>> Go back 25 years to 1985 and Steve Jobs is one year out from leading the team that shipped the initial Macintosh and at that point he got forced out of Apple. Everybody knows that this happened. This is not like a footnote in history, this is like a major turning point in the whole mythology around Apple that you know the guy who found it in a garage and lead them to this sensational start got forced out, stabbed in the back, was away for a decade then came back and led them back to like previously unseen success, it's you know it's a fantastic story you couldn't make it up for a movie, but we just sort of accept it for fact it's the way that like things have happened in history and no matter how absurd once they sort of settle in you stop being amazed by it. So just like consider like prohibition in the United States like less than 100 years ago they outlawed boos like what think about that now like if somebody came up and decided for their campaign for next year in politics hey lets outlaw boos, like but somehow it had been. They fired Steve Jobs, right I mean that is crazy so for all the handering and worrying over the past few years about what happens to Apple when Steve is no longer there in 1985 they had him, he'd just delivered a hit and they fired him, it's inconceivable. So how did that happen? I think he was blindsided because he knew probably more than anybody what we all know. He's the greatest product guy in the history of this industry and firing him them before after or at any time would be the stupidest thing Apple could possibly do. His heir wasn't failing to realize that companies that are poorly structured and poorly run have the unfortunate tendency to actually do the stupidest thing that they could possibly do. It wasn't enough that he could lead great teams to create great products. So what I think he did in the aftermath of that was to sit back and figure out how a large company should be structured. The whole reason that Jobs convinced John Sculley to join Apple as CEO of Apple in the early 80s was that at the time Jobs bought into the notion that there was a need to have like a separation between the product guys who make the computers which is where Jobs saw himself as leading that, and then there's the business guys who run the company, and I think it's clear that after he got axed that he figured out that the right way for things is that there is no separation, the products are the company and if he was gonna do things right he needed to run the company himself. So what does he do now? What does he create? He's not an ex code running objective C, he's not in Photoshop designing pixels for the UI elements, he's not Johnny Ive assumed spelling in the hardware lab milling out hardware and aluminum and making prototypes of physical devices but I do think there's one product that Jobs designed himself personally and that's Apple, the company since he came back. What are the hallmarks of a great Steve Jobs product? I would say things like simplicity, clarity, obviousness, elegance, the direct in favor of the abstract. Well those same adjectives that I think describe Apple products or at least all of the good ones also describe Apple today as a whole. But his current singular and central role at Apple poses an obvious paradox and its one that people don't really like to talk about and its uncomfortable and it's this: He's irreplaceable, there's no doubt about that, but on the other hand he will eventually no longer be there, there is no doubt about that it's a certainty, everybody's going to be gone someday so the only comparison point I can really think of is Walt Disney. So in the 20s Walt Disney wanted to make the world's best animated short films and he was making them for the existing studios at the time and of course they screwed him so he decided alright I've got to make my own studio and he got his brother who had some actual business sense and they made the Disney Brothers Studio and they made the world's greatest animated short films. The 30s rolled around and he was already unsatisfied, he wanted to make animated features which no one had even tried before, wasn't even known if it was going to be possible, if it would work, would people even go to see them. Well they pulled it off, they made Snow White, they made Pinocchio, they made Dumbo, they made these great movies which don't just stand the test of time as great animated films I think you can honestly argue that you go back to like 1939 when Snow White came out its hard to find another movie from 1939 that still stands up today that you can actually watch and say this is this is still a good movie by modern standards, but he still wasn't done. Next came TV and at the time most TV or movie executives saw TV as a threat, it was something that was keeping people from going to the movie theaters, how do we go back to the way things were? Walt Disney was the complete opposite he saw it as an opportunity, another thing that Disney, the company could grow to dominate and they did, they had amazing success on TV. As soon as that was done he immediately moved on to theme parks. Why would you do that? I mean its one thing after another. Never satisfied with previous success no matter how great, always looking ahead to the next big thing. Sounds a lot like somebody else, but it's obviously a morbid comparison because we all know how Walt Disney left that company, he died and after he was gone the company struggled, it wasn't like you don't go back and think wow those Disney club cartoons from the 70s were unbelievable, they weren't. So the pessimistic take on Apple is that while Apple is obviously an undisputedly right now well organized company the pessimistic take is that it's a well organized company that is organized entirely around 1 irreplaceable guy, Steve Jobs, and that he's effectively a keystone, you remove him and the whole innovation engine just stops turning. The optimistic take though and I'm kind of coming around to it is that perhaps Jobs has structured Apple similarly to the other company he created while he was on exile from Apple, Pixar. Pixar is a company that has created a system and a culture for amazing quality and creative innovation with no singular figure at the center of it all and the system works year after year and it's repeatable. So perhaps in its absence Apple will work like that too. It's a question and we won't know the answer until the time comes of whether it's a inaudible personality or a culture.
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