Apple After Jobs 454
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?"
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.
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.
Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that NeXT has been a huge success since they re-branded themselves as Apple.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One could also argue that Be had a better operating system.
Like NeXt, they got bailed out by a corporate overlord. Unfortunately for Be, that corporate overlord happened to be Palm.
Re:But more importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting bought out for a ton of money, getting their CEO installed as CEO of the purchasing company, and having their operating system become the #2 desktop OS sounds like a huge success to me.
I would love to have 10% of the success that NeXT had.
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)
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:4, Insightful)
Example: "Now, as well all know, Jobs is the driving force behind Apple's success and rumours of prominent illness could explain several absences, including the most recent quarterly meeting. Can Apple survive without Steve Jobs? I don't think so."
Granted, that's pure FUD, and opinion and speculation, but if that were to be said on Mad Money or whatever finance shows people like to take advice from, it could drastically impact the casual investor's confidence in the company.
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.
Road Map (Score:4, Insightful)
Innovation vs Confidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Innovation vs Confidence (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an interesting point, and seems to indicate one of Microsoft's serious shortcomings.
Tons and tons of cool stuff has come out of Microsoft's research division [microsoft.com], who seem to be given a blank check to research whatever they feel is the next path forward in computing.
Unfortunately, Microsoft lacks the direction or confidence to tie these things together into a cool package, and their OS doesn't encourage this sort of thing.
Apple, on the other hand, has had about a 75% track record for seamlessly integrating their new products and technologies into their customers daily lives. That's seriously impressive, and they've designed MacOS to be easily extensible, thanks to its UNIX underpinnings and fantastic set of core libraries.
As one example, Time Machine is a seriously cool technology that even novice users can easily connect with. It's useful, intuitive, and the mechanism by which it works on the backend is embarrassingly simple.
What it means is... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's be semantics. Innovation in UI and appearance, is still innovation. It doesn't matter if the hardware is the same: they have innovative ways of making the same hardware more usable. Especially if it means they succeed in a field where everyone else failed.
Re:Innovate... (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing with Apple products is that they aren't really designed for the average geek here on slashdot. Thus to you and me, it's not "innovative". Average geeks care about hard numbers like CPU cycles and frames per second. Apple designs for general consumers not for us in particular thus Apple focuses on how things work and look and whether these every day consumers can use them.
Take for instance Time Machine. Pfft. It's just a backup and restore. We've had that for ages. Really all it is just:
Yeah that and some fancy algorithms. I mean even Windows has Restore Points and Shadow Volume Copy. Sure you can look at a single file and directory and figure the difference and it's available on every new version of Leopard. But those are just details right?
While the idea has been around, no one has taken the idea and refined it like Apple to be as consumer friendly as it is. Remember, Apple is the largest seller of Unix machines in the world. To get everyday consumers to use Unix machines took lots of innovation on many levels.
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I am a geek in every sense of the word, starting programming Z80 Assembly, then moved onto X86. Being a geek doesn't mean you don't admire what Apple does and how Apple hardware works. The interface of a device like the touch is something to marvel over.
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.
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. For a company like Apple, a CEO needs to provide a few specific things, all of which can be summed up as a "vision". But when you break it down, there's a few main aspects of it. There's the quality control issue that you mentioned, having someone who has the authority to overrule the accountants and marketing and not rush a product.
Also important is having a public figurehead for the company. It's extra important when you've got a company that's as secretive as Apple. If a new CEO was a mor
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.
Don't forget about Microsoft! (Score:3, Insightful)
counterproductive speculation (Score:5, Interesting)
Rob Enderle - Enough Said (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to see here but the ravings of a lunatic.
Meh... (Score:4, Funny)
We need to start tagging stories like this with "paul is dead"
--
BMO
Jobs and conference calls (Score:3)
And when Mr. Jobs was absent from last week's quarterly earnings conference call
Rubbish. Jobs is never on the call. He's only used on the quarterly calls when the Reality Distortion Field needs to be deployed to cover some sort of bad news.
