I think I’ve said everything I’m going to say on Steve Jobs’ health but I wanted to point out this article from David Coursey of PC World because I think it says a lot about marketing and the hero worship it can produce. Most of Mr. Coursey’s claims are simply inaccurate and the fact that he’s making them shows he (a) knows very little about Apple and (b) has deified Steve Jobs to an unrealistic level.
My point, just to put it out there, is not that Steve Jobs isn’t great. He is. But he’s not as irreplaceable as people make him out to be and the only people who seem to think he is are ones that have no clue what they are talking about. With that said, off we go…
It is unfair to expect anyone to be a suitable successor to Steve Jobs. I was following Apple after Jobs was forced out in 1985 and replaced first by John Sculley and, later, Gil Amelio. Both made the mistake, I think, of believing they were running a computer company.
I saw a few John Sculley (1st CEO after Jobs) speeches when I was a kid and his vision for the Newton really wasn’t computer centric at all. In fact, it was a lot like Apple’s vision for the iPhone now. It also doesn’t explain all the meetings that Apple had with Hollywood regarding Quicktime during both John Sculley and Michael Spindler’s (2nd CEO after Jobs) tenure.
True, smart business decisions have helped. Sculley and Amelio could never get the OS issue solved. Jobs did it in a way seemed almost graceful. Building a new operating system using Unix under the Apple user interface has been a huge win.
Two things here.
First, I hate people who say this because they are normally the same people who praised the various MacOS versions when they were new. The truth is, and I say this as a Windows user, the MacOS was always ahead of the PC in the user friendly arena. Even without Jobs.
Second, Jobs did not build “a new operating system using Unix under the Apple user interface” as the author puts it. Jobs was brought back into Apple because Gil Amelio (3rd Apple CEO after Jobs) needed a new OS. So really it was Amelio’s decision to go with OS X (which was the NeXT OS at the time). Beyond that, as someone who has used both of them I can say OS X is still closer to NeXT than it is to the old MacOS
Apple also, wisely, reversed its traditional course of “our way or the highway” and embraced both Windows and Intel. It was not until the iPod came to Windows that the music player really took off. I think I called it a three-year-old “overnight sensation” when iTunes for Windows hit it big.
John Sculley was actually the first to have that idea. In fact, he commissioned a special project team (called “Star Trek”) which got the MacOS running on Intel hardware. His only problem was he got fired by the board before he could do anything with it.
Outsiders are not privy to how decisions are made at Apple. People who know are afraid of getting fired if they tell, which probably says quite enough. Still, I’d like to get a handle on the extent to which other people have ideas that Jobs accepts vs. only Steve has the great ideas.
Really? Because I’ve read tons of insider stories. Like this one about the iPod.
Anyway, I could go on but my point is made. This is someone who claims to be an expert on Apple yet he clearly has never read a book on Apple (which would have mentioned all of the above facts) and doesn’t watch Apple news very closely (the iPod story quoted above was pretty widely distributed).
His sole source of information seems to be Apple Hype and that’s led him to believe that Steve Jobs is the be-all-end-all. But he’s not. Apple’s been successful under other leaders and it could be again if it needed to.
Though honestly, I still don’t see anything in the news about Jobs’ health that makes me think it will need to anytime soon.