How Steve Jobs Changed
by James Surowiecki October 17, 2011
As seemingly everyone on the planet knows, Steve Jobs’s defining quality was perfectionism. The development of the Macintosh, for instance, took more than three years, because of Jobs’s obsession with detail. He nixed the idea of an internal fan, because he thought it was noisy and clumsy. And he wanted his engineers to redesign the Mac’s motherboard, just because it looked inelegant. At NeXT, the company Jobs started after being nudged out of Apple, in 1985, he drove his hardware team crazy in order to make a computer that was a sleek, gorgeous magnesium cube. After his return to Apple, in 1997, he got personally involved with things like how many screws there were in a laptop case. It took six months until he was happy with the way that scroll bars in OS X worked. Jobs believed that, for an object to resonate with consumers, every piece of it had to be right, even the ones you couldn’t see.
This perfectionism obviously had a lot to do with Apple’s success. It explains why Apple products have typically had a feeling of integrity, in the original sense of the word; they feel whole, rather than simply like collections of parts. But Jobs’s perfectionism came at a price, too. It could be literally expensive: back in the eighties, Jobs insisted that in magazine ads and on packages the Apple logo be printed in six colors, not four, which was thirty to forty per cent more expensive. And there were more important costs: Jobs’s vision required Apple to control every part of the user experience, and to make everything it possibly could itself. Its hardware was proprietary: the company had its own Mac factory and favored unique cables, disk drives, and power cords, rather than standardized ones. Its software was proprietary, too: if you wanted to run Apple software, you needed to own an Apple computer. This made Apple’s computers more expensive than the competition. It also made them hard to customize, which businesses didn’t like. So, while Apple changed the world of computing in the eighties, with machines that were more user-friendly and powerful than your typical I.B.M. clone, most users never touched a Macintosh. They ended up with P.C.s instead.
When Jobs returned, he still wanted Apple to, as he put it, “own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” But his obsession with control had been tempered: he was better, you might say, at playing with others, and this was crucial to the extraordinary success that Apple has enjoyed over the past decade. Take the iPod. The old Jobs might well have insisted that the iPod play only songs encoded in Apple’s favored digital format, the A.A.C. This would have allowed Apple to control the user experience, but it would also have limited the iPod market, since millions of people already had MP3s. So Apple made the iPod MP3-compatible. (Sony, by contrast, made its first digital music players compatible only with files in Sony’s proprietary format, and they bombed as a result.) Similarly, Jobs could have insisted, as he originally intended, that iPods and iTunes work only with Macs. But that would have cut the company off from the vast majority of computer users. So in 2002 Apple launched a Windows-compatible iPod, and sales skyrocketed soon afterward. And, while Apple’s designs are as distinctive as ever, the devices now rely less on proprietary hardware and more on standardized technologies.
The iPhone signalled a further loosening of the reins. Although Apple makes the phone and the operating system itself, and although every app is sold through the App Store, the system is far more open than the Mac ever was: there are more than four hundred thousand iPhone apps written by outside developers. Some are even designed by Apple’s competitors—you can read on the Kindle app instead of using iBooks—and many are so inelegant that Jobs must have hated them. Such apps make the iPhone messier than it would otherwise be, but they also make it much more valuable. The old Jobs might well have tried, in the interest of quality, to contain the number of apps: he always talked about how saying no to ideas was as important as saying yes. Though Apple does vet apps to some extent, the new Jobs essentially said, Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The introduction of the iPad has ratified this new reality, since developers have already released more than a hundred thousand apps for the tablet. The result is that the network effects that worked against Apple in the eighties, making it essentially a boutique company, are now working in its favor: the more apps Apple’s products have, the more people want to use them, which, in turn, makes developers want to develop for them, and so on.
There’s no doubt that Apple’s success in the past decade depended on Jobs’s uncanny ability to introduce products that captured the zeitgeist. But what turned Apple into the most valuable company on the planet was that Jobs did more than just create cool new devices. Rather, he presided over the creation of new market ecosystems, with those devices at their heart. And if the ecosystems were more chaotic than he might have liked, they were also more powerful and more profitable. It’s true that, by the standards of today’s open-source computing world, Apple’s platforms are still very much closed. After all, when Google designed a phone operating system, Android, it simply handed it out to phone manufacturers to use as they liked. But, by the standards of its old ethos, Apple is much more open than one would ever have thought possible. In giving up a little control, Jobs found a lot more power. ? 
