What Did Steve Jobs Do Right?

About a month ago, I posted a blog about how I became an ardent Apple fan and ended by saying I will write another blog telling what I think Steve Jobs did right at Apple.  Since then, with the appearance by Steve Jobs himself at a Cupertino Council meeting announcing plans to develop a spaceship-shaped new headquarters here to house over 12,000 employees, Cupertino has been gripped by Apple-mania.  Since there may be many readers out there who may be anxiously awaiting the promised blog, perhaps even Steve Jobs himself, I told myself I had better get moving and write this.

It’s easy in hindsight to point out what a person or a company did right or wrong, but it is much more difficult when critical decisions are made to divine what the correct path going forward is. 

Let me take you back over twenty-five years to 1984, when Apple came out with the Macintosh personal computer with its bundled operating system (OS).  (An operating system is a software program that manages all the hardware resources of the computer; it provides common core services for application software to access these resources.)  There were two things that was notable about this event. 

First, the Macintosh OS had a graphical user interface (GUI) using a mouse, menubar, drop-down menus, pop-up menus, icons, and concepts such as drag and drop.  The file management system, the Finder, also was graphical and easy to use.  Apple did not invent the GUI concepts, which was first demonstrated at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), but it was the first to popularize it.

It’s hard to imagine now how revolutionary it was to have these operating system functions so easily accessible by the end user.  The operating system was the domain of the geekiest of computer people — the system administrator or the kernel programmers.  These were the people who used, nay preferred, the arcane command line interface that other computers were then using.

Second, the Macintosh OS was not just bundled with it, it was proprietary to it.  The Macintosh computer and all later Apple hardware and software were all vertically integrated.  Apple made no pretense of using a “standard” OS, like UNIX, and it does not license other hardware vendors to use its OS.  Later, its applications that run on top of their OS were tightly tied to it and do not run on other hardware or under other OS’s.  Again, this was very revolutionary, as other companies at least paid lip service to adhering to “standards” and offering “portable” applications that can run on many different types of hardware/software platforms.

I reentered the work force in the mid-eighties after staying at home raising my family of three children and then getting a master’s degree in computer science.  I started work as a Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore, then the research and development arm of the Bell operating companies.

I was doing technical work in artificial intelligence, and later moved to development and then management of large-scale, highly reliable telecommunications software. Strategic decisions by high-level executives to have standards-based, “portable”, platform-independent software sounded nice in a Powerpoint presentation, but in reality costs a lot more in time and money than the results were worth.

During one period of my career, I was responsible for a large telecommunications software application running on a new hardware platform (IBM RISC/6000) and which uses several third-party software programs (like the Oracle database and SS7 communications protocol software).  Our application software might be impacted by any changes, bug fixes, or enhancements in the hardware, OS, and third-party software.  It might take up to 18 months to put out a major release and system testing would be about six months.  It was a major effort to coordinate our application release cycles with all the other third party hardware, operating system, and software applications release and support cycles.

So what did Steve Jobs do right?

One, he was passionate about making Apple products wonderfully and elegantly usable for the end user.  Does the end user care that his software application were portable to multiple platforms? No.  Does the end user care that he is using proprietary software?  No.

Two, he was persistent and lucky.  The GUI and other usability features required considerable extra memory and processor time, and Apple was thought then to be for home use only but not for “real” applications in the business world.  The passage of time brought about advances in microchips and lower prices; Apple’s extra processor and memory requirements are no longer an issue.

Three, he controlled all elements he needed for success — the hardware, the OS, and the application software.   Now not only do Mail, Address Book, Calendar, Safari, iPhoto, Pages, Keynote, etc., work well but they also work amazingly well together.  With the introduction of the beautiful iPhone, iPad, and iCloud, it is becoming clear that Apple will control more than the computing market.  And Apple users will bring their demands for ease-of-use to the business environment where they work.

Thanks, Steve Jobs, for all the wonderful Apple products that made Apple the biggest, most admired company in the world.  A toast to your good health!