steve jobs

Preoccupations: Why Innovators Get Better With Age

March 30, 2013 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

In fact, many companies are intentionally reducing the average age of their work forces in an effort to save money. Younger employees are generally paid less and have lower health care expenses and retirement costs. As one executive remarked to me recently, “I don’t think anyone really likes this — we all know our own 50-year-old moment will be coming, too.”

There is a surprising downside, however, to encouraging older workers to leave or, at some companies, pushing them out: Less gray hair sharply reduces an organization’s innovation potential, which over the long term can greatly outweigh short-term gains.

The most common image of an innovator is that of a kid developing a great idea in a garage, a dorm room or a makeshift office. This is the story of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple. Last week, Yahoo announced that it had bought a news-reading app developed by Nick D’Aloisio, who is all of 17.

In reality, though, these examples are the exception and not the rule. Consider this: The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50.

According to research by Alex Mesoudi of Durham University in England, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years since 1900.

But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves.

For Nobel Prize winners, this process usually takes about 20 years — meaning that someone who is 38 at the time of discovery will most likely be nearly 60 when he or she receives the prize. For most eventual laureates, that interval is spent attending and making presentations at conferences, networking with colleagues, writing additional papers, editing academic journals and talking with the press.

Let’s assume that with company resources, it will take a corporate innovator 10 years instead of 20 to educate others about the nature, implications and applications of a new idea. If that’s true, a reasonable target retention age for attaining an average level of innovation would be at least 50.

YET despite the overall aging of the work force, many organizations are heading in the opposite direction. One executive at a major investment bank remarked with concern that the average age at his firm was 32. This phenomenon is not unique to corporations. Many medical institutions and universities have also shifted to younger workforces. But according to research by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University, a 55-year-old and even a 65-year-old have significantly more innovation potential than a 25-year-old.

If an organization wants innovation to flourish, the conversation needs to change from severance packages to retention bonuses. Instead of managing the average age downward, companies should be managing it upward.

We can act within our own organizations to make a difference. For example, we can end policies that limit the time people are allowed to stay at a certain level in a given position. And we can stop rotating high-potential managers across different businesses. Instead, we need to encourage the best performers to stay put, giving them the years — perhaps even decades — to support and lead major innovations from inception to commercial launch.

And to encourage innovation, we must provide economic incentives to C.E.O.’s, boards of directors and investors through changes in the tax code and elsewhere that favor long-term returns driven by innovation over shortsighted pressure to reduce costs.

The journalist A. J. Jacobs has perfectly described our current situation when it comes to the relationship between age and innovation. In his book “The Year of Living Biblically,” he writes: “I’m 38, which means I’m a few years from my first angioplasty, but — at least in the media business — I’m considered a doddering old man. I just hope the 26-year-old editors out there have mercy on me.”

Relax, A. J., you still have a few more years to hit it out of the ballpark with a mega-best seller.

Tom Agan, 51, is a co-founder and the managing partner of Rivia, an innovation and brand consulting firm.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/jobs/why-innovators-get-better-with-age.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: steve jobs, top grossing films, university in england

Off the Shelf: In ‘Mondo Agnelli,’ a Ride on Fiat’s Roller-Coaster — Review

December 31, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Without access, without hours of interviews with the people who populate the story, a narrative book is all but doomed. You think everyone would be buying Walter Isaacson’s book if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to cooperate? Doubt it. What you get without access is an “outside” book, often cold and impersonal, typically cobbled together from magazine and newspaper clippings and interviews with analysts and others who never quite know what’s really going on.

Jennifer Clark, a onetime Rome bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has a rousing tale to tell in “Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler and the Power of a Dynasty (Wiley Sons, $29.95). It’s the story of the great Italian industrialist, Gianni Agnelli; the turnaround at his family’s crown jewel, Fiat, after his death; and Fiat’s subsequent takeover and government-financed rescue of Chrysler.

Ms. Clark has a good grasp of her narrative, especially when it remains in Italy. From the detail in her text and footnotes, it would appear that she enjoyed decent if unspectacular access to current and former Fiat and Agnelli executives. And, unfortunately, in the end, that’s what “Mondo Agnelli” ends up being: decent if unspectacular.

The book’s most serious failing is an inability to shed much new light on the Chrysler side of the story. “Most of those” at Chrysler, Ms. Clark notes, declined to be interviewed, which is a shame, given that it’s the Chrysler angle that will appeal most to American readers.

