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Apple After Jobs
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jul 28, 2008 08:14 AM
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
recoiledsnake writes "The connection between Apple and Steve Jobs is unlike any other brand and CEO relationship in corporate America, maybe the world. While Bill Gates has successfully transitioned himself away from his day job at Microsoft, can Apple do without Jobs at all? Once word started circulating that Jobs may be ill, Apple stock took a considerable hit, dropping more than $10 a share. And when Mr. Jobs was absent from last week's quarterly earnings conference call, the questions started again — and the stock fell again. What does this mean for corporate users of Apple for whom switching costs are high? Can Apple continue innovating in Job's absence?"
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But more importantly (Score:5, Interesting)
Can the press, or maybe slashdot, stop speculating??
Maybe today is Apple trifecta day, you never know...
Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually he was doing the Next thing - Pixar was more or less just an investment.
Next wasn't a huge success. So one might as well ask if Jobs can do well without apple.
Either way this 'article' is just gossip.
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Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Informative)
Next wasn't a huge success...
...until he sold NextStep to Apple for big bucks, and wrapped it up in Aqua and made OSX the Next Big Thing.
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Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that NeXT has been a huge success since they re-branded themselves as Apple.
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Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
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Socialism? (Score:4, Funny)
Apple After Jobs
I don't know what will happen to Apple after they abolish all their jobs. I gotta imagine it'd be something like pure socialism with people just doing whatever they feel like at the company and getting just enough to get by. No jobs at Apple would probably be a pretty bad move ... how would I start working there?
Perception - (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perception - (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think so (Score:4, Funny)
Stock movement != health indicator (Score:5, Informative)
Don't put much stock (hah!) in how people are betting APPL. The shorts got a hold of it early to try and shake out (successfully I might add) anyone with a tenuous grasp (those that bought recently, those that had unrealized gains). Look what happened after that 15 point down spike. It bounced back 10, and the following day totally filled the remaining gap.
Using 2 days of trading to predict the future of a company is less likely to work out for you than say... flipping a coin
Re:Stock movement != health indicator (Score:5, Insightful)
And the casual investor will get scalped. Don't be a casual investor. Be a trader, or find a less risky long position. News moves markets but only so far, and most casual traders play news totally bass ackwards anyway.
Also, you said it... "facts will be blown out of proportion and influence investors"
That's called an "opportunity" where I come from. The market is very information efficient. If it's blown out of proportion, it will be blown back into proportion.
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Innovation vs Confidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)
he has already transitioned the day-to-day operation to his younger brother, Raúl.
Oh, wait a minute, that's Cuba...
Re:Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, that's not fair, Castro and Jobs are plenty different. One is a maniacal, autocratic, narcissistic dictator/zealot who rules his followers with an iron fist and who is admired only by scruffy underemployed socialists who spend all their time in coffee shops, and the other was president of Cuba.
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Innovate... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to bash Apple here, but I'm not sure innovate is necessarily the right word to use. Product design seems more appropriate. So much of Apple's product line seems to be UI and attractive exterior, as opposed to Really New Ideas (tm).
Don't get me wrong. That's two things more than anyone else seems to be doing these days.
Re:Innovate... (Score:5, Funny)
#> tar -czvf back.tar.gz *.*
If you're currently backing up to the same volume as what you're backing up, you might just one day find out that Time Machine is an innovation ;P
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Re:Innovate... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that a lot of people underestimate the utility of usability even for technical nerdy types.
I'm pretty nerdy. I can tell you the two things wrong with the tar command you showed and exactly why Time Machine is different. I can tell you how Time Machine works, the hacks that Apple has done on their filesystem to accommodate it and many other UNIXy things, and a great many deep system internals. I am perfectly at home with the UNIX command line.
And yet, I think Time Machine is the best thing ever.
Why? Because it makes backups easy. Before TM, my backups were sporadic. Once a week, if I could remember. When Leopard was released, I went out and bought a new 500GB hard drive, pointed TM to it, and suddenly I'm getting backups constantly throughout the day with no human intervention. Sure, I could have set up a cron job, but it would have been annoying and error prone and it wouldn't have done the cool incremental backups that TM does.