Oh, the the difference between the Apple of the late 80's that ousted Jobs and the Apple of today is the senior leadership around Steve who actually understand him and his methods for running the company.
Someone like Steve is essential (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple without Steve Jobs is like the Korean War without General Douglas MacArthur. You DO NOT leave the business of war in the hands of dumbass politicians. That bozo from Pepsi was a dumbass politician.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do some Apple enthusiasts always discount Anyone But Steve's value to the company? (And Steve was not the CEO at the start.)
From Wikipedia;
Apple CEOs
1977-1981: Michael "Scotty" Scott
1981-1983: A. C. "Mike" Markkula
1983-1993: John Sculley
1993-1996: Michael Spindler
1996-1997: Gil Amelio
1997-Present: Steve Jobs (Interim CEO 1997-2000)
You can discount Sculley ( QuickTime started under his reign ), and Spindler ( OpenDoc, Pippin, Copland, and bridge technologies that were great ideas poorly delivered ) but
Once the company founders are gone... (Score:3, Interesting)
...it's only a matter of time:
Apple went downhill after Jobs was given the boot the first time. (And some would argue that without the Woz it still is a shadow of its' former self)
DEC's death certificate was signed when Ken Olsen left.
Commodore's end was nigh when Jack Tramiel defected and bought Atari.
HP went from being one of the best employers in the industry to being just about the worst when Bill and Dave both kicked the bucket.
As sad as it may be, people are inspired to work for, and purchase products made by companies with charismatic leaders who have a parental-like emotional investment in the company.
The only good that can possibly come from this is that Bill Gates has left the building, hopefully the Borg can't survive without their Queen.
WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Jobs is NEVER on the Quarterly Conference Calls (Score:3, Informative)
OK everybody, listen very carefully:
I've been listening to every Apple Quarterly Conference Call since 1st quarter 2003 and Jobs has never, NEVER been on the call. Not once.
That makes his lack of participation on the most recent call completely unrelated to anything. Including his health.
whj
Steve is a dead man, miss him miss him miss him (Score:4, Funny)
I heard that while playing my OS X install disk backwards
Transition plan needed (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing we in IT are typically very bad at is transition planning. I was discussing this with friends over the weekend - what Microsoft had going for it was a good transition plan after Bill Gates. While Ballmer isn't the best CEO for the company, at least the transition was long enough with Steve at the helm that Bill's departure this summer became a non-event for the company. Lots of interviews and "remember when" videos to be sure, but no one on Wall Street or in the press was left wondering who would lead Microsoft in a post-Gates world.
On the other hand, Apple has worked themselves into a corner. Effectively, Steve Jobs is Apple. Take away Jobs, and Apple suffers. I wasn't aware of Steve's health problems this week, but when I was discussing Apple this weekend I postulated that if Jobs were suddenly to become sick, or for some other reason suddenly be absent from the company for an extended time, Apple's stock price would drop dramatically. And now, catching up on the news [wsj.com] I see that's exactly what happened. [google.com]
Apple needs to create a transition plan, and make it clear to the community - investors and users alike. It doesn't matter if Steve plans to remove himself from Apple in a year or 10 years, there needs to be a clear #2 with the chops to effectively manage Apple in Steve's absence. Steve needs to project that person into the public consciousness by having the person back him up in presentations and public appearances, even to the point of introducing new products at MacWorld and CES, etc instead of Steve.
Apple is an innovative company, and Jobs is seen to lead that innovation, so this #2 person needs to be "leaderful" and innovative as well. That's a tough pair of requirements to meet, but if Apple is to survive Steve's eventual departure, he/she must be seen as Steve's spiritual equal among Mac geeks.
Interesting but inaccurate. (Score:3, Informative)
Apple's stock price cannot be attributed primarily or solely to Steve Jobs' health. While it may have been on factor, the stock price was already declining due to several factors:
Apple's stock performance is one of the most speculatively-influenced. Rumors of a new product send the stock skyward and, consequently, the release of said product tends to signal that the opportunity has been capitalized by speculators and a sell-off tends to follow. This happens also in the lead-up and aftermath of each WWDC and MacWorld, as well as earnings statements.
