How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs 331
ThousandStars writes "The Wall Street Journal asks How Apple Could Survive Without Steve Jobs: 'Speculation about the continued reign of Mr. Jobs — which has popped up from time to time since his 2004 treatment for cancer — underscore how closely Apple's fashion-setting products are identified with its co-founder.'"
This goes for many companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh... Same thing could be said about Oracle or Microsoft. Answer is; it depends.
Re:This goes for many companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone is fighting his cancer and the media is already choosing a coffin?
Lame half baked article with sliding premise (Score:3, Insightful)
Rinse and repeat
Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Everytime I see a new Apple discussion - like before (and after) the iPhone introduction or now on various products - I see a big set of geeks just not GET IT. By it, I mean the popularity of Apple products, by doing a checklist feature comparison like the back of a software box - as if all checkmarks indicated the same quality. Not all checkmarks are created equal;)
Anyway, I would suggest that Apple look at how Fashion powerhouses handle succession, and not the typical technology company. Perhaps it would give them a better idea how to handle transistion in a creative enterprise and not just a purely technical one.
Inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
Already people are discussing Apple's time-line, and how poorly they did without Jobs. The real point is the product that turned Apple around was not a computer, but a music player. The reason the iPod did not exist sooner was because the technology did not exist. Hard drives could not be made that small, color LCD panels were too expensive for consumer use, battery life was too short, etc. So did Steve Jobs merely come back to Apple when the iPod was simply an inevitability? Was he responsible for that inevitability ending up under Apple's control instead of Sony or Pioneer, etc?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
But none that captured the public's mind share quite as much and in such a great way.
Apple would do a lot better if... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how fair TFA is but...
Apple would do a lot better in my department (one of the biggest departments at one of the biggest universities in the world) if they would get serious about enterprise support.
My gripes:
1) If my Xserv fails, I need to call Apple, they will possibly send parts or repairmen but they really want me to fix it myself using my spare kit. I just don't feel that is optimal compared to IBM server support.
2) Their volume discount is a total rip-off. Again, I am at a major university and our discount is basically the same as the Apple Education Store discount. It is really hard for me to justify my purchases and commitment to Apple.
3) On a related topic, I know months in advance what machines are coming out and can thus plan accordingly. Apple, with its flair for the dramatic, wants to keep all this hidden and secret. Again it really hurts my efforts when compared to IBM, Dell, and HP.
4) The Apple support network is a total joke compared to Microsoft or even Novell. Basically I have the same support that non-enterprise Linux has. My best sources are AFP548, MacEnterprise, and sometimes the Apple Support forums.
5) For those of us that have to integrate with a Microsoft world, AD-OD integration still has a long way to go. Apple seems to break their AD support with every other service pack. I can't believe this couldn't be done better. I know Microsoft has issues with their service packs, but honestly, does it have to be this bad?
Basically I feel that Apple is such a consumer company rather than enterprise. This hurts Apple penetration, bottom-line sales, and future buy-in from potential customers who want to use the same platform at home that they use at work.
Steve Jobs just can't get out of his own ego's way to let the correct thing happen. Matt Feeman, our sales rep, is a total waste yet has carried his job for many many years now. There really is no fun left in Apple and only diehard fanboys (myself?) can continue to run what is, IMHO, the Unix-like distributions.
Re:Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a significant part of computer sales for a season, and Apple's first real stab into non-design for years.
The iMac is part of how Apple has been so profitable, market at every price point, but have your low end lack features, so nobody can make do that need a little more. The iPod shuffle for example has less features than the original MP3 player (no screen), yet it is Apple, and cheap.
If you want a real MP3 player, you need to buy the overpriced Nano (well it fluctuates between reasonable and overpriced, depending on where it is in life cycle).
The iPod already dominated before the color screens even, it was just better looking, and smaller. There essentially isn't even a competing HD based MP3 player market anymore.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean not all check marks are as shiny as others?
No, I don't get it. The iPhone is not a quantum leap in smart phones. It's pretty, sure, apple design their stuff well, but it's not revolutionary. Neither is/was the iPod. More than that, apple take steps to lock people in to their software and hardware interfaces.
