What Made Steve Jobs a Giant Among the World

8/4/2019 What Made Steve Jobs a Giant Among the World

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The Guardian UK

Saturday 27 August 2011 Page 1

What made Steve Jobs a giant among the world's greatest

communicators?

Steve Jobs rescued Apple from near oblivion and turned it into a byword for quality,

production values and beauty

Steve Jobs in his Los Angeles office in 1981, five years after he co-founded Apple. Photograph: Tony Korody/Corbis

Steve Jobs's resignation was the most discussed in corporate history. Because his

illness has been public knowledge for so long, and because Wall Street and the

commentariat viewed his health as being synonymous with that of his company, for

years Apple share prices have fluctuated with its CEO's temperature. If all the

"Whither Apple without Jobs?" articles were laid end to end, they would co ver quite a

distance but they never reached a conclusion.

Still, you could understand the hysteria. After all, he's the man who rescued Apple

from the near-death experience it underwent in the mid -1990s. When he came back


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in 1996, the company seemed headed for oblivion. Granted, it was a distinctive,

quirky outfit, but one that had been run into the ground by mediocre executives who

had no vision, no strategy and no operating system to power its products into the

future.

Jobs came back because Apple bought NeXT, the computer workstation company

he had started after being ousted by the Apple board in 1985. By acquiring NeXT,

Apple got two things: the operating system that became OS X, the software that

underpinned everything Apple has made since; and Jobs as "interim CEO" at a

salary of $1 a year. But it was still a corporate minnow: a BMW to Microsoft's Ford.

Fifteen years later, Apple had become the most valuable company in the world.

It was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Because only an obsessive,

authoritarian, visionary genius could have achieved such a transformation, it's easy

to see why Wall Street has had difficulty imagining Apple without Jobs. He was, after

all, the only CEO in the world with rock star status. And Apple is a corporate

extension of his remarkable personality, much as Microsoft was of Bill Gates's. But

Jobs has something Gates never had a reputation so powerful as to create a

reality distortion field around him.

This field has blinded people to some under -appreciated facts. While it is true, for

example, that Apple under Jobs's influence is probably the world's best industrial

design outfit, it is also a phenomenally well -run company. Proof of that comes from

various sources. For example, not only does it regularly dream up beautiful,

functional and fantastically complex products, but it gets them to market in working


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order, on time and to budget; and it has continually done so despite exploding

demand. Compare that with slow-motion car crashes such as Hewlett Packard's

Touchpad, RIM's BlackBerry Playbook or Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Then there's the way that Apple in the teeth of industry scepticism made such an

astonishing success of bricks-and-mortar retailing with its high-street stores. Or

ponder the fact that it became the world's most valuable corporation without incurring

a single cent of debt. Instead, it sits atop a $78bn (48bn) cash mountain: enough to

buy Tesco and BT and still have loose change. Compare that with the casino

capitalism practised by so many MBA-educated company leaders in the US. And

finally there is the stranglehold Apple now has on a number of crucial modern

markets computers, online music, mobile devices and smart phones.

If you ask people what Steve Jobs is best remembered for, most will name a

particular product. If they're from my (baby boomer) generation, it will probably be

the Apple Macintosh, a computer that changed many of our lives in the 1980s.

Younger generations will credit him with the iMac, iTunes and the iPod. Toda y's

teenagers will revere him for the iPhone. But there's a good argument that Jobs's

greatest creation is Apple itself in its post -1996 incarnation. If that's true, the great

test of his career legacy is whether the organisation he built around his values will

endure and remain faithful to them.

What are those values? He usually expressed them as aphorisms and, as news of

his resignation spread , people began raking through them for clues. Many focused

on what he said to John Sculley, CEO of Pepsi, when he was trying to persuade him


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to run Apple.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water," he asked, "or do you

want to change the world?" (Sculley accepted the invitation, then presided over

Jobs's expulsion.) But for Jobs it was a serious question. What he was asking, as the

blogger Umair Haque put it, was: "Do you really want to spend your days slaving

over work that fails to inspire, on stuff that fails to count, for reasons that fail to touch

the soul of anyone?"

Jobs is famously fanatical about design. In part this is about how things look (though

for him it also involves simplicity of use). When the rest of the industry was building

computers as grey, rectangular metal boxes, for example, he was prowling

department stores and streets looking for design metaphors. For a time he thought

the Mac should be like a Porsche. At another stage he wanted it to be like the

Cuisinart food-processor. When the machine finally appeared in 1984, Jack Tramiel,

the grizzled macho-boss of Commodore, thought it looked like a girly device that

would be best sold in boutiques. What Tramiel did not realise and Jobs did was

that ultimately computers would be consumer products and people would pay a huge

premium for classy design.

In that sense he is the polar opposite of the MBA-trained, bean-counting executive.

"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting," he said in 1996, when the company was on

the rocks. "The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."

At another point he said: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of


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drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it

faces the wall and nobody will ever see it."

This delight in elegant work has always been the most striking aspect of Jobs's

celebrated speeches introducing new Apple products in San Francisco. As he cooed

over the iMac or the iPhone or the iPad, words like "beautiful", "amazing" and

"awesome" tumbled out. For once they didn't sound like cynical, manipulative

corporation-speak. He spoke from the heart.

It goes without saying that he is impossible to work with; most geniuses are. Yet he

has built and retained the respect of the most remarkable design team in living

memory, a group that has been responsible for more innovation than the rest of the

computer industry put together. For that reason, when the time comes to sum up

Jobs's achievements, most will portray him as a seminal figure in the computing

industry. But Jobs is bigger than that.

To understand why, you have to look at the major communications industries of the

20th century the telephone, radio and movies. As Tim Wu chronicles it in his

remarkable book, The Master Switch, each of these industries started out as an

open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of inc ompatible standards, crummy

technology and chancers. The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came

when a charismatic entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher

production values and greater ease of use.


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With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide

network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial

tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph

Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system.

Jobs is from the same mould. He believes that using a computer should be

delightful, not painful; that it should be easy to seamlessly transfer music from a CD

on to a hard drive and thence to an elegant portable player; that mobile phones

should be powerful handheld computers that happen to make voice calls; and that a

tablet computer is the device that is ushering us into a post -PC world. He has offered

consumers a better proposition than the rest of the industry could and they jumped

at it. That's how he built Apple into the world's most valuable company. And it's why

he is really the last of the media moguls.

This article is written by John Naughton. John Naughton (born 1946) is an Irish academic, journalist and writer based

in the United Kingdom since 1968. He has worked at the Open University since 1972, and has held the title of

Professor of the Public Understanding ofTechnology since 2006

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What Made Steve Jobs a Giant Among the World