Both an earnings statement and iPhone 3G release preceded the current sell-off.
Additionally, current market conditions are sending most common stock issues downward on bad earnings news and renewed fears of the credit crisis.
While I am suggesting that Steve Jobs' health is not the driving factor, especially since these other news items have been far more exposed than concerns over his health, I am not suggesting that Apple's stock has "nowhere to go but up". I want to lay that out there to avoid exclamations of "fanboy"... in the days prior to the iPhone 3G release, I sold half my shares and advised other investors to do the same.
Apple's common stock is currently priced at ten times its book value per share... that is, total assets minus liabilities and intangibles. From a Graham-centric point of view, Apple is considerably overvalued and has a great deal of downside risk.
The question of Apple's future performance as a corporation is not reinforced by how good or bad its heavily speculated (read: overpriced) stock does... as the company does not generate new equity for operations by the trading of already issued shares on the secondary markets (e.g. NASDAQ).
But, I suspect, that since most with an interest in Apple's pipeline and financial success invariably seems to ask how the stock is doing, and so few people follow Graham's value investing philosophy, it goes to reason that what people who post such articles are really saying is "How will Apple's stock do when Steve Jobs is gone?"
These sort of diatribes offer no detailed insight into the actual corporate pipeline, management succession plans, corporate balance sheets (the financial strength upon which a company's future rests), cash flows, etc. and are therefore of little more value than what the gossip column has to say about Miley Cyrus.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Wii generates a profit from every console sold. The 360 sells at a loss to make revenue up on software licensing later.
If this talking point is limited to hardware only, then the argument is valid. If this is supposed to be a blow for blow comparison, then it's kind of inaccurate. You won't really know how successful the 360 is until they quit selling it, and even then only once they stop collecting revenue from licenses. The same goes for the PS3.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Woah, hold your horses there. You missed the important part. The most important thing in console sales is software, this is where money is really made, I'm not saying the 360 has made up for per performance compared to the Wii in other areas with software but it has sold around twice as many titles per unit as the Wii.
It's probably not on as much of a loss compared to the Wii as one might think when it's shifted something like 7 games per console compared to the Wii's average of roughly 3 games per console
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.
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.
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!"
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!
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.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which lets Apple make $1.411.764 per employee, while HP made only $336.569.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you really blaming Apple for being an efficient, well-run company ?
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.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't realize the purpose of companies was to provide jobs. Here I am thinking the purpose of companies was to make profit.
How do their profits stack up?
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.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Interesting)
Shaping Apple products != Shaping the personal electronics industry. Give me an example if you disagree (and not one of the "Apple firsts" myths, please).
Revenue? Why not Profit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of ignorance, why post only revenue and not profit?
Apple reported in April 2008 a quarterly profit of $1.05 billion.
HP reported $2.1 billion of profit in May 2008.
Apple obviously has larger margins, and from your own post appears to have employees with an order of magnitude more productivity!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
O RLY?
We present to you the Microsoft iPod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0 [youtube.com]
http://www.ipodobserver.com/story/25957 [ipodobserver.com]
There's a difference somewhere... I just can't put my finger on it ;).
MS is stagnating (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple is growing, Microsoft is stagnating.
http://quote.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL#chart2:symbol=aapl;range=my;compare=msft;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined [yahoo.com]
Some investors do care about 'cool' and about producing good products, even if most are all about the money.
That being said, MS has the momentum, the marketing capital and sales skill to keep earning very nice profits. It big enough that it resists real innovation, but its stable enough that it will take worse than Ballmer to wreck itself. Even if it were to start to fail, it would be this huge beached whale that will feed scavengers for decades.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That has less to do with the stability of Microsoft, and more to do with the flimsiness of Microsoft's chairs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Turns it into another Microsoft? Wow, the shareholders will cry with someone turning Apple into one of the largest companies in the world making over 10x their current profits. That would be something to worry about."