So yes, pretty, generally a good UI. However I'm damned if I'm running iTunes or letting Steve decide what I can do with my phone.
Life isn't just about checkmarks, but releasing a product with less checkmarks and then hyping it as the way forward gets to some folks.
Re:About as well as Disney survived with Walt (Score:3, Insightful)
I think we give Steve Jobs a bit to much credit. A hidden key part of Apples growth in Mac Sales, is the simple fact most of programs we run today are via (mostly, kinda sorta) open standards AKA the Web. Think about all those crazy applications that you had way back then before the late 90's. An Encyclopedia and Full dictionary, other resource applications all needed to be on physical media which you put in your system and run by your system. A slew of games even ones of cheap quality (even for the platform of the day) which offered about 1 day of amusement then you never ran it again. Everything normally talked to itself and rarely with other application. Even network protocols wouldn't talk cross system (NFS, SMB, Novell, AppleTalk...). It was an era that In order to be productive you needed one platform and only one. Having platform diversity would only create overhead and problems. Microsoft won that game, First by offering good enough quality for less price ($80.00 for Windows for workgroup, or $800.00 for NT vs. $8,000 for a unix system) (yes Unix system could be 10x better then NT however NT is good enough for what they wanted it for) Plus you can get Microsoft Products without being bound to any hardware manufacture. (Cheaper, more hardware choices, and gets the work done... A good deal)
This is why Apple was getting creamed at this time. Even if Jobs was still there he may have done a better job (with better hardware and software) but not enough. It took the popularity of the Web to really get Apple out of the slump. it started with the iMac (the colorful ones) sure the computer was cute and all, however its focus was the fact that most of the stuff you do on it will be via the web. Hence no CD Burner or Floppy Disk (And externals were expensive and USB Flash drives were not available). But it worked on the internet. In a time where the internet started to get past the Geeks only club. And with pressure from Linux, Java, Netscape, against Microsoft it opened developers eyes to the fact that we need to find ways to make software available to people not to computer platforms. Created an environment where people started thinking about making Web Applications vs. Application that you run on your PC. So now we have an enviroment where we can say go to Slashdot and interact on an equal level doesn't matter if you are Using a Mac, Linux, or Windows. Where if this was released before the web was common you would have a Slashdot application which you would run. Probably only being a Windows Only App. With perhaps a MacPort.
a man with a plan for better or worse (Score:5, Insightful)
The most efficient form of governance is a dictatorship. This is not to say that it is a universally ideal form of government -- for every example we have of an autocrat who was able to get what he wanted and happened to be correct, we can find many other examples of autocrats who got what they wanted and were dead wrong.
It is easier for a man of singular vision, foresight, and ambition to stand out as a dictator than as one of a committee but men of singular ignorance and venality tend to do less harm in committee form because they're like crabs in a bucket and it's hard for one to rise to preeminence and control.
By all accounts, Jobs is a bastard to work for. What makes it all the more galling is that is judgment calls are usually right so when your design needs more work, he'll tell you you're a fucking piece of shit, get the hell out of his sight, don't you fucking come back until you have something that doesn't make him want to vomit you cocksucker, you'll want to punch him in the throat. Yes, he could have been nicer about it, but by the time you finally come back with a design he likes, it'll also be the one the customers will go nuts for.
It's very rare to find that kind of person. When Jobs was booted out the first time, they brought in an airline executive as CEO. He didn't know anything about the industry and said all of Jobs' ideas weren't sticking to the knitting, were going out into left field and would waste money. Pragmatic business people agreed. Hell, I thought going into the music business when they were already struggling making computers was a bad idea. Looks like I was wrong.
