Steve Jobs lived up to the hype at D8 on Tuesday, forecasting a dim future for PCs and Google TV, offering candid comments on the Gizmodo iPhone incident, and more.
Thrown by All Things D and hosted by the Wall Street Journal's head tech writer, Walt Mossberg, this year's D conference (the eighth, hence "D8") is the first since 2007 in which Jobs has participated. Given the media attention, you'd think Jobs was the only one speaking.
Jobs began by noting that while Apple surpassing Microsoft in market valuation is "surreal," "it doesn't really mean anything." He batted aside the usual questions about Flash, Adobe, and his "Thoughts on Flash" essay, still pushing HTML5 and saying he merely wrote that essay in response to "being trashed by Adobe in the press."
On the subject of PCs, he said they'd taken us a long way, then made a trucks vs. cars analogy, explaining that, before people built metropolises, they drove trucks, because they needed the boxy utility. But now they drive cars. Only one in a certain number of people still need trucks. PCs are the trucks. Macs are cars. You getting this?
One of the most interesting pieces of Apple-related news in the company's history is Apple's feud and possible legal action against Gizmodo over the allegedly stolen iPhone scandal. [Disclosure: I am a former employee of Gizmodo, though I left before the scandal took place, and Fast Company has an ongoing partnership with Gizmodo in which both publications run stories from the other.] Jobs framed the situation by saying "they bought stolen property and tried to extort [Apple]," which makes it pretty clear that Apple will continue to pursue the case through legal means. He also joked about the juiciness of the whole saga. "It's got theft. It's got buying stolen property. It's got extortion. I'm sure there's some sex in there," he said. "Somebody should make a movie out of this."
On the subject of Google TV, Jobs had some interesting words:
The television industry fundamentally has a subsidized business model that gives everyone a set-top box, and that pretty much undermines innovation in the sector. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask Google in a few months. The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it. But right now, there’s no way to do that….The TV is going to lose until there’s a viable go-to-market strategy.
He explains that this is why he still calls Apple TV a "hobby": television can't fully connect and integrate with the Internet given the cable companies' control of set-top boxes. Google's attempt, remember, takes a new approach by often staying out of sight, but Jobs seems to think that option won't see much more success than Windows Media Center or any of the other attempts at connecting televisions.
Stray observations:
Jobs wants to encourage old-school (read: not blogging) journalism on new media, but seems as frustrated as the rest of us with publications' inability to monetize.
The iPad actually predates the iPhone, in a certain sense--Jobs tasked his engineers with building a tablet, then realized afterwards that the new designs lent themselves to a smartphone. That's been reported before, but it's neat to hear him explain it in full.
He calls Apple "the biggest startup on the planet" due to the collaborative, non-hierarchical upper management structure.
Later in the interview, he returned to the subject of the Gizmodo/iPhone story and said he was advised to let it slide, adding, "You shouldn't go after a journalist just because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you," but said he ultimately felt like the whole thing went against Apple's "core values." He said he'd "rather quit" than let it slide.
He admits to occasionally making mistakes in the App Store approval process--we're all perfectly aware of that, but it's refreshing to hear it from Jobs. Now about rejecting that iFart app for the iPad...
Most Fortune 500 CEOs are about as accessible as Kim Jong Il, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been breaking the mold. He’s sent terse e-mail replies to more than a dozen customer inquiries — and one journalist — in the past few months.
It’s not that he’s become unusually friendly. Rather, the legendary entrepreneur is carefully reinventing his role as CEO.
Jobs typically shies away from the public spotlight, but with these e-mails he has been transforming his public persona into that of a leader who’s well-connected with his followers, as opposed to a man running a business, says Brian Solis, a new-media branding and public relations expert.
“What he is trying to do is strategically pick the right people that are going to literally spread his word verbatim,” Solis said. “With just one e-mail he’s able to talk to the entire world.”
Historically, Jobs has been selective about the media outlets he communicates with. His favorites tend to be The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And in the past, there have been a few occasions where Jobs sent short e-mails in response to customers’ questions, but around the time the iPad launched, the CEO began shooting out e-mails to customers almost every week.