The Italian sections of the book are stronger than those set in the United States, so much so that I wonder how good the book might have been had Ms. Clark corralled a co-author based in Detroit. After Fiat’s 2008-9 takeover of Chrysler, the surprising turnaround that Fiat’s C.E.O., Sergio Marchionne then engineers consumes all of 31 pages, the last 10 percent of the book. I’ve read Fortune articles almost as long, and with far more insider sources.

The book begins — well, check that a moment. The story begins toward the end of the 19th century, when a well-to-do Italian cavalryman, Giovanni Agnelli, gets together with several of his chums in the northern city of Turin and decides to start an automobile company. The book doesn’t begin in the same place, though; Ms. Clark is one of those authors who love setting a scene in the present, then looping back again and again, Tarantino-style, to fill in the background. This can work in some books, but here I just kept getting confused.

The company that Agnelli founded became Fiat, and Ms. Clark effectively traces its history and development through world wars and Communist-led strikes. Giovanni was a devotee and friend of Henry Ford’s, and copied Ford’s methods wherever possible. When Giovanni died in 1945, control passed to his grandson, Gianni, who promptly spent the next decade or so romping across the French Riviera with the likes of Pamela Harriman while professional managers ran things back in Turin. For the next 40 years, Gianni kept Fiat afloat, no small accomplishment.

One of the stronger themes that Ms. Clark develops is the importance of the city’s history in Fiat’s growth. Once the capital of the House of Savoy, Italy’s royal family until 1946, Turin retained Savoy’s “Prussian” values well into the 20th century. Loyalty, discipline and hard work were its hallmarks, as they became Fiat’s.

But while loyalty and discipline kept Fiat alive during Gianni Agnelli’s reign at the company — and his family in control — they did not foster much in the way of long-term creativity or ingenuity. By the last years before Gianni’s death, in 2003, Fiat’s culture had calcified. Modern methods, like the manufacture of single parts that could be used in different makes of cars, passed it by. Engineers ran the show; they made the cars, then told the marketing people how many they needed to sell. Nobody thought of asking the marketing folks what kind of car people might actually want.

As a result, Fiat churned out lots of fine little cars that not enough people wanted to buy.

Relief came, unexpectedly, in the person of Gianni’s grandson, John Elkann, who joined the board in 1997 at the age of 21. Though a neophyte, he nevertheless had the good sense to hire Mr. Marchionne, then working in Switzerland. Mr. Marchionne blasted through Fiat’s aging culture, drawing around him scores of young hotshots who dragged Fiat into the 21st century, and then rescued Chrysler.

Ms. Clark does an excellent job of showing how all this played out internally, in large part, one senses, because Mr. Marchionne himself helped guide her through it. Access, access, access.

In the prose, Ms. Clark embraces too many clichés; the phrase “last but not least” is a special favorite. But her sentences are crisp and clear, and she keeps the story moving along nicely, from Giovanni to Gianni to Marchionne. She is especially good at conjuring a sense of place, whether in the Fiat factories or the many Agnelli villas and funerals that dot the text.

All in all, “Mondo Agnelli” is worth a read, even if one remains aware there is probably room for a more ambitious, Ron Chernow-style book on the Agnellis and their empire to be published someday.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6c72908db33d533b91b61c146ec6c3b5

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: fiat, footnotes, steve jobs

Prototype: Don’t Know How? Well, Find Someone Who Does

November 27, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

IS advanced technical knowledge necessary to become an inventor? Look at the story of Katherine Bomkamp, and you will see that it isn’t.

Ms. Bomkamp, 20, came up with the idea behind the Pain Free Socket, a prosthetic device that is intended to ease phantom limb pain in amputees. The device, now awaiting a patent, works by applying heat to the amputee’s joint socket through thermal biofeedback. The theory is that as the nerve endings are warmed, the brain is forced to focus on the heat rather than send signals to the absent limb.

Now a sophomore at West Virginia University, Ms. Bomkamp was in high school when she began working on her invention. At the time, she had zero background in chemical or electrical engineering, which were essential to the creation of the device.

“It was all completely foreign to me. I had no interest in engineering before this,” said Ms. Bomkamp, who was a criminal-justice major at her magnet high school in Maryland. In college, she’s studying political science, with plans to attend law school.

Her experience shows how ambition, persistence and an ample supply of curiosity can lay the groundwork for achieving breakthroughs, even technological ones. (A bit of youthful pluck helps, too.) It also shows that drawing on other people’s experience and resources is often as good as, if not better than, doing everything yourself.