What's driving Apple right now is a productive cult of personality. There's simply not a viable line of succession. Alexander the Great dies, the empire falls apart. Stalin dies, the empire lurches on but nobody in the party leadership will ever again risk letting someone gain that much power again. It's possible for a leader to rise up within the ranks of an existing organization and take it over with such force that you would think he was the founder. Jack Welch did that with GE. Because the market value went from $14 billion to $410 billion under his watch, he's lauded as a genius. Personally, I think he was more like an asshole who got lucky, got some breaks, and knew how to shaft the right people at the right time. He'd been picked as the golden boy to succeed to the leadership role by the previous CEO who later came to regret that decision because Jack poisoned the corporate culture much like a Carly Fiorina. Wall Street didn't seem to care because he made the trains run on time and that's all that mattered.
What's interesting is Microsoft seems to be struggling from both the lack of vision and the bureaucratic bloat that paralyzes large organizations and prevents meaningful action. This kind of strategic paralysis is usually the opening needed for a competitor to swoop in and steal the market. Apple would normally be in that position except for the huge questions concerning Jobs' prospects for this world. If both companies become wadded up with stupidity, will it finally become Linux's year for the desktop by default?
Vision, standards, focus (Score:4, Insightful)
Jobs does not do anything magical. It might have been his idea to make a better phone, but he did not design the iPhone.
Rather, he had the vision of how a phone would fit into the ``iLife,'' he held designs to high standards, and he made sure that everyone focused on integration with existing products and the consistency of the experience.
Standards and focus are what most people view as his ``dictator'' personality.
This is pretty much what, I feel anyway, Microsoft has always lacked.
They have no vision. Remember Ballmer scoffing the very notion that the iPhone would have any success at all, let alone surpass WinMo as it just did.
I cannot say that they have low standards per se. Rather, their standard is to let the user design their software (the focus groups that designed Vista; something about which Gates was proud).
They lack any sort of focus. Vista is a prime example of this. It is obvious when using Vista that no one had a plan. No one provided any focus. Compound this with the myriad of products Microsoft makes which barely even work each other...even in the same product family (incompatibilities between Mac Office and Win Office).
So, yeah, those are the three qualities I want to see in a successor to Jobs. There should be plenty of people at Apple with those qualities. Actually, there are plenty of those people anywhere...people like Ballmer just do not recognize them or think they are important. I trust Jobs to find an appropriate person to replace him.
Also, let's not forget to embrace change. Even someone like Jobs needs to be replaced eventually. They just have to be replaced carefully.
MacWorld etc (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect the ending of these big "look at the next big thing" conferences Apple runs on a regular basis are part of transitioning Jobs out of the public eye. They need to disconnect Steve Jobs from the "ergonomic/chic/cool/it just works", brand. His presentations enforce the assumption that Jobs and his product line are inextricably linked.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to say that, but when you take Apples "Less functional" product and set it next to a "More functional" product you can really see a difference.
I'm not a fan of their computers, and I don't think much of their design decisions there. But take the iPod vs Every other music player, and it's just sad. Sure, other had more space, sure others supported more codecs, but the iPod blows them away in usability and style (except in the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned annoyance of having to get a third party app to get music off the iPod on to a new computer.)
Likewise the iPhone. It's slick and intuitive. Sure there were more functional crackberries and palms out there, but they didn't have the full touchscreen, and they didn't have the same sort of development environment...Crippled as it is, people are lining up to make apps for the iPhone.
And what happens after the iPhone comes out? Everyone else gets a touchscreen phone. They look similar. They have the same or better features. And they just don't work as well. The Blackberry "Storm" is a dog...The software support is terrible, and it's not as responsive.
They make decisions that cause problems for high end users, but we are the niche, not everyone else. And techies are still getting the iPhone, they're just bitching about it.
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Lance's cycling team - Cofidis - gave him up for dead, too. In hindsight, I'm sure they still support that decision.
Re:About as well as Disney survived with Walt (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh (Score:3, Insightful)
isn't suicide by definition a voluntary act?
Re:This goes for many companies (Score:2, Insightful)
More than preparation (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked for an organization which was carved out of the main organization by the sheer force of will and vision of a single manager who became it's head. She then made life impossible for every type-A person in her organization and put very skillful and considerate but not type-A people in as her subbordinates.
everything worked great till she left for the next job. Then for ten years nothing got done, no initiatives lasted longer than 6 months everthing was adrift. A succession of managers drawn from her subborindates got us no where. Finally someone from the outside was brought it and things got a bit better.