Like any normal human being, Jobs may simply be eager to talk about his beloved pet projects. But even if that’s true, there’s a strategy behind Jobs’ e-mail spree, said Steve Rubel, a senior vice president of Edelman Digital, the world’s largest independent PR firm.
Rubel explained that Apple is one of the only companies to operate with a centralized “command-and-control model.” Because Apple is not in a position to communicate with tools such as Twitter or Facebook, Jobs’ e-mails are proving an effective means to address an enormous community of consumers.
“They’re more open than the way they were before,” Rubel said. “I wouldn’t define Apple as open, but more open. There’s a big difference.”
Jobs’ out-of-the-blue responsiveness couldn’t have come at a better time. For the past year-and-a-half, Apple has frequently been the target of negative press, thanks to its controversial App Store. And its recent legal tangle with Gizmodo over a lost iPhone prototype has inspired even mainstream comedians Jon Stewart and Ellen Degeneris to mock Apple for its increasingly nefarious public image.
Therefore, Jobs could very well be stepping in to take control when Apple needs it most.
Rubel added that it was unlikely Jobs’ PR team was helping him draft his e-mails, because they come off as very frank and human.
“They’re off the cuff, but he’s a marketing genius, though,” Rubel said. “He’s responding to the right e-mails at the right time, based on what he thinks is right.”
Solis explained that by responding to e-mails, Jobs is demonstrating Apple’s nimbleness by showing the company is paying attention to the world’s needs, even at a CEO level.
Jobs is responding to questions to steer perceptions by setting the record straight, Solis said. One example was his response to a customer seething over Apple’s delayed launch of the iPad overseas, alleging that Apple was “pulling the wool over the rest of the world’s eyes.”
“Are you nuts?” Jobs wrote. “We are doing the best we can. We need enough units to have a responsible and great launch.”
And a second more recent example was Jobs’ heated e-mail exchange with Gawker blogger Ryan Tate, who accused Apple of destroying digital freedom with the iPad and the App Store’s stringent rules.
“Freedom of programs that steal your data,” Jobs countered in his response. “Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.”
Such fortifying statements can act as a “slap in the back of the head” for inquirers, Solis said.
Last, Solis believes Apple is trying to make one message especially clear: Jobs is back, even though his medical leave last year had some analysts making grim predictions. Also, Jobs could be stepping in to mitigate some public relations issues relating especially to the controversial App Store, Solis said.
“I think part of him feels that during his absence, he felt Apple lost some of its footing during that time with public relations,” Solis said. “Because of some of the challenges, he’s taking the lead.”
It’s unlikely many other CEOs could execute Jobs’ strategy, Rubel said, but he and Solis both agreed that Mark Zuckerberg might very well pull it off. The Facebook CEO recently responded to a blogger’s e-mail in response to mounting criticism about the network’s privacy flaws, and which he also addressed in a guest column printed by The Washington Post.
“Leaders are going to have to shed the filters they once hid behind, one of them being public relations, in order to lead,” Solis said. “That’s what people are looking for them to do. Facebook and Steve Jobs are leading communities into places they’ve never been before.”
“Zuckerberg and Facebook already have lots of people out there speaking in very credible ways about them,” Rubel added. “They have their blog, their Twitter account, they already are open.”
Jobs did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment on his e-mail comments.
Is the adored, charismatic Apple CEO Steve Jobs secretly the Dark Lord of the Sith in a black turtleneck? The buzz in the universe is that we're all being duped, like Jar-Jar Binks of the Senate Republic stupidly voting for our own enslavement. (Okay, no more Star Wars references.)
Apple has made some devious maneuvers lately, wielding the iPhone like a, um, red sword-like thingy. Is there a master plan in place? Let's break it down:
Three years ago, Apple launched the iconic iPhone whose mobile Safari did not support Adobe Flash. Nor does the present-day iPad. At first, Apple said it was because Flash was poorly written and drained precious battery life. Jobs even went so far as calling Adobe developers lazy.
But there are reasons to believe that technology isn't to blame. Jobs embraces the still-evolving HTML 5 browser standard as the alternative to Flash. Yet there are still technical issues surrounding HTML 5. Technologists I've spoken with tell me that Flash isn't bad software.