Politicians know this. Business leaders like Steve Jobs knew this. And yet, when we think of inventors, we think of a solitary soul hunkered down in a basement lab for weeks or months before emerging to claim an unshared victory.

To this, Ms. Bomkamp would say: think again.

The seeds for the Pain Free Socket were sown when Ms. Bomkamp, whose father is a disabled Air Force veteran, found herself in waiting rooms at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center — the hospital in Virginia that has since closed — seated among wounded soldiers just back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of them were amputees.

“They would tell me their stories, and phantom pain kept coming up,” she said. She started researching the condition and learned that “most amputees are prescribed antipsychotics and barbiturates, which are expensive and have high addiction rates.”

“So I wanted to see if I could eliminate the need for those drugs holistically,” she said.

An opportunity to pursue her idea came when her chemistry teacher announced a school science fair. Wanting to “do something meaningful that impacted the community,” she said, she decided to work on a device to treat phantom pain.

“My thought process was: When I pull a muscle, I apply heat to it. If I applied the same concept to treating phantom pain, I thought that could work.”

The only problem was execution. Ms. Bomkamp was the furthest thing from a math or science geek; there was no way she could do this alone. So she began e-mailing engineering professors at universities in the area and asking them for assistance. “They were all very receptive,” she said. “They all invited me to come work in their labs. I chose the University of Maryland because it was closest to my house.”

And so, every Friday, she would take the day off school — with permission — and her mother would drive her to College Park. There, she worked with Professor Gilmer L. Blankenship in the department of electrical and computer engineering, and his lab manager, Jay Renner. “They taught me electrical engineering from the bottom up — electrical programming, heat wiring,” she said. “Basically, everything, they had to teach me.”

They helped her build a prosthetic socket as the first prototype; heated socks used by hunters served as the gadget’s heat source.

But engineering was only half the battle. Ms. Bomkamp wanted to expand her invention and build a prosthetic limb. Who would build it — and not charge her $15,000, the typical cost of an artificial leg?

Again, she resorted to grass-roots outreach, printing the names of prosthetics companies she found on the Web site of the Amputee Coalition of America, and making calls. “A lot of people hung up on me, saying, ‘This won’t work, you’re just a kid, don’t waste my time,’ ” Ms. Bomkamp said.

Finally, she reached Jake Godak, who at the time was working at Cascade, an orthotic and prosthetic supply company in Chico, Calif., and remains a consultant in prosthetics. “He said this could really work, and so he built sockets and a leg for me,” she said. “I still work with him.”

In the second-generation prototype, the heated socks were replaced by ribbing cable, and the electronics were such that the amputee could control the temperature of the socket.

The device “appears to be a very promising prototype for one of the possible ways for amputees to deal with phantom pain,” said Joe McTernan, director of coding and reimbursement, education and programming at the American Orthotic Prosthetic Association. “This certainly is interesting and intriguing research, “ he said, adding: “But it is, as far as I can see, currently very much a prototype.”

At West Virginia University, Ms. Bomkamp has acquired a new set of mentors in the school’s entrepreneurship program. She has set up her own company and is working on third- and fourth-generation prototypes. These will have smaller, more compact electronic boards and will be able to be operated by a mobile phone.

In the meantime, she has applied for a patent, and the device will be tested. She is also in talks with a domestic prosthetic company about licensing the rights to sell the device, which is subject to the approval of the Food and Drug Administration. She hopes to receive a small percentage in royalties from future sales.

Otherwise, she’s just an ordinary college kid — sort of.

“I definitely don’t have the typical college student life,” she says. “But at the same time, I do. I still worry about tests and getting scholarship money. But yet I’m a C.E.O., and I’ve got this project and I go on business trips. I walk the line between the two.”

And, yes, she won the high school science fair.

E-mail: proto@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2d9a2f555330fdf65a9a2ff69b6594df

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: phantom limb pain, steve jobs, walter reed army

An Analogy of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs

October 9, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

That day, The New York Times ran nearly two-dozen articles on Edison’s life and death. Newspapers worldwide were filled with eulogies and remembrances for many days afterward. Words alone were not enough to express the nation’s grief. Heeding President Herbert Hoover’s request, many Americans briefly turned off their electric lights at 10 o’clock Eastern time on the night of Edison’s funeral.

The broad outpouring that has followed the death of Steve Jobs reminds me of the display of grief following Edison’s death. In both cases, their passing evoked an extraordinary public response, tributes that were greater and broader than those paid to many a head of state. Why is that?

