The longer Jobs dies, the clearer we can feel the difference between what he left behind and what he took away.
Today, Jobs has been dead for a full decade.
Ten years later, the technology company he founded and shaped was already the world's most valuable company. In a decade, the iPhone has sold more than 2 billion units, and although Apple has been criticized time and again for losing its ability to innovate, this has not prevented its generations of new products from selling around the world. New CEO Tim Cook has proven himself in many ways that he is indeed a qualified successor to Jobs, with one exception — Jobs's personal charisma of "distorting reality force field" and the charisma that has gathered an aura and fanatical feelings for Apple.
Max Weber divided power into Charisma-type powers and positional powers. The former has extraordinary qualities and personal charm, like the ancient religious prophets and war heroes. The latter is the power that comes from the position. Jobs, apparently, belonged to the former.
Without Jobs, Apple remains a first-class tech company run by a top-notch CEO. "We believe in simplicity rather than complexity. We believe we need to own and control the important technologies behind the products we make, and only participate in markets where we can make a significant contribution..." As Cook once said at an analyst conference, "No matter who is doing what the job, these values are deeply rooted in this company." ”
At Apple today, jobs's legacy is still ubiquitous. It's just that the person who once made people so crazy has left this world forever. What exactly did he take away?
In the past two years, at the Apple conference that was affected by the epidemic and turned to play pre-recorded videos, there was no "rollover" scene, no cheers and applause from the audience, and no iconic "One more thing" surprise moment, and many products would even be directly released on the official website. People pay for the design, performance, and even lower prices of Apple products, but these products no longer make them feel connected to someone.
Jobs, the person who has been compared with Edison, Ford and even Leonardo da Vinci, was once Apple's heart disease, and once apple's aura, and he used his legendary and stubborn life to make cold technology products and technology companies have a strong personality characteristic.
Ten years after Jobs's soul returned to heaven, the Apple, led by the calm and serious successor Cook, continued to move forward on earth.
"To the crazy people..."
"To crazy people. They are mavericks. They are untamed. They get into trouble. They don't fit in. They see things differently. They don't like to stick to the rules. Nor are they willing to settle for the status quo. You can identify with them, oppose them, praise or denigrate them. But they cannot be ignored. Because they changed the ordinary... They push humanity forward. Maybe they are crazy in the eyes of others, but they are geniuses in our eyes. Because only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world can really change the world. ”
The commercial, titled "Think Different," is not only a monument to Apple's once coming out of the brink of death, but also a portrayal of Jobs's life. What is less well known is that before the official release of this commercial, Apple actually prepared two dubbed versions. One version was voiced by actor Richard Dreyfus, while the other version was voiced by Jobs himself.
In the final moments before the commercial aired, Jobs decided to use Dreyfus's version. "If you use my voice, people will think it's an advertisement about me." He told the advertising agency, "But that's not it. That's about Apple. ”
It wasn't until three days after Jobs's death, at Apple's memorial service for him, that the previously unpublished version was made public. The descriptions, yearnings and love for the "crazy guys" in the advertisement also became Jobs's own "master". Over time, the commercial inevitably became an advertisement for Jobs.
Jobs, and the Apple of Jobs's time, were originally two sides of the same coin, inseparable. Jobs has infiltrated all aspects of himself into Apple's genes, and Apple's success has also allowed Jobs's value to be recognized by the world and enter the "Hall of Fame" of history.
Everyone has more or less heard some of Jobs's anecdotes, some stories are inspiring, some stories show the crazy and even unbearable side behind a genius, some deify the protagonist, and some show Jobs's precious spirit beyond the times with the passage of time.
Ten years after Jobs's death, we were able to reacquaint ourselves with Jobs, his imprint on Apple, and the world.
Artists grow up in Silicon Valley
"When I was young, I always thought I was a good fit for the humanities, but I loved electronic devices," Jobs recalled in his first interview with Walter Isaacson about jobs. "Then I saw something that one of my idols, Polaroid founder Edwin Rand, said about the importance of people who are both good at the humanities and master the sciences, and I decided, I want to be that person."