If "bad technology" was merely a smokescreen, was there something more sinister at play? Perhaps Apple is seeking to control mobile video. Maybe. But Apple's support of HTML 5, which is an open standard, and approval of Slingbox on the iPhone and Netflix on the iPad suggest otherwise.
An InnerDaemon blog post says the epic battle between Apple and Adobe stems from a grudge. In 1996, Apple was on the ropes. Its core customers—creative types—depended on Adobe software. That's when Adobe turned its back on Apple, declaring that its primary development platform would be Windows.
After the return of Jobs followed by the new hope, OS X, Apple reached out to Adobe only to be rebuked again. Now that Apple holds the mobile power, the saga apparently continues. But all of this sounds a little too petty, a little out of this world. After all, this is business.
Last week, however, the veil may have been lifted. Apple announced iPhone OS 4.0 for the iPhone and iPad that will have, as its centerpiece, Apple's own mobile advertising network, called iAd.
It's the Death Star of mobile advertising that strikes at the heart of Google's browser-based search business model. (That Star Wars reference just slipped out.) Mobile advertising on the iPhone and iPad is going to be huge. All iAd ads must be built on HTML 5, not Flash.
Hold on, it gets worse. Check out this wording in the Apple developer contract concerning iAd, uncovered in an AllThingsD story:
"Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple's prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited."
Device data translates into consumer analytics from an iPad or iPhone. Without analytics, it's impossible for third parties to sell ads on iPhones and iPads. Sorry, Google AdMob. Sorry, Adobe Omniture, which sells analytics for advertising. And there's no recourse for Adobe because Flash won't be anywhere near an iPhone or Apple's iAd network.
As Yoda would say, "Powerful you've become, Apple, the Dark Side I sense in you. " (Okay, that was really the last one.)
Apple is looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a Bigfoot that squeezes smaller competitors.
A former lieutenant of Steve Jobs's once told me something surprising about his ex-boss. "Steve is a monopolist at heart," he said. "He's just like Bill Gates. He just hasn't been as successful." Well, Jobs is getting there. This summer, Apple's market capitalization surged past Google's, making it the financial king of Silicon Valley. True, Apple still holds only 11 percent of the U.S. consumer PC market, according to researcher NPD, but its influence is far greater than that market share suggests. The iconic iPod dominates its market, and the iTunes music store has sold more than 5 billion songs, making it the No. 1 music retailer in America, ahead of Wal-Mart, according to IDC. Apple's iPhone is the No. 3 smart phone in the United States, according to NPD.
Not long ago Apple was just a niche PC maker selling to diehard fans who were quick to forgive (or even celebrate) Apple's quirks and foibles. But Apple is no longer an underdog. In fact, Apple has started looking like what Microsoft was 10 years ago—a company that so controls certain market segments that smaller competitors can survive only by living on its scraps or staying out of its way. (Apple declined to comment for this story.)
A year ago a small company called Vudu was winning rave reviews for its dynamite little box that attaches to the TV and downloads movies from the Internet. Vudu had advantages over Apple TV: it had a larger catalog of movies, you could rent movies instead of buying them and you didn't need to download the films to a PC first before watching them.
In January Apple struck back, introducing a vastly expanded catalog of movie titles, which it started renting, as well as selling. And it came out with a new, cheaper version of the Apple TV box that matched most of Vudu's features. Now Apple is selling or renting more than 50,000 movies a day, and Vudu is laying off staff. A spokeswoman for Vudu says the company is doing fine. I will point out only that this is what Microsoft's victims used to say, too.
The really scary thing about Apple is that it doesn't just make hit products—it controls entire ecosystems. Just as Microsoft controls both the operating system and the applications that run on top of it, Apple owns popular hardware platforms (iPod, iPhone) and operates the only store that can sell music, movies and software programs for those platforms. Apple sets prices and takes 30 percent of the money.