Both men have fully occupied my attention at different times. I wrote a book about Mr. Jobs in 1993. I looked at his struggling endeavor to start another computer company, NeXT, after he left Apple amid a power struggle in 1985. His return to Apple in 1997 and the triumphs that would follow were not within sight. I took my snapshot of him and the company when he was at the miserable nadir of his professional life.

Years later, I wrote a biography of Edison, a person whom Mr. Jobs admired. When you compare the two personalities and their careers, a few similarities emerge immediately. Both had less formal schooling than most of their respective peers. Both possessed the ability to visualize projects on a grand scale. Both followed an inner voice when making decisions. And both had terrific tempers that could make their employees quake.

Both men worked in several product areas, but entertainment-related technology was a major portion of their product portfolios. This prompts a question: Would the public’s relationship to Edison have been essentially the same without the phonograph and without movies? Or with Mr. Jobs, if Apple had remained just Apple Computer?

After enjoying early success, each of them pursued a quixotic project that would occupy them for roughly 10 years — Mr. Jobs’s disappointing but enlightening NeXT odyssey and Edison’s failed attempt to build an iron ore processing business in northwestern New Jersey.

Edison’s misadventures in mining produced no visible change in the man. He had set out to “do something now so different and so much bigger than anything I’ve ever done before people will forget that my name ever was connected with anything electrical.” The milling machinery he designed, redesigned and redesigned again never worked as he expected. But he shrugged. Nothing could rattle his sense of omniscience in all technical fields.

Mr. Jobs, however, clearly learned from his experiences at NeXT about what not to do, such as driving away after short stints the talented people he had recruited. When he returned to Apple, he built an executive team that remained stable.

THE later careers of the two were more different than similar. Mr. Jobs was able to realize his product visions — again and again. Edison’s career was characterized by a pattern of introducing what today we would call a beta version of a product and then losing interest in it. Competitors would then swoop in and fully commercialize the idea — and profit the most from it.

Mr. Jobs was the far shrewder businessman, even if he never talked about wealth as a matter of personal interest. When Edison died, he left behind an estate valued at about $12 million, or about $180 million in today’s dollars. His friend Henry Ford had once joked that Edison was “the world’s greatest inventor and the world’s worst businessman.” Mr. Jobs was worth a commanding $6.5 billion.

Mr. Jobs was perhaps the most beloved billionaire the world has ever known. Richard Branson’s tribute captures the way people felt they could identify with Mr. Jobs’s life narrative: “So many people drew courage from Steve and related to his life story: adoptees, college dropouts, struggling entrepreneurs, ousted business leaders figuring out how to make a difference in the world, and people fighting debilitating illness. We have all been there in some way and can see a bit of ourselves in his personal and professional successes and struggles.”

By contrast, Edison became a victim of his own manufactured life narrative and the world’s adulation. Earlier, when Edison introduced the spring-driven phonograph in 1878, a reporter coined a nickname for him: “The Wizard of Menlo Park.” He liked — too much — playing the Wizard. He was ever ready to pontificate on any subject under the sun. Educational reform. National defense spending. The fatal effects of clothing that “pinches” the body. The relationship of diet to national destiny (“The rice-eating nations never progress…”). Much of it was ephemera or idiocy, best forgotten.

Steve Jobs did not waste his time or ours with similar flotsam. A rare time that he publicly stepped out of the role of chief executive and shared personal thoughts was when he delivered the commencement address at Stanford in June 2005. It was a moving meditation on his life and his — and our — mortality. It was a talk for the ages.

Early in Mr. Jobs’s career, journalists were wary of stepping within range of his “reality distortion field,” his perceived ability as a showman to make products seem better than they actually were. But it was Mr. Jobs’s personal reality in his later years, making the most of a life that both he and we knew would be cruelly cut short, that proved most influential in the end.

The public tributes to Edison in 1931 and those to Mr. Jobs 80 years later were similar, but only superficially. With Edison, the public thought of the Wizard, an outsize persona, through which it was impossible to see an actual person. But with Mr. Jobs, the tributes were to a fellow mortal, exactly our own height, just as vulnerable as we all are to the random strike of a life-ending catastrophe.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=357c2c2d7e13db35361f44e0056a3ff7

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: apple computer, product areas, steve jobs

Unboxed: Steve Jobs and the Power of Taking the Big Chance

October 8, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

And he did, time and again. Mr. Jobs did not make the technology himself; he led the teams that did, prodding, cajoling and inspiring. His track record as a business team leader is unique — as Apple’s Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad testify. In two stints at Apple, he made computers into coveted consumer goods and transformed not only product categories, like music players and cellphones, but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today.