The thing about imperious leaders is that they really get the job done. It matters less that they make perfect decisions but that they make a series of connected decisions related to a driving vision. if some decisions are sub-optimal they still are part of the path forward because no one is second guessing the slow progress and everybody is working as a team.
Jobs had both visions, aggression and a sense of style. Apple sells style but does john Ives have the cojones to command?
I can only judge shiller and Ives by their brief appearances but they seem a bit too jolly to me.
It's also not enough to be a tough guy. You actually have to have skills too. That's what happened when Jobs got forced out by the mangerial power plays. Tougher guys without jobs skill and understanding took over and ran it into the ground.
You need the whole package. Jobs is that guy. The question is not if he's trained his subordinates, but if he scared off all the type-A guys with real skill?
What about that dude that wrote Beos? Maybe he'd be someone with some vision and force of personality? How about some of those Execs that started TransMeta?
Or maybe Fake-Steve.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's easy to say that, but when you take Apples "Less functional" product and set it next to a "More functional" product you can really see a difference.
No, you really can't. For example, the iPod, which you mentioned, isn't anything particularly special (for the vast majority of models). There are two models which are truly great: 3rd generation, and Touch. The 3rd gen is discontinued, and the Touch is so expensive that it's not a feasible alternative to other players at the moment (not to mention it's pretty damned shameful for a "video" player to have so little space). The rest of them are unusable junk. Apple had a great design with the 3rd gen, and then ruined it by putting the buttons on the wheel. It's an utter failure in usability terms, but they get praised for it. Why? Damned if I know, but probably fanboys.
I haven't personally used an iPhone, but odds are it wouldn't completely blow me away. I thought it was cool (and still do), but far and away better than anything out there? No. Revolutionary? Hardly. It's a neat toy, nothing more... and now that others are copying the idea, it's not even the best version of the neat toy.
Re:How, indeed. (Score:3, Insightful)
I count at least two high profile OSS projects: webkit & darwin. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's two more than MS.
Apple = Van Halen (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't discredit the value of man with a vision and a big mouth.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? It's normal. You aren't a lawyer, but you must obey and make choices about the law. You aren't a doctor, but you mush make choices about your health. You aren't a chef, but you must cook your food (or spend a fortune in restaurants, I guess). We are all required, as part of daily life, to make choices about things that we understand imperfectly or not at all. This is one of the reasons that corporations and governments seems more powerful than individuals. They can afford to higher one or more experts in many fields and make their decisions based on expert advice from those people. People who are not programmers or systems administrators are often forced to make decisions about their own personal IT, despite the fact that they understand it imperfectly. For that matter, even people who are "experts" in a field often make choices which are either arguably bad or demonstratively bad even in their own "expert" field (doctors who smoke, lawyers who get caught :-P, etc).
Some might argue that as a programmer/sys admin I made such a choice when I bought an iPhone myself. Personally I'm happy with the choice, the device does what I want in the way I want it to most of the time (it's hardly perfect, but it works for me much more often than not). Never the less, according to many people on this site and others I made a bad choice, and all the worse for being an "expert" in the field. Really though, when you think about it, even with non-experts making the choices absolute crap rarely prospers in the face of stiff competition unless the absolute crap has some sort of entrenched advantage (even then it fades eventually).
Even the most obvious example, Windows, shows this. Despite the huge advantages Windows has in the OS market, the really poor releases rarely proper. Bob, Me, and Vista all show this. Even XP failed to gain traction until the worst of its problems had been well and thoroughly resolved. I'd still rather have Linux or OSX on my boxes but XP isn't complete crap. I use it here at work and it does what I need it to the vast majority of the time without being to horribly slow or difficult. There are always exception of course, sometime crap beats out the better choice, but mostly the better choice gets adopted eventually.
Re:Apple without Jobs? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they need a 'visionary', they can always find another crazy 'Steve', here [microsoft.com].