With iPhone, Apple decides which independent applications will be allowed, and it can pull the plug on any application at any time, without explanation—as happened in July to several developers of iPhone apps. "I spent four weeks trying to get through to Apple via e-mail and phone calls, and they wouldn't return my messages," says Cyrus Najmabadi, developer of an iPhone application called Now Playing, an online movie-theater guide that Apple yanked in July after receiving a complaint about the program. (Najmabadi persisted and finally got Apple to put his application back online; Apple declined to comment on the matter.)
With its retail stores, Apple controls another ecosystem—the market for iPod and iPhone accessories, like speakers and cases. Apple determines when accessory makers can announce new products, and charges them a variety of fees, including one for putting a MADE FOR IPOD sticker on the items. One iPod accessory maker—who insists on anonymity, as he fears reprisal from Apple—gripes that Apple takes up to 75 percent of the sales price, leaving him with zero profit on some of his products when he sells them in Apple stores. This guy plays along because having his products on display in Apple stores builds awareness of his brand, and he can make a profit selling his speaker systems through Best Buy, Target and Circuit City.
Apple's tactics might seem like smart business: why not squeeze every penny out of every deal? The problem is that if Apple squeezes too hard, some partners may go out of business, harming the ecosystem. Bully behavior also invites backlash, as it did for Microsoft when that company rose to power in the 1990s. In the U.K., a regulatory board has banned an Apple advertisement that claimed its iPhone gives you "all the parts of the Internet," when the phone won't display information created using Flash or Java, two popular Web software programs. In Alabama, a woman has filed a class-action lawsuit because her new 3G iPhone won't always attach to a 3G network, which provides faster wireless Web downloads. In July customers howled when Apple rolled out MobileMe, a new online service for synchronizing personal data to the iPhone and iTouch that wound up having some pretty serious glitches. Apple offered three months of free service to subscribers as a form of appeasement.
In the old days, stuff like this didn't matter. Apple was such a fringe player that nobody really cared how the company behaved. I wonder sometimes if Apple misses those days.
Yet for all his hanging out with copywriters and industrial designers and musicians -- and despite his anticorporate attire -- make no mistake: Jobs is all about business. He may not pay attention to customer research, but he works slavishly to make products customers will buy.
He's a visionary, but he's grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple's various operational and market metrics. He isn't motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned -- proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.
The financial results have been nothing short of astounding -- for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple's groundbreaking "digital lifestyle" strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google.
Its market share in personal computers was plummeting back then, and the cash drain was so severe that bankruptcy was a possibility. Now Apple has $34 billion in cash and marketable securities, surpassing the total market cap of rival Dell. Macintoshes make up 9% of the PC market in the U.S. today, but that share is increasingly beside the point.
With 275 retail stores in nine countries, a 73% share of the U.S. MP3 player market, and the undisputed leadership position in innovation when it comes to mobile phones, Apple and its CEO are no one's idea of underdogs anymore.
In 2006 Disney paid $7.5 billion to acquire Pixar, the computer animation film studio Jobs had nurtured and controlled. Jobs, in turn, became a Disney director and the blue-chip company's largest shareholder. His net worth, solely based on his stakes in Apple and Disney, is about $5 billion. Other executives have had stellar decades but none can compare with Steve's.
With Jobs back at the helm of his company, plenty of challenges lie ahead. Will the Goliath role suit him nearly as well as playing David clearly has? How will he respond to the competition he has awakened, particularly in smartphones, even as the personal computer fades in relative importance? Has he fashioned an organization that can succeed him? Can he possibly be as dominant in the decade to come as the one that is ending?
The "decade" of Steve actually began in 1997, when he returned to Apple after having been ousted a dozen years earlier. That was a year of triage, of a humbling investment from Microsoft, of paring Apple's product line to a bare minimum of four computers.
How's this for a gripping corporate story line: Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.
Sound too far-fetched to be true? Perhaps. Yet it happens to be the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his outsize impact on everything he touches.
The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back.
It's as if his signature "one more thing" line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant -- and yes, profitable -- as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976.
Superlatives have attached themselves to Jobs since he was a young man. Now that he's 54, merely listing his achievements is sufficient explanation of why he's Fortune's CEO of the Decade (though the superlatives continue). In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets -- music, movies, and mobile telephones -- and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.
Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm's Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.