I could duplicate a lot of what Apple has done for me. But that would mean that I would spend all day tinkering with my computer instead of actually getting things done with it. Since Apple has done it for me, and made it really easy to use, I can use their work and use my time to do more useful things.
The great thing about OS X is that it's powerful enough to satisfy a UNIX geek, but it offers enough usability that a UNIX geek who just wants to get some work done can do so.
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Philosphy (Score:5, Insightful)
Jonathan Ive (Score:5, Informative)
Jonathan Ive [wikipedia.org]
Responsible for look and feel of virtually all Apple products for the last ten years, is as much responsible for Apple's resurgence as the man Jobs himself.
Old news though is that he himself is already positioned as a possible successor to the big man.
Jonathan Ive groomed to take over from Jobs [engadget.com]
If that happens, I'd feel pretty confident about Apple and their continued ability to innovate in create great products.
Job's absence (Score:5, Funny)
Can Apple continue innovating in Job's absence?
Wow! I knew Apple were early starters, but I had no idea they were operating in Biblical times!
Steve's rarely at the earnings calls (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but with a twist (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a research project on Polaroid and came to the conclusion that, like Jobs and Apple, Polaroid was essentially Land's company and after he died, it spiraled rapidly downhill. They had some amazing stuff and once their "vision" had been lost, they were caught short by all the tech that came after.
With Jobs and Apple, I think the situation is the same only insofar as, pointed out in the article and elsewhere, Jobs and Apple are synonymous. The difference, I see, is that Land was the chief guy people expected all tech advances to come; once Land left there wasn't any one person to keep their eye on the industry. Jobs, however, is not the tech guy; he has a *lot* of good people who are clearly making great stuff, only to be held in check by Jobs until he's satisfied they "have a product".
Apple without Jobs would probably put out more products quicker, and that is the problem; Jobs is the "great floodgate" for a company that probably is literally bursting with cool, but unpolished, stuff that, if put out in the marketplace, would get a lot of buzz, but then probably sink under the weight of bugs.
Obviously Jobs can't be there forever, but unlike Microsoft that has been happy to throw everything and anything at the wall to see what sticks (and promise it'll stick better in the next version), Apple needs that special someone who can tell when a they "have a product", as well as be the human face to the company.
So yes, Apple can continue and prosper without Steve Jobs, so long as they find someone who is just like Steve Jobs.
Any takers?
Jobs isn't on conference calls (Score:5, Informative)
I guess submitter doesn't listen to many quarterly calls, because Steve is literally never on them, and certainly hasn't been in the last year. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, runs those calls. His not being on the Q3 call is simply business as usual, not something special.
counterproductive speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
Rob Enderle - Enough Said (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to see here but the ravings of a lunatic.
WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs' vision for the company, and the computer industry as a whole is what sets Apple apart from other technology companies. I'm sure Jobs can be replaced, but what happens if the wrong person takes over his job and wants to turn the company into another Microsoft?
Thinking Jobs does everything at Apple would be silly, but Jobs does enable those who work at Apple to do the kind of work they do. If, for example, Steve Balmer took over the reigns, it wouldn't be long before Apple was putting all their efforts into web searching.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone coming in after Jobs will be more concerned with not becoming "the guy that killed Apple" than in creating innovative products. Jobs plays to win. His successor will play to not lose and that will hurt Apple.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've read, Jobs has a pretty decent plan in place to arrange the right successor when that time comes. As I'm sure most of us know or can determine, Apple uses their software (practically as a loss leader) to sell hardware, whereas Microsoft primarily leverages other people's hardware sales to sell its own software. Regardless of your thoughts about either approach, you need to remember that they're completely different and almost completely incompatible with each other. Microsoft's goal, as (primarily) a software company is to make it as easy as possible to get it on each and every piece of hardware in existence, and all things considered they do a pretty good job with it. As Apple makes nearly all of their money on hardware, their competitive advantage is Mac OS X, so it's obviously in their best interest to keep it limited to their own hardware.