Part of Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be the lessons learned by those who worked closely with him over the years. Here are just a few:

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DELIGHT CUSTOMERS Six weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Mr. Jobs ordered a crucial design change. Until then, the planning for supplies, manufacturing and engineering had been based on the assumption that the smartphone’s face would be plastic, recalls Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009. Plastic is less fragile than glass, and easier to make.

But the plastic touch screen had a drawback. It was prone to developing scratches. Those scratches, Mr. Jobs insisted, would irritate users and be seen as a design flaw. “All the logical facts told us to go with plastic, and Steve’s instinct went the other way,” Mr. Fadell says. “It was Steve’s call — his gut.”

The glass choice was a challenge that seemed “nearly impossible” at the time, he says — a last-minute scramble to get supplies of specialized glass and tweak the design of the phone’s casing to reduce the chances the glass would crack when an iPhone was dropped. But with extra investment and a frenetic work regimen, the switch proved doable, despite the tight deadline.

The episode, Mr. Fadell says, points to a principle he took away from his years working with Mr. Jobs. “You do not cut corners and you make sure the customer gets an experience that is an absolute delight,” observes Mr. Fadell, who heads a Silicon Valley start-up company whose product has not yet been disclosed and will not compete with Apple.

GOOD IDEAS TAKE TIME After he was ousted from Apple, Mr. Jobs founded NeXT in 1985. It produced a powerful desktop computer, a stylish black cube, and its initial market was going to be in education. The idea was that the machine would be more than hardware and software; it would also offer content, “a universe of wisdom,” recalls Michael Hawley, a computer scientist who worked closely with Mr. Jobs at NeXT and lived part time in Mr. Jobs’s house, as Mr. Hawley shuttled between California and his post at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

NeXT computers, in Mr. Jobs’s vision, would marry technology and the liberal arts by including digital books, music and art. Mr. Jobs began pursuing the rights to works that could be converted to digital form. He persuaded a few publishers that because they would save the expense of paper, printing and distribution, NeXT should pay a royalty that was a fraction of the cost of a printed book. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Hawley recalled, struck a deal with the Oxford University Press for the complete works of Shakespeare for a royalty of $1 a digital copy.

NeXT’s foray into education fizzled; its machines were too expensive for that market. But Mr. Jobs’s concept and business model for digital media were “the instinct that was translated to Apple with the iTunes store, 99-cents-a-song pricing and all the media offerings that have followed,” Mr. Hawley says.

“When Steve believed in an idea, he was both passionate and patient, scratching away over the years until he got it right,” says Mr. Hawley, a scientist, concert pianist and host of the EG Conference, an annual gathering for technologists, educators and people in media and entertainment.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=aba06d7eebf15c08ac848e49703136c0

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: design flaw, drawback, steve jobs

Media Decoder Blog: Sony Buying Film Rights to Steve Jobs Biography

October 8, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

LOS ANGELES — Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio that the produced high-speed and high-profile movies “This Is It,” with Michael Jackson, and “The Social Network,” about Mark Zuckerberg, could do it again with the Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs. The studio late this week concluded a deal to buy film rights to the authorized biography “Steve Jobs,” from Walter Isaacson, according to a person who was briefed on the deal and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the studio had not authorized a public statement.

A Sony spokesman declined to comment. Word that discussions were being completed was posted Friday on the Deadline.com Web site.

After the death of Mr. Jobs on Wednesday, Simon Schuster, which is publishing the book, moved up its release date by a month, to Oct. 24. And advance orders have been brisk, as readers hunger for more information about a leader who has emerged as the embodiment of creativity and enterprise that has appeared to falter in much of the business culture.

Historically, movies have been developed slowly, and seldom tackled current events, as circumstances, interest and the national mood would often change in the years it took get a picture on track. But that has changed, as studios took advantage of faster digital production techniques, and showed a new willingness to keep pace with the increasing pace of the media world. After Michael Jackson’s death, the studio had his concert film, “This Is It,” in theaters within months. “The Social Network,” which was made even though the studio did not acquire Mr. Zuckerberg’s life rights, was already being written even as the book on which it was partly based, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires,” was being rushed to publication.

Having agreed to pay a reported $1 million advance against a total of $3 million if the movie is produced for the Jobs book, Sony is certainly in a position to join its producing partners — the MG/360 team, which pairs Mark Gordon and Management 360 — in putting a movie on screens while the memory of Mr. Jobs and his achievements is fresh.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=056d900655f144a8f50dbc44daa53727

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: billionaires, business culture, steve jobs

Common Sense: How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity

October 7, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

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.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3b8aea033bf02425dbf65b91abd61201

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: first personal computer, mr gates, steve jobs

Pogue’s Posts Blog: Jobs Was Imitated, Never Duplicated

October 7, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Wednesday evening, Apple broke the news that Steve Jobs had died.

