About this time I had lunch with Bill Gates, who dismissed PCs as nothing but components held together by plastic and screws manufactured on low-cost assembly lines, a commodity business with narrow profit margins. The future belonged to software and semiconductor makers like Microsoft and Intel, where the real innovation was going on.
This made sense to me, and as the years unfolded, Mr. Gates seemed prescient. The PC makers were mostly reduced to commodity producers; I.B.M. sold off the ThinkPad, Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq and may now abandon the business; Gateway was sold off and the brand has all but vanished. Apple nearly went under. But today, the exception is so glaring as to have stood Mr. Gates’s prediction on its head: Apple’s operating profit margins have grown (to over 33 percent), and Apple’s market capitalization of $347.3 billion this week is bigger than that of Microsoft and Intel combined.
Of all Steve Jobs’s accomplishments, this, to me, remains both the simplest and the most astonishing. How did he take a commodity — to borrow from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the “veal gray” plastic boxes that once weighed so heavily on both our desks and spirits — and turn it into one of the most iconic and desirable objects on the planet?
“Steve Jobs and Apple never — ever — wanted to be a low-margin commodity producer,” Donald Norman, a former vice president for advanced technology at Apple and author of “Living With Complexity,” told me this week. “Even the Apple II had some charm to it. It was the first personal computer that had professional industrial designers. Before that they were designed strictly by engineers, and they were ugly. Steve was always, if not an artist, then someone who was charmed by style. He had this dream of something beautiful. If it was going to cost more, it didn’t matter. This was in his genes.”
Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recalled buying a 1990 Macintosh Classic and taking it back to Italy. “When I got home, I took it out of that brown, padded carrying case with the rainbow-colored Apple logo on it and put it on my desk in Milan. It was like a little pug dog looking at me. It wasn’t just something I worked with; it kept me company. It had such personality and such life.”
My own conversion came much later. When I came across the MacBook Air, I thought it the single most elegant technology product I’d ever encountered, and not just because it looked good. Its light weight and paper-thin design made it easy to carry while offering all the functions and keyboard of a full-size PC. Even the packaging was so beautiful that I couldn’t bring myself to discard it. Now I refer to it as my third arm and can’t imagine life without it.
Mr. Jobs “had an exceptional eye for design, and not just an eye, but an intelligence for design,” Ms. Antonelli said. “We don’t talk just about the looks, but how objects communicate: The specific shape, how it feels in the hand, under the fingers, how you read it in the eye and the mind. This is what Steve cared passionately about.”
MoMA has 25 Apple products in its permanent design collection. And like many great artists, Mr. Jobs’s near-dictatorial control of Apple made possible the pursuit of perfection. “If you’re a visionary, and a dictator, you can take risks and be consistent,” Ms. Antonelli said. “NeXT was a risk and a beautiful failure. It brought him back to Apple. The dynamics of Apple and Steve’s personality and the course of history made for this perfect alignment of the stars.”
Also like many artists (Frank Lloyd Wright comes to mind), Mr. Jobs was legendarily difficult at times. “He has always been focused, driven, demanding and, as a result, very difficult and abrasive,” Mr. Norman said. “This abrasiveness in the early days was too extreme and was destructive of the company. John Scully had to fire him. When Steve came back, he had matured. He still had a demanding vision of perfection, but he brought focus. He was slightly less abrasive. He was brilliant at understanding what a product should be and he was a dictator.”
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