In the memory of
Steve Jobs
If you do not bother to read this memoir, you can directly go to,
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The memoir by Dr.
Tim Bresnahan of Stanford University.
Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship
Steve Jobs has died. We should remember his accomplishments and the vision of American entrepreneurship he embodied.
The PC business was founded by a ragtag
band of outsiders. Steve, a lotus-eating less-than-successful Atari
employee, was as much an outsider as any entrepreneur ever. But he and
the more techie Steve (Wozniak) brought us a usable computer, the Apple
II, you didn’t need to solder together, moving the industry from
hobbyist kits towards a real business. What a powerful commercialization
idea that was, and what a great collaborator he was, not only with the
very different Woz but with all the different people writing
applications. Most of the kids in the industries made technologies they
themselves would like to use. Steve Jobs made a computer real customers
could use and went to work to sell it, yes, to SELL IT to us.
Steve Jobs, master commercializer,
thought the PC was going to be mostly important for customers as
consumers at home. But Apple didn’t try to control applications
developers, leaving things open to developers. It wasn’t so much that
Steve was committed to open systems, but it was real entrepreneurship
and they had no resources, so they had to rely on others. The most
important applications developers invented the spreadsheet and the word
processor, setting the PC on a grrowth path to be used mostly at work.
Rather than viewing this change as a disappointment, Steve pushed his
company toward making machines that white-collar workers could use to
run those applications.
He didn’t quail when the switch to a
work PC gave IBM the opportunity to enter and compete with him. His
balls and bravado were right out there when he put “welcome IBM” in huge
type in the Wall street Journal. And but for a tiny problem of
computers overheating and microchips popping out of the Apple III, IBM
would have had no chance, and we’d have an Apple PC standard today.
Entrepreneurs in those days had no resources, had to do it all, design,
build, sell, recruit applications developers. One better quality control
decision in manufacturing ….
In the IBM PC era, Steve drove
innovation forward with the Macintosh. This, like the Apple II, was
squarely aimed at expanding the use of PCs to everyone, the “computer
for the rest of us.” Everyone now knows that this was innovating too
fast, and that cheaper, duller IBM machines running Microsoft’s dull
clone of an earlier operating system would become the standard. But do
you know how Steve changed when he realized that “the rest of us” were
not going to buy the Mac? He learned that the most important early
customers for Macs were corporate marketing departments (those
graphics!) and worked hard to create, as he told me not long after, “the
best computer company for those corporate marketers we can.” Real
entrepreneurs don’t wallow in vision, they sell product.
There’s so much loose talk about
“entrepreneurial vision.” Steve Jobs was the real deal. When his vision
for the Mac didn’t work out, he responded to what the market wanted.
Earlier, when his vision for the Apple II didn’t work out, he responded
to what the market wanted. It is one in a billion humans who can both
drive forward a vision — like his vision for the Mac — and then
flexibily adapt to what customers want. The floor is littered with
visionaries and marketers, it is the rare individual indeed, Steve Jobs,
who can do both who is the one in a billion.
After losing the standards war to IBM —
and worse, after the super-cool Steve Jobs lost the race for PC industry
leadership to the super-geek Bill Gates, came the dark night of the
soul. You’ll read a lot about “being fired from Apple,” but as Steve
later said, that was a blessing in disguise. The real blow was losing
the standards war.
Fitzgerald said there are no second acts
in American lives. Steve Jobs had the most American of lives, and
created his own second act, at first more or less by accident. Having
lost the standard-setting war to Bill Gates — what a bitter thing, the
overheated chips popping out, innovation not being the answer, then the
super nerd beating his own super cool self — he made a huge fortune more
or less by accident in, of all places, the movie business. And that
funded the best second act of all time.
At last, in our century, it was
technically possible to design and sell a cool device to “the rest of
us.” It was anything but easy, for, while there were some
consumer-oriented innovators running on the Web, like Google, the direct
distribution of PCs to consumers was blocked. A direct attack on
Fortress Microsoft would not work. But Microsoft was not the only
dinosaur to slay. What a briliant indirect route to take back the PC
Steve designed! He started, innocently enough from the perspective of
the computer powers that be, with a portable music player. He’d noted
how lame Hollywood’s reaction to the Internet era was, and took the
opportunity. Then he morphed it into a smart cell phone, also an
enterainment device and something of a computer. He’d noted how lame
telephone companies’ reaction to technical change was, and took the
opportunity. And now, last, he’s built — and SOLD — a tablet which is
both an entertainment device and a real computer, launching an assault
on fortress Microsoft. Once again, the insiders did not take advantage
of technical change, and Steve Jobs seized the opportunity.
Steve died before that final assault
could be carried out — hell, he dragged himself back to work from his
deathbed to launch that final assault — but he can rest with the
knowledge that in his second act he came from the outside and made a
huge change to three industries. Platform innovations are extremely
difficult and extremely rare. No one, not Watson, not Gates, not
Zuckerberg (though there remains hope for that pup) has made as many
brilliant platform plays as Steve Jobs.