Looking back at the beginning of Jobs's life, we can't underestimate the impact of the Silicon Valley environment on Jobs's life. Jobs, who was abandoned by his biological parents, also grew up in Silicon Valley because of his adoptive parents. In 1938, bill Hewlett and David Packard, two Stanford graduates of electrical engineering, started working on electronic instruments in a small garage in Palo Alto with $538 and founded Hewlett-Packard, the first high-tech company here, on New Year's Day of the following year. Later, the garage was recognized by the California government as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
In the neighborhood where Jobs grew up, many of his neighbors were Employees of Hewlett-Packard. Even after many years, Jobs still remembers the influence he received from his father and neighbors. At the time, Larry Long, who lived seven houses away from Jobs's family, was a typical HP engineer who had hooked Jobs with a Heath tool box used to assemble radio equipment.
"It makes you realize you can assemble and figure out anything. After you've done a few radios, you'll see the TV in the catalog, and you'll say, I can do this, even if you don't actually do it. "I was lucky because when I was a kid, my father and heath toolbox gave me confidence that I could make anything." ”
And when the teenager Jobs actually went to do a frequency counter, he found that he needed some parts made by Hewlett-Packard. So he picked up the public phone book and called Hewlett,Hewlett, the founder and CEO of HEWLETT,000 for 20 minutes, and got the parts and the opportunity to work at HP during the summer vacation of high school.
This may be the first time Jobs showed his "extraordinary thinking", but it is also important that the open and equal social atmosphere in Silicon Valley at that time also gave a hairy boy like Jobs the opportunity to emerge.
In the third year after Jobs was born, eight young engineers jumped from a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley to form Fairchild Semiconductor, now unknown and later the cradle of the American semiconductor industry, with more than a hundred companies founded by former Fairchild employees, including the famous AMD and Intel, all of which were rooted in Silicon Valley and gave the meaning of "Silicon Valley" to the united states.
When Jobs was ten years old, Gordon Moore, who had already founded Intel, proposed the famous "Moore's Law": the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months. This means that the performance of the processor will also grow exponentially. Moore observed the direction of the tide, which would propel the tide, including Jobs, to the pinnacle of technology, wealth and influence for decades to come.
Apple's first "tech merchant"
"He really doesn't know much about technology, but he has an amazing talent for knowing what can succeed." This is what Bill Gates, as a peer, said about Jobs after 30 years of acquaintance. Among those who knew Jobs, there were not a few people who held the same view.
Despite being a giant at the intersection of technology and humanities, and although Jobs may have more influence on technology products than any other engineer, it is difficult not to admit that Jobs is not a particularly good engineer after removing the filter that fans deified him, at least compared to Wozniak, another founder of Apple.
Officially founded in the garage in 1976, the first two products, Apple I and Apple II, were designed by Wozniak. The latter even became the best-selling personal computer of the 1970s and early 1980s. Until the company was founded a long time later, Apple II was still the product that contributed the most sales to the company.
But unlike the shy and introverted engineer Wozniak, Jobs had far more enthusiasm and talent for doing business. Jobs, for example, persuaded Wozniak not to share his computer schematics in a "home-brewed computer club" of computer enthusiasts, but to make a motherboard and sell them.
"Every time I design something that's great, Steve finds a way to make money." Wozniak recalls, "I never thought about selling computers. It was Steve who said it, and we'd show it to everyone and sell some of it. ”
Many years later, in the face of Apple without Jobs, many people will laugh at Tim Cook as a "tech businessman" and "business genius". However, we must admit that Apple's first "technology businessman" was Steve Jobs himself.
In naming the small company the two had founded together, Jobs came up with the option of "Apple" at the last minute. In addition to inspiration for things like the fruit meal he was eating, Jobs said, "The name sounds interesting, vibrant, and not intimidating." 'Apple' weakens the word 'computer'. In addition, it has some practical effects: "Apple", which starts with A, can also rank quite high in the phone book.
Fortunately, with his ability to discern people and notoriously bad temper, Jobs, who did not know much about engineering, was able to become apple's unique leader, gathering a group of "first-class employees" around him, and those who could not stand Jobs's almost cruel honesty and moody way of treating people were thus "survival of the fittest".
Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography of Jobs that dozens of his most abusive colleagues, when telling their long, tragic stories, would end up saying that he had made them do things they never dreamed of. He created a team of top-notch employees.
Among them, there was Tim Cook, who became Apple's COO as early as 1998 and later became known as Jobs's successor, and Jonathan Aif, Apple's later chief designer, and many other hardware and software leaders. When Jobs was alive, they were more invisible behind him, but they also made extremely important contributions to many of Apple's later key products. This is probably also an important reason why Apple can continue to develop after Jobs's death.