MS shareholders should cry (split adjusted)
Apple Stock price 6/28/1998 - $10.29
Apple stock price 6/28/2008 - $162.12
Gain - 1575%
Microsoft Stock price 6/28/1998 - $27.48
Microsoft Stock price 6/28/2008 - $26.16
Gain (loss) - -4.8%
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.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Funny)
Just for reference, and here's the creative brain behind most of Microsoft's success products [swagalicio.us].
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.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Informative)
He left in 85. Apple's decline was after (much after), not because of. If you look at some of his decisions wrt to Apple III, Lisa, early Macintosh, and even NeXT, it's entirely conceivable he would have driven the company into the ground.
Actually his decisions regarding the early Macintosh were precisely what lead to its success. As Andy Hertzfeld once said, when he started working on the Mac, it was going to have a character-based display just like the Apple III. Jobs' instance on pushing out a computer with the advances he witnessed at Xerox PARC was precisely what led to its success. The Lisa, OTOH, was just too ambitious for the time. The price tag was too high and the machine was too high-end for the day to ever garner mainstream appeal.
Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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So NeXT may not have had stellar success, but SJ's other little project making cartoons wasn't exactly a failure. You make it sound like Steve had nothing without Apple. The success he had with Pixar in itself was a huge achievement. He bought it for $10M and sold it for something like $8B.
Pixar's success was partly accident. Steve wanted to grow the company by selling the hardware that they developed for animation. It was Lassiter who first pushed Steve into the direction of creating great animation.
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.
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:4, Informative)
Minutes!? Are they a bit slow? No exaggeration, but my father, who is 84, going senile, and who has trouble operating automatic flushers in bathrooms, was given an iPhone and has been able to use the various features quite easily right off the bat.
Anyway, on topic, I suspect that one of the reasons the Apple stuff works the way it does is because people are TERRIFIED of Steve and where he will put his foot if they give him something fucked up. Anyone remember the "rant" that was posted online recently about how Bill Gates had issues using the Windows Update service? He was merely somewhat snarky and sarcastic; I imagine that anyone who gave Jobs an unpolished turd like that would literally burst into flame from the response.
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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I don't know what his life insurance policy coverage is, but it should probably be tripled.
Aside from his vision and stubborn bullheadedness, Steve's reality distortion field is probably Apple's biggest asset.
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If you think he's there for completely altruistic reasons, I've got a bridge to sell you. Steve also has a metric fload of company stock. So if Apple does well, he's still seeing *significant* compensation.
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's not the source of their innovations, but a lot of public perception is tied to Jobs being Apple (whether or not that is accurate or not is really inconsequential).
The bottom line is that if the public refuses to accept an Apple without Jobs at the helm, then they will falter.
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The bottom line is that if the public refuses to accept an Apple without Jobs at the helm, then they will falter.
Everybody but the fanbois on /. could give two shits about whether Jobs is at the helm or not. It's all about the products. If Apple doesn't continue to make desirable products - with or without Jobs at the helm - THEN they'll falter.
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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And having an anointed "visionary" at the helm has allowed Apple to switch gears like no other company. And if they find a profitable segment (music players: yes, tablets: so far, no), they then exploit it. Only Google stands as the only other large technology company
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Assuming Apple's engineers (the people who actually matter) don't quit when Jobs leaves, Apple will do just fine after Jobs.
Really? Leaders matter. I have two words for you:
John Scully
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Your is an idiotic statement. Who makes the big decisions about where Apple should head? Who came up with the ipod or the iphone? Do you not think Apples stock will go down if something happened to Steve?
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Re:Come on, guys. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice troll, AC. I'll bite.
Apple captured a lot more than 5%. It's just that after Jobs got fired, the company he left behind lost the lead they had to a convicted monopolist. Now that he's back, they've gone from about 5% to nearly 20% in less than a decade. And the slope of the graph is going up, not down.
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.