Following today’s sad news about Steve Job’s decision to stand down as Apple CEO for health reasons, it is an appropriate moment to revisit the Apple story.
I have always found it difficult to write about Apple? How do you make sense of a company that is so successful, yet fails to follow any of the increasingly accepted principles of openness and collaboration? Wired magazine had it just about right when it came up with the headline: “How Apple got everything right by doing everything wrong.” In Crowdsurfing, which I co-wrote with David Brain, we decided that it should be considered as an exception to the rule, which might have been something of a cop-out, but we received some support for this view from The Sunday Times’ Bryan Appleyard, who wrote, in a review of a biography of Steve Jobs, that: “Most of these (the lessons from Steve) are harmless, but ‘Be a despot’ (“It’s okay to be an asshole, as long as you’re passionate about it”) and ‘Don’t listen to your customers’ might well prove fatal in the wrong hands. In fact, I’m pretty sure that any company that wasn’t run by Jobs pursuing these tips would be brought to its knees in a fortnight. Jobs’ Apple is not a repeatable formula because Jobs’ isn’t.”
If you have a messianic figurehead like Jobs, a design genius in Jonathan Ive, complete control of the product value chain (what technology commentator John Naughton calls “the toll gate through which everything flows” ) and are enjoying an unparalleled hit-rate when it comes to new product launches, you can adopt Apple’s tight and hyper controlled approach. If not, and even Apple has now lost one of these fundamental pillars that made it unique, it is not a replicable model. Life after Jobs is likely to see Apple becoming less willing to defy conventional wisdom and accepted practice. It will become a more normal company, which will make it easier to replicate, but less easy to worship.
I was recently asked by my HR Director to give him 2 contrasting case studies for Social Media in Industry. I choose Apple vs. Dell.
After some analysis and gathering of all their respective SM activity I concluded it was a case of Heart vs. Head.
For every Open, collaborative and supportive interaction between Dell (head) and it’s customers, there was a closed, dictatorial and defensive Apple (heart) activity.
Customers want attractive, structured and simple-looking technology. Indeed the fact that Apple products are so technically complex, yet apparently simple allows their customers access to computing and communications they might never try.
Apparently HRH Queen Elizabeth was to taken by Harry and William’s iPads, they she requested one for herself !
Perhaps Apple is not so strange when you consider the huge money invested in cars, influenced by little more than gut-feeling, the smell of the interior and sound of the door closing.