Say goodbye to Apple for the first time
Jobs's harshness about product details and the way he treated people with absolutely unfriendly treatment also caused him great trouble. Jobs's polishing and demanding of various details of the product often makes the project overturn at the last moment, seriously delaying the timing of product release, and also causing high costs, even if the product is finally listed, sales and word of mouth are not prominent, but often fail. Jobs's blind, unconcerned management style has also made his relationship with other executives increasingly strained.
Apple once determined the color of the plastic it used with the help of pantone Company. The company had more than 2,000 different beige colors, but none of them satisfies Jobs, and he wanted to create a whole new color. When adjusting the computer chassis design, Jobs spent several days trying to confirm how rounded the corners should be. This also upset the then-president Scott, who "just wants to make it happen as soon as possible." Other debates, including the color of the workbench and the length of the warranty period, have kept the two in conflict.
The conflict eventually broke out between Jobs and later CEO Sculley. The man who was told by Jobs, "Do you want to sell sugar water for a lifetime, or do you want to seize the opportunity to change the world?" Impressed by the former president of PepsiCo, he found that as long as Jobs was there, he could not really manage Apple at all. When the showdown took place, Jobs had to bitterly face the fact that the company's management and ordinary employees were mostly on Sculley's side. In 1985, Jobs was fired by the company he founded.
This is the second time in Jobs's life that he has been "abandoned" - in addition to people like Sculley who kicked him out of apple, there are also many jobs's fathers. They gave Jobs a lot of help and recognition in the process of founding and growing Apple. And now, when Jobs was thirty years old, these people were going to abandon him. In a later Stanford lecture, Jobs called it a "devastating blow."
In the years since leaving Apple, Jobs continued his business, first founding NeXT Computer Company, then acquiring the computer animation division of George Lucas's film company — and prompting it to evolve into the later famous Pixar Animation Studios. Interestingly, initially, Pixar's animation business was just a side hustle, with the main purpose of showing off how good its hardware and software were.
In a way, Jobs was not changed by this "devastating blow". His pursuit of detail has given NeXT computers and systems a lot of high-quality details, but the expensive price also makes it sell well in the market. However, Pixar's Toy Story was a huge success, and was described as the third leap after Mickey Mouse gave the cartoon sound and Snow White gave the cartoon color: giving the cartoon 3D. What remains unchanged is that Jobs is still the man who insists on standing at the intersection of humanities and technology.
The square four-grid table that saves Apple
The success of "Toy Story" also prompted Apple, which was already in crisis at the time, to decide to invite Jobs back. By 1996, Apple's market share had fallen from a peak of 16 percent in the late 1980s to 4 percent. While stock prices at other tech companies are rising because of stock market bubbles, Apple's stock price has continued to fall under the company's losses. Apple management tried to sell the company, but no other company was willing to take over.
Jobs, who returned to Apple, entered the most prolific stage of his life. He knows the crux of Apple's previous problems — the opposite of the other extreme. "Sculley introduced the values of the lower three abuses and the lower three abuses, and destroyed the apple." Jobs's words were extremely ugly, but they seemed right: "They only care about how to make money — mainly for themselves, but also for Apple — and not how to make great products." ”
At that time, Apple's product line was already very chaotic, and the model names composed of complex numbers could not be clearly distinguished even by the company itself. Jobs broke out at a big product strategy conference. He grabbed the marker, walked over to the whiteboard, and drew a horizontal line and a vertical line on it, making a square four-grid table. "That's what we need." Jobs said. He divides the product form into "desktop" and "portable", and writes "consumer" and "professional" at the other end. Their job is to make four great products, one for each grid.
The conference room was silent. Jobs ushered in an era of full control of Apple. To this day, when you open Apple's official website, you will lament that they have so few products to offer. On some pages, you can still faintly see the four-grid table that Jobs drew that year.
Jobs always believed that a company needed to control every aspect of its products—from design, hardware, software, to content. Under Jobs's extremely focused strategy and dictatorial dominance, the development process of Apple products is not like an assembly line, from engineering to design, to marketing, and finally to sales, but to work at the same time. "Our approach is to develop highly integrated products, which means that our production processes must also be done through integration and collaboration." Jobs said.