Point being that the two business models are so fundamentally different that there would have to be a screw-up of monumental proportions in order for Jobs' successor to try using Microsoft's business model with Apple. Ballmer would obviously be a terrible choice, but that has just as much to do with Apple employees sitting on bouncy balls and rainbows instead of chairs as Ballmer's complete inability to strategically run a company.
Of course, if by "turn the company into another Microsoft" you mean creating a monstrously profitable giant - well, isn't that the goal of every corporation out there?
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Wii has sold more units than the XBox 360. The Wii is sold at a higher profit margin than the XBox 360. The Wii was released a year later than the XBox 360. The Wii continues to outsell the XBox 360.
The Wii is the clear winner of this race. The XBox 360 may be quite successful from a consumer point of view, but from a financial point of view, it is not a smashing success. It doesn't hold a candle to the Wii. It has in fact been blown right off the playing field.
Also, a single example, even if it were valid, hardly disputes the grandparent post's point.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm all "power to the engineers" but let's say this another way.
You can work for a company that micromanages your time to 5 minute intervals. You will help coworker A debug his system for 2 hours. You will then work on a cross-team initiative to replace the corporate tools with duct tape and sandpaper. Then you will innovate for exactly 1 hour, on the subject of how to make product U enclosure shinier without adding cost. Etc. In this environment you're just turning the corporate crank, any creativity you may have had will be replaced with cheap corporate synthetic. You're doing what your CEO thinks he needs to succeed. You may have this idea for a cool smart phone, but it doesn't help your CEO meet his OPEX goals, or it doesn't give a 5% Y/Y increase in business unit Q's gross margin, or whatever. You present your idea, people give you weird looks like "WTF is that", maybe ask "How much money will this make?" and you don't know, because no one has built it before, so it sounds like risk and we don't like risk. Marketing doesn't help you, because they spend all their time doing the same thing you do, and the idea is lost.
Or you can work for a company that insists you develop a product. They don't know what product, figure it out. You, your teammates or that really clever guy in the basement says "Hey, we can make a really awesome phone, all we need is a major cellular telco, and a few million dollars". The idea flows upstream, someone sees the vision and potential, the idea gains momentum and voila you're funded. You do your design thing, probably get some user interface stuff wrong, probably miss some polish. You get a proto, the CEO works out a deal with otherwise impossible to approach cellular telco's and they agree to support the project. Managers sit in your lap to get you to behave for a few months to a year doing disciplined design and engineering, but out comes a nice product.
So yes, the CEO and the middle management he chooses, matters a whole lot, even if you believe your company has a lot of smart engineers.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously you do not have any corporate experience with HP at all. We are buying servers from them and we have a number of (acquired) their software products that we run. For instance, the Mercury Load Runner testing suite. I know they do a pretty good business, so I do not understand your "printer ink companies" comment.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
The average joe blow's experience with HP is, "Those guys that make cheap computers and laptops?" or, "Those %!@#ing ink cartridges cost an arm and a leg."
Not, "Wow, what fantastic load testing and server software suites they have!"
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Funny)
HP is also quite popular for their laptops
Not to mention their workstations.
But HP's sauce [icons.org.uk] is the best of all!
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Jobs' return, Apple would be what HP/Compaq are today - shitty printer ink companies.
Comments like those just demonstrate the typical ignorance of a Mac fanatic.
HP had $104 billion in revenues in 2007, Apple had $24 billion.
HP had 309000 employees in 2007, Apple had 17000.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which lets Apple make $1.411.764 per employee, while HP made only $336.569.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Jobs' return, Apple would be what HP/Compaq are today - shitty printer ink companies.
Comments like those just demonstrate the typical ignorance of a Mac fanatic.
HP had $104 billion in revenues in 2007, Apple had $24 billion.
HP had 309000 employees in 2007, Apple had 17000.
Those figures don't mean anything. On their own it says to me that HP only made 4 times as much in revenue than Apple while having 18 times the manpower.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
HP is a company that leverages its buyouts and established product lines. They may have a huge R&D budget but they don't get any results out of it. They used to have a big high-tech instrumentation division but I understand they no longer do. They utterly lack vision, and for their huge size, I can't think of any market where they hold initiative except maybe for imaging. Even their server and storage offerings are mostly the result of acquisitions.