In all instances, and many more like them, these entrepreneurs turned captains of industry defined a single market that had previously not been dominated by anyone. The industries that Jobs has turned topsy-turvy already existed when he focused on them.
He is the rare businessman with legitimate worldwide celebrity. (His quirks and predilections are such common knowledge that they were knowingly parodied on an episode of "The Simpsons.") He pals around with U2's Bono.
Consumers who have never picked up an annual report or even a business magazine gush about his design taste, his elegant retail stores, and his outside-the-box approach to advertising. ("Think different," indeed.)
It's often noted that he's a showman, a born salesman, a magician who creates a famed reality-distortion field, a tyrannical perfectionist. It's totally accurate, of course, and the descriptions contribute to his legend.
By the following year Steve's regime had kicked into gear. Jobs completed the hiring of a new management team, which included several executives from his previous company, Next. Those top players would form the nucleus of the Jobs brain trust for nearly 10 years.
Then came the first Macintosh after Jobs' return, the iMac, a breakthrough all-in-one computer and monitor that heralded Apple's return to health. The success of the pricey iMac, coupled with drastic cost cutting, allowed Jobs to build a cash cushion. By repairing Apple's balance sheet, he prepared the company for big investments to come, a shrewd business move if ever there was one.
Jobs laid the foundation for Apple's leap from stable to stratospheric when things looked darkest. In 2000, Apple missed its financial targets in a September earnings announcement, sending its stock price plummeting in subsequent months to the equivalent of $7 in today's prices. Yet Jobs by this time had set in motion the key elements of Apple's rejuvenation.
Over the course of 2001, as global markets fell and the world headed into recession, Apple launched the iTunes music software (in January), the Mac OS X operating system (March), the first Apple retail stores (May), and the first iPod (November), a 5GB model that Apple bragged would hold 1,000 songs.
The market didn't catch on quickly to the significance of those events. iTunes was just music-playing software embedded into Macs and lacked an online store that sold music. The new operating system, though impressive, powered a niche product. The iPod was a snazzy MP3 player in an established market.
As the company's stock languished, takeover rumors appeared from time to time. What was never reported was that Jobs seriously contemplated taking the company private with the help of newly formed buyout group Silver Lake Partners. An Apple buyout would have been the deal of the century, but according to people familiar with the talks, Jobs ultimately shut them down.
That was actually the second serious proposal to buy Apple. In 1997, Jobs' friend Ellison, later an Apple board member, lined up financing to take over the company on the assumption that Jobs would run it. In a recent interview Ellison said Jobs didn't like the idea of being "second-guessed" if it looked as if he'd returned simply to make money. "He explained to me that with the moral high ground, he thought he could make decisions more easily and more gracefully," says Ellison.
For those paying attention after Jobs' return, the CEO was telegraphing Apple's trajectory. "I would rather compete with Sony than compete in another product category with Microsoft," he told Time in early 2002. "We're the only company that owns the whole widget -- the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things that the other guy can't do."
Jobs was convinced that the masses would turn to Apple, but only if he could speak directly to them -- and not just to faithful Macintosh users, a club that included mainly artists and students. The strategy of building company-owned retail stores, so integral to Apple today, was derided at the time as a risky cash drain.
"He did this with a nervous board," says Bill Campbell, a former Apple executive who went on to become chairman of Intuit and an Apple board member. "He knew that this is what customers wanted." What's striking looking back is how little there was to sell in the original Apple stores. Jobs knew how he'd fill them.
Jobs made it his business to know everything about Apple. "He's involved in details you wouldn't think a CEO would be involved in," says Ken Segall, a former Chiat/Day creative director who has worked with Apple on and off for years. Jobs commissioned the iconic "Think different" campaign, says Segall, well before any of Apple's new products were introduced -- or even described to the ad team. "He'd say, 'The third word in the fourth paragraph isn't right. You might want to think about that one.' "
The rare pairing of micromanagement with big-picture vision is a Jobs hallmark. Early in his return to Apple, he recognized that gorgeous design was a differentiator for Apple in a computer industry gripped by the successful blandness of Dell, Microsoft, and Intel.