Jobs's emphasis on marketing is also very rare. Beginning with the "Extraordinary" campaign, Jobs held three-hour freelance discussions with his main agencies, marketing and PR departments every Wednesday afternoon to discuss advertising strategies, a practice that continued during Jobs's years at Apple. So much so that Lee Crowe, an advertiser who has worked with Jobs for more than three decades, lamented: "No CEO on earth treats marketing the same way Steve does." ”
Jobs's credo, in the computer field, is not the most successful. In contrast, Bill Gates' Microsoft adopts an open ecosystem strategy that is better in terms of market share and industry influence. It wasn't until the consumer electronics revolution sparked by products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad that Jobs finally proved how predictable he was.
"Golden Decade"
If you only look at external indicators such as revenue, profit, and scale, apples from 2001 to 2011 are obviously dwarfed by apples after this. However, this decade is also the decade that made Jobs and his Apple a god, and its importance is an insurmountable highlight moment compared to any period in Apple's history.
Before 2001, portable music players were invented. But such devices tend to have a rudimentary appearance and complex user interface. Jobs led Apple's engineers and designers to replace the button design with a scroll wheel, and put 1,000 songs in a small fuselage, but it was surprisingly easy to use.
Complex functions are done by computers, while the iPod needs to be as simple and minimalistic as possible – the pivot of people's digital lives is entering the eve of great changes. In Walter Isaacson's view, the iPod transformed Apple from a computer maker into the world's most valuable technology company.
And the more revolutionary change came after the iPod. In January 2007, at macworld in San Francisco, Jobs proudly announced that the Mac had "changed the entire computer industry" and that the iPod had "changed the entire music industry." Subsequently, he carried out perhaps the most appetizing selling in history:
"Today, we're going to launch three revolutionary products of this caliber. The first is a widescreen touch iPod, the second is a revolutionary mobile phone, and the third is a breakthrough Internet communication device. After saying that, he repeated the sentence again, and then continued: "Do you understand? It's not three separate devices, it's one device, which we call the iPhone. ”
On the iPhone, Jobs's all-round control of the product reached the pinnacle: its back cover was non-removable, the battery was irreplaceable, and the original iPhone did not even have an application market - because Jobs was not comfortable with third-party developers developing applications for the iPhone.
At a time when Apple is now criticized and even sued worldwide for its closed ecology, mandatory official in-app payment interface, and 30% "Apple tax", we should not ignore that this all-inclusive, strictly closed product thinking is also one of the most powerful genes left by Jobs to Apple.
In fact, it was also the arguments of other colleagues that Jobs reluctantly accepted the development of iTunes for Windows, so that PC users can also connect to iPods, and third-party developers to develop applications for Apple products - this proved to be a revolutionary thing, by June 8, 2021, 600 million users in 175 countries around the world have used the AppStore, and developers around the world have received $230 billion in revenue.
After all, it is mortal
Jobs, who always presented himself as a "dictator", was not always as determined and never self-doubting as he seemed. An obvious example is that when a new ad enters production, Jobs often falters, and he will call the agency and raise objections and ask for cancellation. But he will be persuaded to accept the broadcast of the advertisement. And his performance in the iPhone 4 "antenna gate" has also been criticized by many people as arrogant and shirking responsibility. Some of the products that he had high expectations ended up turning out to be failures — many mistakes like the ones he made when he first started managing Apple. Jobs, after all, was just a mortal.
And mortals have an end to life.
After years of battling pancreatic endocrine tumors, Jobs finally lost. After several sick breaks, Jobs officially resigned as CEO in August 2011, and Apple entered the post-Jobs era.
Long before that, Jobs's old rival Gates had warned, "The [Apple] integration model succeeded because Steve was at the helm." But that doesn't mean it will win in multiple rounds in the future. ”
And at the meeting to say goodbye to Apple, when Jobs heard that Hewlett-Packard had to terminate his tablet project because of the success of the iPad, Jobs wasn't as happy as the others. "Hewlett and Packard created a great company that they thought had been put in the hands of reliable people." "But now this company is in the midst of division and destruction, it's so sad," he said. I wish I could leave a stronger legacy, so that it would never happen to Apple. ”
Ten years on, the things Jobs had feared had clearly not happened. On the contrary, Apple has become bigger and stronger, and has proven itself time and again in the development of new categories such as smart watches and true wireless headphones, which are still one of the most innovative companies in the world. Jobs's genes are still there, but everyone knows that Apple and the world have lost Jobs forever.
Beijing News shell financial reporter Xu Promised Editor Xu Chao Proofread chen diyan