And yet Microsoft, with it's equivalent pool of talent and far greater resources, comes up with products like Vista and the Zune. Congratulations on so effectively negating your own argument.
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Minor nitpick, but I think it's misleading to speak of "functionality" separate from "ease-of-use." One of the roots of Apple's continued success is their understanding that for a very large percentage of consumers, if a particular function isn't easy to use, it might as well not exist. My cellphone technically has a web browser in it, but it's so awkward that it might as well not be there. I haven't used it in years, despite the fact that I've often been in positions where looking something up real quick would've been useful. The same goes for my phone's mp3 player. Despite the laundry list of functionality that was printed on the box it came in, my phone might as well do nothing other than make calls and display the time, because that's all I can use it for without it driving me crazy.
Re:Apple would do a lot better if... (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you that Apple could do many things to better support the Enterprise but I don't think you have show that this support will help their bottom line. Apple is a fantastically successful company that makes consumer products. All of the things you are proposing cost money and take time and energy away from their highly successful consumer products. Ultimately it might not be the best move for Apple over all. Sure they could do much better in that particular market but we aren't talking about a company that is hurting.
But I think the GP's point still stands. Apple MAKES enterprise hardware, and they CLAIM they want a piece of that market. Given this it is a back eye for them (however small or large a black eye as it relates to their overall market penetration) that they fail to properly support the enterprise. If you don't want to take the enterprise market seriously, withdraw from it. Stop spending dollars to develop and market Xservers and Xsans that either don't work as people expect or aren't supported to the level that Enterprise customers expect.
If they drop enterprise support completely, they save money (given what I've seen of there enterprise support, I can't imagine it makes enough to be worth its support costs). If they take enterprise support seriously they stand to make more money (selling to this market in volume is keeping most of the PC companies in business right now). By kind of wishy-washingly half supporting the enterprise they're both weighing down their balance sheets and creating an unnecessary level of discontent. Sure, they're doing fine as a company either way, but it never hurts to improve.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to say that, but when you take Apples "Less functional" product and set it next to a "More functional" product you can really see a difference.
No, you really can't. For example, the iPod, which you mentioned, isn't anything particularly special (for the vast majority of models).
See, you completely miss the point. The innovation with the iPod wasn't the iPod, but iTunes. 99-cents a song for a very large selection, just plug in your iPod and the friendly interface guides people to put music on it. Other companies made you purchase music elsewhere and import it into their syncing software. What Apple saw was a gap--not one in the mp3 player technology, but in the hurdles people had to jump over to get music on them.
Re:the elephant in the room (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty much.
Its a format the replicates the functionality of something we already have. It may be technically better, it may be less restrictive, but honestly, who cares?
There are very few times in my life where I had to do anything with an OGG, and to be honest, it didn't do anything more that make me hate the person cramming it down my throat so I could listen to what I wanted to hear.
No one needs it, no one is clamoring for it except a small fraction of fanboys, so why does anyone get the right to complain when mainstream devices don't support it? I have always been of the opinion that if you want a format out there, make it truly worth the effort, and then make a case for it being a useful replacement. All I hear is whining about why people don't instantly support the "obviously" better codec. Perhaps its not obviously better to 95% of the population?
The same thing goes for open-source/closed-source. Just let the closed source shops crash and burn, if they are going to. If they don't, well maybe closed source does have some uses after all? Heresy, I know.
Not only Apple products where design is paramount (Score:3, Insightful)
Same for the iPhone: from a pure functional point of view it's not a very good phone, and it has a few issues that we would not accept from any other manufacturer
That's completely false. I would have gladly accepted the iPhone as is lock, stock and barrel from any other manufacturer - especially Palm. Think of all the people that accepted more limited functionality with worse for factors in smart phones for years, just to get the functionality they offered...
You are right that design (which encompasses usabIlity AND form factor) is a key thing for many people - and people are willing to tolerate other flaws if on the whole something basically works really well for what they mostly do. It's when a company can find that balance that they can find long-term success with a product.