"I cannot count the number of clients who have marched in and said, 'Give me the next iPod,' " writes Tim Brown, CEO of product-design consultant Ideo, in his new book "Change by Design." "But it's probably close to the number of designers I've heard respond -- under their breath -- 'Give me the next Steve Jobs.'"
Jobs also has a knack for pouncing at the right moment. The music industry had failed repeatedly to develop its own digital-music sales site before Apple came along with iTunes, which was by then prepared to become a store for buying music.
Jobs cleverly made his pact with the record labels when iTunes worked only on Macs, which in 2002 had a personal-computing market share in the low single digits. Apple's humble position -- before iTunes became compatible with Windows, expanding its potential market share to nearly all PCs -- was a virtue. This made iTunes an experiment rather than a destructive paradigm shift.
"I don't understand how Apple could ruin the record business in one year on Mac," said Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music, according to "Appetite for Self-Destruction," a new book about the record industry's ills by Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper. "Why shouldn't we try this?" Writes Knopper: "By the time Steve Jobs came around, he was the last resort. He was merely smart enough to know it. He played tough, but not any tougher than any lawyer for a major label who had negotiated an artist contract in recent decades."
A key Jobs business tool is his mastery of the message. He rehearses over and over every line he and others utter in public about Apple, which authorizes only a small number of executives to speak publicly on a given topic.
Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say -- and don't say. Harvard professor David Yoffie estimated that in the months between announcing and selling the first iPhone in 2007, Apple received $400 million in free advertising by not making any public statements, thereby whipping the media into a frenzy.
Jobs himself is careful to avoid overexposure, preferring to speak only when he has products to promote. He didn't disclose his 2004 cancer surgery until after it occurred, and then only in an employee e-mail that was strategically released to news outlets. Similarly, he told the world of his recent leave in another employee missive, with no additional comment from him or anyone else at Apple.
Nobody in Jobs' sphere speaks without the permission of the company's media relations team, which reports directly to Jobs. Apple declined to make Jobs available for an interview for this article. It did bless the participation of some people in Apple's orbit to speak about him, while nixing requests for others.
The secrecy has rankled corporate governance experts, who insist the health of such an indispensable CEO warrants greater disclosure.
Jobs was initially mum as well about a stock options backdating scandal that embroiled the company's former finance chief and general counsel. In an eventual SEC filing, Apple said Jobs was aware that the company had adjusted option grant dates so that the grants were more profitable for employees. Jobs apologized for the backdating, calling the episode "completely out of character for Apple."
Jobs manages the money, the message, the deals, the design, and more. Consider the case fairly made that the long-ago enfant terrible of the computer industry has built up impressive business chops and that his company is peerless. But if nothing else, his recent illness is a reminder that Steve Jobs is mortal. When he's gone, how long will his company thrive without him?
Apple's future.
This past September, when Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to the public eye, he thanked precisely one Apple executive by name: Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer.
At an event to introduce a new line of iPods, Jobs first informed a crowd of journalists, analysts, and Apple developers that he now possessed the liver of a "twentysomething liver donor who had died in a car crash." Then he thanked Cook and the rest of the management team for "ably" running Apple in his absence. Cook, in turn, led a standing ovation for Jobs, his arms raised over his head from the front row of a San Francisco auditorium.
With Jobs back at work, the conversation has been postponed as to whether Cook, or anyone else, is prepared to fill Jobs' shoes. "At Apple the hierarchy is determined by who Steve calls," says a former Apple executive. "There's a lot of value in 'Steve said.'"
Larry Ellison, a CEO known to dislike the topic of succession, says of his friend, "He's irreplaceable. He's built a fabulous brand. He's got a wealth of products. Whenever he leaves, I hope he retires in good health and he's sailing off in his yacht in the Mediterranean. But they're going to miss him terribly, because it's a consumer products company. The product cycle is so fast."
There are signs that Jobs has inculcated the troops enough to last awhile without him. "The organization has been thoroughly trained to think like Steve," says someone with contacts among the Apple executive team. "That's why the six months went so smoothly. People could envision, 'This is what Steve would do.'"
Jobs, in fact, inspires far beyond Apple. Larry Pag
