It is amazing to me what Steve Jobs has done and in a very unconventional way. Someone who essentially invented the PC with the Apple and then Apple II, then has a series of try to do it again with lots of hype and then fails with Apple III, Lisa, Newton, Next. But some how then learns and from Pixar (still most of his net worth) and then with Apple, does it completely differently:
- Instead of unrelenting hype and bombast that the PC industry grew up on, he creates a company that is all about stealth. Don’t tell anyone what you are doing and then launch with a real product.
- Be pragmatic and first fix what is broken. What was wrong with the original Mac, well, a proprietary processor, proprietary bus, proprietary graphics, proprietary networking and proprietary operating system. In the first few years, the Macbook and then the iMac became Intel, PC bus, nVidia graphics, and Ethernet and Unix.
- Then find a category and be vertically integrated and customer oriented. The iPod was the first thing and it did what customers wanted in terms of user experience, but didn’t try to be a complete operating system or platform at all. But it is a hardware platform with standardized connectors and a hardware ecosystem.
- Find the next category that is a phone and make the iPhone. Using the guts of the standardized operating system, but do it in great secrecy, so when it came it, it just worked. In many ways, this has been about shifting from stealth to platform mode for the software from a new distribution model and promotion model to the way to write applications that works across Intel and ARM.
- Finally, define a new category that is the iPad. Now we are on to really a new category, but use everything that came before it. But is in fact just in a software and hardware sense a large iPhone. Focus quite a bit on the new experience.
So in 20 years, what will people remember Steve Jobs more for? Will it be the original Apple, or the iPad. My personal bet is on the iPad because it is what computing should be. It comes out the box, there is no user training. Most people look at it for 5 minutes and want one and can use it in less. Amazing.