I suppose they're a good company if you care about market share and financials. But in terms of initiative, they have nothing on Apple, which has a track record of shaping the personal electronics industry.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't be ridiculous. There is no doubt that the success of Apple has been closely tied to Jobs' involvement with the company. Jobs has been the creative brain behind most of the companies success products.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Informative)
Which is supported by the fact that many [wikipedia.org] of their successful [wikipedia.org] products [wikipedia.org] were not created in-house, but acquired and then polished internally. Jobs would have to be one helluva creative guy if he could be the creative force behind something without actually having contact with anyone working on it.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but remember what happened when he left before?
As I recall, Apple grew for a decade afterwards, while Jobs went off to form NeXT which struggled to survive and faced imminent demise before being bought back out by Apple. It's true that Apple faltered for the few years before Jobs re-joined the company, but it had a pretty good run from 1985 (when Jobs left) to 1995 (when Apple lost its GUI IP fight on a technicality and Windows 95 cemented Microsoft's GUI dominance).
I'm not saying that Jobs hasn't been wonderful-- much better than I would have expected-- for Apple and its shareholders. But bringing in another Sculley wouldn't exactly be the worst thing in the world, although I'd much prefer an Ive.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
that's just it will it? in 1984 the Apple BOD fired Steve Jobs and the company nearly went out of business a decade later right until they brought Steve Jobs back.
While Steve doesn't design anything, he is the asshole who pushes products to be better than anything else. Johnathon Ive is the best person to replace Steve. Anyone who can spend months testing materials just so the click wheel on the ipod has the right feel is a good choice.
The iPhone isn't the first touch screen phone, or PDA. It is however the first one to get the UI right. I have handed my iPhone to computer nerds and neophytes. They all have picked up the UI in minutes.
Apple is very controlling and i don't buy DRM encumbered music. I will however buy a well designed product no matter who actually produces it.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
'Johnathon Ive is the best person to replace Steve. Anyone who can spend months testing materials just so the click wheel on the ipod has the right feel is a good choice.'
Though it's kind of a pity he didn't spend a couple of hours testing other materials so that the back of the iPod wouldn't get scratched to hell just by looking at it...
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. If there is one company that is its leader it's Apple. Of course Jobs doesn't personally do the engineering, but what he does is get people to work long hours for normal pay to be part of something that they feel is bigger than themselves. He also inspires tons of people to buy products for the simple reason they are cool. I obviously don't know him personally, but from the stories I've read he has an exacting, perfectionist personality that he uses to drive all of these engineers and thus the products.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs set up the culture at Apple, and does do a lot of stuff that the average CEO wouldn't. I think the secret to Apple after Jobs will be to look within for a new CEO, or at least to a closely related company. Promote someone from the ranks, or maybe from Pixar, but don't go shopping for one of the usual business school grad CEOs that other companies seem to end up with.
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No software (Score:5, Insightful)
NeXT went belly-up because it was too innovative at the time. It was workstation-level hardware with high-capacity R/W optical drives, the stability and flexibility of Unix, and the ease-of-use of the Macintosh. They were excellent machines.
But, they were too expensive, so they didn't sell many units. The lack of hardware sales resulted in very few software products. The only great software for it was Lotus Improv (an extremely innovative spreadsheet program), Mathematica, FrameMaker, and Word Perfect. There was some other stuff, too, but those are the big ones I remember. (Other things, like WebObjects, never really took off, as they were also too expensive.)
But, NeXT still had a huge effect on the computer industry. The current Mac OS X is based largely on NeXTStep. Many of the concepts of the Windows 95/2000 interface came from the NeXT design. So, though NeXT the company wasn't very successful, NeXT the technology was a huge source of innovation that is still used today.
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Re:Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Great ideas are really not great until they are packaged in a fun and usable manner. Apple seems to be one of the only companies out there that understands that.
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