People ascribe Apple's success to marketing but there are plenty of things that get marketing out the wazoo only to fade away. Marketing is not enough to drive a bad (or even mediocre) product to success, people have to basically connect with a product and find it truly useful before it can gain large scale adoption.
Re:Uh (Score:3, Insightful)
I see you are unfamiliar with ancient Rome. Or shogunate Japan. Pity the CEOs of the banks we bailed out don't have that sense of honor.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're right, that in some sense Apple is more a fashion company than a tech company.
But I also think they're something else. Fashion usually wants to do it different and is often not very usable.
In contrast, what makes Apple good is the focus on usability over anything else. Yes it usually looks nice, but I feel that's often a by product of trying to make the most useful appliance not the goal.
I don't really know what to compare them to, I don't think there is a company in the world that focusses so much on usability as Apple does.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apples key selling feature is usability.
Not the looks, not the tech, not the numbers features or anything else.
Usability.
Their stuff is the easiest to use.
That's the core of the Apple magic. It's a combination of targeting the right market, ergonomics and interface design.
Their goal is to make devices that you never struggle with to get them to do what you want. They often succeed.
After having used Windows and Linux for decades, I'm since a year an Apple convert. And being a software developer myself, I am amazed again and again how well designed it is and how well it works and how good it is at not annoying me.
Re:the elephant in the room (Score:3, Insightful)
I know the first thing my wife did when she got her iPhone was bitch about what a poor SSH client it was... Oh.. no, wait... She obsessively played with the web browser for an hour, ignoring the large screen laptop right in front of her, just because it was SOOO cool that she could surf the web that well on a phone. Then she started playing around in the app store. She still hasn't mentioned SSH, now I come to think of it.
Had she done so I might have shown her the SSH app I got from the app store which works perfectly adequately. The transparent on screen keyboard and zoom and scroll function mean that that it actually has a much larger usable screen area than SSH clients I've use on other smartphones with "real keyboards". Of course I still prefer a terminal window on a real computer for most of my SSH needs, but for quick "OMFG it's broke!" SSH access in from the mall or parking lot, it works quite as well as any other phone based SSH. Better than the one I had on my Treo that had 4 point fonts and incessantly warned me that my phone was incapable of real encryption so I was probably being spied on by half a dozen men in trench coats.
Re:Absolutely not! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to try something bold, a car analogy.
Linux is like a classic 60's car and OSX (and iPods, iPhone etc.) is like a modern bmw (and let's just say the Windows is like a mazda, or ford, or whatnot). The gear heads love the classic 60's car because they can tinker with it and play around with the guts to truly enjoy the car just as Linux people love their systems because they can tinker with them and make them do exactly what they want. Conversely, most people that aren't gear heads would hate to own a 50 year old car because they are going to be dealing with problems that they do not know how to fix.
Most people want the bmw because they don't have to think about how to make it work and it comes with a good warranty/service plan. Similarly, apple products don't require much knowledge to install or run the system and apple takes good care of its customers (free in person service checks as opposed to dell that charges something like $100 a year for a few over the phone checks). The gear heads won't like the new BMW because they need a degree in mechanics, electrical engineering and computer science to really change the car. It's not going to give them the satisfaction of access to the guts of the system that their old car gives them.
Finally, less expensive cars like fords, mazdas, hondas, etc. work, they get you where you need to go and they break down a little more than the bmw. Similarly, windows lets you do what you need to do but it might break on you more often. If you're good with old cars you don't see the point in spending more money on a car that's not as good. If you can justify spending the extra money you'll get the more expensive car to have fewer hassles. But most people don't see the value in spending more money for extra features that they don't think are worth it.
Interestingly, since apple computer market share is increasing, it appears that people are valuing the extra benefits as worth the extra cost. With regards to the iPod, since it is a lower cost item, people don't see the added cost as a detriment because the alternatives are truly much less user friendly than an iPod. If you're a gear head you don't care about the user friendliness because you can easily work around it, but if you're average bob then you will get really frustrated by that.
Because they had it when it mattered (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I'm not an Apple fanboy, I don't even like Apple, and the Cult Of Jobs makes me want to puke. But even I can see why the iPod ended up on top.
