores, said in June that he would be leaving to join J. C. Penney as its chief executive. The spotlight, for better or worse, will be on Cook and his willingness to take a risk on what could be the company’s next big thing. “The path between the iPad and iPhone can carry them a long way,” said A.M. Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But, at the same time, you have to ask, is there something beyond the iPhone? Is it in the living room or a blend of the PC and the tablet? Do they have that next defining great product?”

Rico says he feels like Forrest Gump when he reads these articles, having been at ground zero for all this (hell, he even dated Janie Packard in high school)... But, no matter what happens, it can't be as bad as the Sculley and Spindler and Amelio interregnum, when Rico worked at Apple and Claris. But leaving Apple for J.C. Penney? Isn't that the reverse of the "do you want to give up soda water?" question, when Sculley left Pepsi for Apple?
But maybe the whole thing is really the Book of Job (not Jobs), where an extremely righteous man named Job, who was very prosperous and had seven sons and three daughters (or a lot of Macintosh products), when God gives Satan permission to test Job's righteousness, so Satan smites him with dreadful boils. (Or, in this case, cancer.)
The story ends happily, with Job restored to health, with a new family.
Rico says let's hope that Jobs' story ends happily as well.