A former insider, David Sobotta, experienced the brilliant, difficult and theatrical Apple boss Steve Jobs.
This week, Steve Jobs stood on stage in San Francisco to make his keynote speech at the Macworld show, to unveil new products. Here's something I discovered in my 22 years at Apple: some of the toughest competition for the best seats, or the first of those new products, comes from former Windows-centric executives Jobs personally sucked into his "reality distortion zone" in face-to-face executive briefings.
You want to go to one? You want to meet Jobs to persuade him that Apple should build a tablet computer or an iPhone? Then besides having a big buying budget and persuasive reasons, you'd better bring a big ego.
In 2002, I had been at Apple for nearly 20 years and had risen through the ranks to become its national federal sales manager. I joined a delegation from the prestigious National Institutes of Health, the top US federal agency for medical research, for an "executive briefing" at Apple's Cupertino headquarters near San Francisco with Jobs. Most people haven't heard of the institutes, but its 2007 budget will be about $US29 billion. ($37 billion). It is also one of Apple's premier scientific customers.
Nine key people attended the meeting, including the institutes' two highest-ranking technology officers. Setting up an executive briefing at Apple is a bizarre process that takes a couple of months; if you also want Jobs to grace the briefing, add six weeks to run a formal request up the chain of command, including just about every detail but the DNA of the people who want to meet him.
With luck, and if Jobs happens to be in town, you will get the commitment that unless something else turns up, he will drop by and stay as long as he feels necessary.
Once you have that guarantee, the management chain starts telling horror stories about how the best thing is for Jobs not to come. That if he does come, he'll talk about whatever he has immersed himself in recently, whether it is iTunes or Garageband.
That whatever he has to say might or might not have anything to do with what the customer wants to hear.
For a salesman, that's disconcerting; your customers normally come to these executive briefings to understand where Apple executives stand on key issues. And they're customers, aren't they? They're the ones who pay for it all, the ones who are always right?
Yet it's an amazing experience to take part in a briefing with Jobs. Stories about him reprimanding customers are true. Once, when renegotiating a Pixar distribution deal with Disney, he humiliated Disney's chief information officer in front of his staff. Jobs pointed to a couple of recent Disney flops, and told the attendees they could expect more of the same as long as the officer was stupid enough to keep Macs out of the creative process.
An executive briefing always looks, on paper, like a clash of titanic egos. From what I saw, most wilt quickly in Jobs's presence. And customers' reverence for him usually overwhelms any hostility.
In fact, it doesn't really matter who is presenting or what is being discussed. When Jobs enters a room, everything stops and attention turns to him. When he walks in you get the feeling that he has sucked all the other thoughts out of the room. As for quoting him precisely - you don't take notes if you want to live. (At Apple's most recent sales briefing, nobody was allowed to have a notebook, phone or computer out while Jobs spoke.)
I've checked these recollections with an institutes attendee. Jobs did show up wearing shorts, sandals and a few days' stubble. Everyone else was in east coast business casual - sports coats and khaki pants. He also brought his brilliance but not, that day, the arrogance you often hear about.
The delegation wanted to know if Apple would build a tablet computer (electronic notepad) that would work in their clinical situation. Actually, more than that: they wanted to convince Jobs to make a tablet. After all, Bill Gates had launched one the year before at the Consumer Electronics Show, boldly saying: "Within five years, I predict that it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America." Tablets were the future - weren't they? Not like those music players that Apple had launched the previous year. Pod-somethings?
But as Apple's then vice-president of hardware, Jon Rubinstein, once told me: "Customers do not know what they want to buy. We have to tell them." Jobs had not been warned about the tablet question, but it became obvious he had given the topic serious consideration. He listed a number of reasons Apple was not interested. And they provide some of the best insights into why Apple does, or does not, do a product.
First, he said, tablet computers were not a big enough market for Apple to spend its limited resources chasing. And even if the market grew, it would not reach a size to be of interest. The form factor was all wrong. Apple was more interested in defining markets than trying to catch other companies that were trying to create a market for questionable products.
Still, some of the health institutes' scientists pressed the issue. Jobs's follow-up answer was the most impressive I had heard him give.
First, he said, the wireless bandwidth for huge images, plus the security needed to successfully do what the institutes wanted, was just not on the horizon. Plus, tablets' screen resolution was nowhere near that required for high-quality medical images. Finally, any product designed to work in the medical field would attract significant liability. The hint was that Apple wasn't interested in anything with that kind of potential liability. That pretty well shut down the issue.
So, no tablet.
The market for a converged computer and phone, however, should be very attractive. The consultancy Gartner forecast last year that 986 million mobiles would be sold in 2006. And there's an "Apple gap": mobile phone users often find their interfaces confusing, even within the same brands. Apple's unique ability to simplify while innovating looks like a good fit there. It has played around with unique relationships with phone manufacturers: Jobs used a Sony Ericsson phone to demonstrate Bluetooth capability in 2002, and showed off the Motorola ROKR, the first to play iTunes, in 2005. This fits Apple's pattern of learning what it needs to know through partnerships before jumping into a market. Significantly, the first PowerBooks, in 1991, involved Sony. Now the companies' laptops compete, although Sony still makes the batteries.
But a tablet computer? Most analysts would agree the market is growing slowly, mostly in the health care and other specialised industries, and that these models will make at most 5 per cent of the laptop market by 2009 (they account for 1 per cent now). Further, the tablet was championed by Bill Gates. I don't see Jobs helping Gates's reputation as a forecaster of computer trends.
I believe there are other reasons Apple won't make a tablet computer. Even before the iPod gained momentum, Apple executives had a theory that the route to success is not selling thousands of expensive things, but selling millions of very inexpensive things, like iPods.
Jobs's ability to know where consumers and technology will intersect often creates a road paved in gold. That's why he'll focus his energy on mobiles with enhanced music capabilities and maybe a few computing features such as email and contacts synchronisation with Macs or through .Mac.
The potential there that only Jobs can see could well turn into another must-have product for the legions who don't even know they are part of Steve's Army. They haven't met him. But they've met the products of his thinking.
THE APPLE CORE
Born February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. Grew up among the apricot orchards that are now Silicon Valley.
Education Attended high school in Cupertino, where Apple has its headquarters. Frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto and worked there over summers.
1974 After dropping out of college, took a job at Atari as a technician.
1976 Sold Kombi van to help co-found Apple and started producing personal computers for $666.66.
1984 Released the Apple Macintosh.
1985 Forced out of Apple.
1986 Founded Pixar Animation Studios and later another company called NeXT Computers. Pixar has produced Academy Award-winning animated films such as Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.
1996 Apple bought NeXT for $US402 million. Jobs soon became Apple CEO.
2001 Jobs unveiled the iPod. Since then Apple's annual sales have more than tripled. Last year Apple sold 39.4 million iPods - a 75 per cent increase on the
22.5 million in 2005. Apple's sales were $19.3 billion last year. Jobs received an "official" salary of just $US1 a year.
2006 Disney bought Pixar with
$US7.4 billion worth of stock, making Jobs Disney's biggest shareholder, with 7 per cent. He sits on the Disney board.
Family Lives with wife and three children in Silicon Valley.
The Guardian
David Sobotta was the federal sales manager at Apple. His blog is at viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels.
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