See, I actually wanted to buy an MP3 player waay back then, and honestly, the iPod was the only sane choice. I actually got a CD-based one instead, but if I had decided to go with a HD based one, it was iPod or nothing.
Let me tell you some of the other offerings were as big as a freaking brick, for a start. (I seem to remember an Archos like that, for example.) They looked like two 3" HDD's stacked on top of each other. It made my old high-school cassette player look positively sleek by comparison. And I'm not even talking about one of those newfangled small Walkmen, but about a big old thing.
Some had an interface that was plain old crap and unintuitive. E.g., it took Creative _years_ to fix their bloody interface into something actually usable.
A lot were actually more expensive than the iPod. Some could actually justify it by having included some extra features... that nobody wanted, or not at that price. Some were more expensive than a freaking laptop. For some, I'm not even sure WTF was their excuse. They seemed to be just bigger, uglier, clunkier and more expensive for it. That was a tendency that continued for _years_: trying to be the iPod killer by costing $1000 or close to that. Heh.
Etc.
The iPod may not have been the absolute best in any one given category. But on the whole it sucked the least. As debatable compromises went, Apple hit the sweet spot with their product. It was the compromise that looked the most palatable.
Basically, sure, you can blame it on fashion and (thus) ubiquity _now_, but think of it this way: it had to start from zero at some point. You can't use your market leader position until you actually win that position in the first place. And back then, IMHO Apple won it fair and square.
Re:How, indeed. (Score:3, Insightful)
I will take it one step further. Most of the whiners on here won't be happy until they can get OS X for free. According to them software is worth $0 and what really peeves them off is that Apple is gaining marketshare with product that is closed source (oh the pain) and that actually costs money to buy (heresy!!) and can't be obtained legally for free.
There has been no evidence that desktop market share is influenced by how open a platform is. If openness was the dominating factor then Win wouldn't have >90% of the desktop market with Apple growing at a very healthy rate while Linux gains virtually nothing.
Apple Boards Responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Whenever people say about Apple as having no real original ideas and nothing more than perceived "coolness", or at most compliment it as just a good design firm, I have to wonder. So the same people admire and buy Dell purely because they are cheap? Certainly not because Dell is known for the tech inventions they contribute to hi-tech industry nor for the award winning designs. And for coolness - if people really wanted cool wouldn't half of all computer users use Linux? Isn't it being tech savvy and the geek really cool nowadays with dotCom billionaires and CSI?....
Yeah, I guess having worked in Windows/Solaris world for more than a decade, and played with Linux on the side for about as much, it finally dawned on me that "coolness" was what I needed... Funny with all the engineers and engineering force behind Windows and Blackberry that I'm equipped with in my day job, working in those environments are 90% frustration, as opposed to the consistency, efficiency, and reliability I've found with my own Mac and iPhone.
So according to people who have nothing better to do except write about technology, Jobs' only talent besides song and dance is that he dares to make the right decisions in critical moments? Sounds like a rare leader that you don't find in 99% of industry.
Sure, Apple didn't invent anything, and Jobs just picked up what others neglected and overlooked (GUI, firewire, touch screen, digital content, NeXT...) and made winners out of them, and set trends others are forced to follow - that's why people can't stand him. When the mouse finally gets replaced by touch pads, and GPU and ZFS become household terms, others will say hah they didn't invent any of it - but so what? It's the first time I will find them practical and usable. Refinement is just as much part of engineering as inventing the initial concept and prototyping.
Re:More than preparation (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm picturing Bill Gates, in a black polo neck, with spectacles designed by Johnathan Ive.
No you got it all wrong. The only way for Apple to survive post Steve Jobs, is for Steve to hand pick the type of successor that will urinate on his grave as soon as he is gone. The idea is not to share Steve's vision, but to have a vision as grand as Steve's and go about realizing it in aa Steve like manner.
If Bill Gates were to take over, he would take the company in a very non apple and non Microsoft like direction. He should also continue to get his haircut at the lemon tree and fly coach. If he doesn't do that anymore he should start again.