James Surowiecki on a lesson that Steve Jobs absorbed by the time he returned to Apple

by Ken

I've refrained from commenting on the passing of Steve Jobs, since my feelings are complicated, and probably not important to anyone but me. (My perspective, I might explain, is that of a longtime Mac user who hasn't been thrilled with the evolution of our platform, and hasn't been affected by the revolutionary iPod, iPhone, or iPad, which makes it problematic for me to embrace his unparalleled visionariness.) This week's New Yorker (October 17) contains a no-attempt-at-restraint encomium from Nicholson Baker (another complicated case for me -- something like "the most talented phony in literary history"?), "Postscript: Steve Jobs," but also an interesting slant on James Surowiecki's "Financial Page": "How Steve Jobs Changed."

Surowiecki focuses on what he sees as an important change between the Steve Jobs who cofounded Apple and maintained what is routinely characterized as his "perfectionism" to the ventures he pursued after being forced out, as against the Steve Jobs who returned to Apple and made it the world's greatest company. The earlier incarnation, he notes, with his insistence on maintaining absolute and proprietary control over all aspects of the Mac's hardware and software, produced a lovely computer, more powerful than the PCs of the time, that nevertheless remained a niche product. However --

When Jobs returned, he still wanted Apple to, as he put it, “own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” But his obsession with control had been tempered: he was better, you might say, at playing with others, and this was crucial to the extraordinary success that Apple has enjoyed over the past decade. Take the iPod. The old Jobs might well have insisted that the iPod play only songs encoded in Apple’s favored digital format, the A.A.C. This would have allowed Apple to control the user experience, but it would also have limited the iPod market, since millions of people already had MP3s. So Apple made the iPod MP3-compatible. (Sony, by contrast, made its first digital music players compatible only with files in Sony’s proprietary format, and they bombed as a result.) Similarly, Jobs could have insisted, as he originally intended, that iPods and iTunes work only with Macs. But that would have cut the company off from the vast majority of computer users. So in 2002 Apple launched a Windows-compatible iPod, and sales skyrocketed soon afterward. And, while Apple’s designs are as distinctive as ever, the devices now rely less on proprietary hardware and more on standardized technologies.

The iPhone signalled a further loosening of the reins. Although Apple makes the phone and the operating system itself, and although every app is sold through the App Store, the system is far more open than the Mac ever was: there are more than four hundred thousand iPhone apps written by outside developers. Some are even designed by Apple’s competitors—you can read on the Kindle app instead of using iBooks—and many are so inelegant that Jobs must have hated them. Such apps make the iPhone messier than it would otherwise be, but they also make it much more valuable. The old Jobs might well have tried, in the interest of quality, to contain the number of apps: he always talked about how saying no to ideas was as important as saying yes. Though Apple does vet apps to some extent, the new Jobs essentially said, Let a thousand flowers bloom.

The introduction of the iPad has ratified this new reality, since developers have already released more than a hundred thousand apps for the tablet. The result is that the network effects that worked against Apple in the eighties, making it essentially a boutique company, are now working in its favor: the more apps Apple’s products have, the more people want to use them, which, in turn, makes developers want to develop for them, and so on.

There’s no doubt that Apple’s success in the past decade depended on Jobs’s uncanny ability to introduce products that captured the zeitgeist. But what turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet was that Jobs did more than just create cool new devices. Rather, he presided over the creation of new market ecosystems, with those devices at their heart. And if the ecosystems were more chaotic than he might have liked, they were also more powerful and more profitable. It’s true that, by the standards of today’s open-source computing world, Apple’s platforms are still very much closed. After all, when Google designed a phone operating system, Android, it simply handed it out to phone manufacturers to use as they liked. But, by the standards of its old ethos, Apple is much more open than one would ever have thought possible. In giving up a little control, Jobs found a lot more power. ♦

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