Since that moment, tributes, eulogies and retrospectives have poured over the world like rain. He changed industries, redefined business models, fused technology and art. People are comparing him to Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci. And they’re saying that it will be a very long time before the world sees the likes of Steve Jobs again.

Probably true. But why not, do you suppose?

After all, there are other brilliant marketers, designers and business executives. They’re all over Silicon Valley — all over the world. Many of them, maybe most of them, have studied Steve Jobs, tried to absorb his methods and his philosophy. Surely if they pore over the Steve Jobs playbook long enough, they can re-create some of his success.

But nobody ever does, even when they copy Mr. Jobs’s moves down to the last eyebrow twitch. Why not?

Here’s a guy who never finished college, never went to business school, never worked for anyone else a day in his adult life. So how did he become the visionary who changed every business he touched? Actually, he’s given us clues all along. Remember the “Think Different” ad campaign he introduced upon his return to Apple in 1997?

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.”

In other words, the story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow.

Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or more beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social graces.

Apple has attained its current astonishing levels of influence and success because it’s nimble. It’s incredibly focused. It’s had stunningly few flops.

And that’s because Mr. Jobs didn’t buy into focus groups, groupthink or decision by committee. At its core, Apple existed to execute the visions in his brain. He oversaw every button, every corner, every chime. He lost sleep over the fonts in the menus, the cardboard of the packaging, the color of the power cord.

That’s just not how things are done.

Often, his laser focus flew in the face of screamingly obvious common sense. He wanted to open a chain of retail stores — after the failure of Gateway’s chain had clearly demonstrated that the concept was doomed.

He wanted to sell a smartphone that had no keyboard, when physical keys were precisely what had made the BlackBerry the most popular smartphone at the time.

Over and over again, he took away our comfy blankets. He took away our floppy drives, our dial-up modems, our camcorder jacks, our non-glossy screens, our Flash, our DVD drives, our removable laptop batteries.

How could he do that? You’re supposed to add features, not take them away, Steve! That’s just not done!

(Often, I was one of the bellyachers. And often, I’d hear from Mr. Jobs. He’d call me at home, or when I was out to dinner, or when I was vacationing with my family. And he’d berate me for not seeing his bigger picture. On the other hand, sometimes he’d call to praise me for appreciating what he was going for. A C.E.O. calling a reviewer at home? That’s just not done.)

Eventually, of course, most people realized that he was just doing that Steve Jobs thing again: being ahead of his time.

Eventually, in fact, society adopted a cycle of reaction to Apple that became so predictable, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

Phase 1: Steve Jobs takes the stage to introduce a new product.

Phase 2: The tech bloggers savage it. (“The iPad has no mouse, no keyboard, no GPS, no USB, no card slot, no camera, no Flash!? It’s dead on arrival!”)

Phase 3: The product comes out, the public goes nuts for it, the naysayers seem to disappear into the earth.

Phase 4: The rest of the industry leaps into high gear trying to do just what Apple did.

And so yes, there are other geniuses. There are other brilliant marketers, designers and business executives. Maybe, once or twice in a million, those skills even coincide in the same person.

But will that person also have the vision? The name “Steve Jobs” may appear on 300 patents, but his gift wasn’t invention. It was seeing the promise in some early, clunky technology — and polishing it, refining it and simplifying it until it becomes a standard component. Like the mouse, menus, windows, the CD-ROM or Wi-Fi.

Even at Apple, is there anyone with the imagination to pluck brilliant, previously unthinkable visions out of the air — and the conviction to see them through with monomaniacal attention to detail?

Suppose there were. Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough — or maybe uncomfortable enough — to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?

Zero. The odds are zero.

Mr. Jobs is gone. Everyone who knew him feels that sorrow. But the ripples of that loss will widen in the days, weeks and years to come: to the people in the industries he changed. To his hundreds of millions of customers. And to the billions of people touched more indirectly by the greater changes that Steve Jobs brought about, even if they’re unaware of it.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his tragically unfinished life:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=89526f612da3893b5d0a4cbf40ec0ef5

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: crazy ones, eulogies, steve jobs

Pogue’s Posts Blog: Imitated, Never Duplicated

October 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment