Steven Jobs' Totalitarian Vision
"We started out to get a
computer in the hands of everyday people," Steven Jobs, co-founder and putative
savior of Apple Computer, tells us in Time this week. What Jobs left out
of that sentence, though, is a word that has wrecked Apple in the past and
could wreck it in the future. The word is "our" or, to be more accurate, "my,"
as in: "We started out to get my computer in the hands of everyday
people."
Jobs was
never interested in having everyone own personal computers. He was interested
only in having everyone own Apples. And this is, of course, the great irony
behind Apple's apparently imperishable image as the corporation of the
counterculture, an image that has been the source of some of American
journalism's more preposterous pronouncements. It was all about freedom,
sure--the freedom to have a Macintosh on your desk.
As everyone knows by now, Jobs always portrayed Apple in
general, and the Mac in particular, as avatars of a new populist revolution, as
tools of democratization. In this sense, the 1984 Super Bowl ad featuring an
athletic woman hurling a hammer and destroying Big Brother was not so much some
invention of Chiat/Day's imagination as it was the visual expression of
everything Jobs had been saying since Apple began. What you couldn't tell from
the ad, though, was that in Jobs' imagination, what would replace Big Brother
was not the anarchic space of the market, with people buying computers from 20
or 30 different manufacturers. It was instead the comforting spectacle of
millions upon millions of Mac users, all imagining they were pursuing "personal
creativity and individual self-expression"--and all buying that creativity only
from Apple.
What's
really interesting about Jobs' imperial ambition, though, is that the very
immensity of its scope doomed Apple to marginality. The problem was not that
Jobs wanted Apple to have a hand in every corner of the personal-computing
market. That's what Bill Gates has always wanted, after all, and that desire
has made Microsoft into one of the world's most profitable companies. The
problem, rather, was that Jobs wanted Apple to be every corner of the
personal-computing market. He wanted to make the computers and the
systems that ran them--and to be the only company that did so. And that meant
that, almost from the beginning, Apple was confused about its mission. In the
simplest terms, it was a hardware company that thought it was a software
company--or vice versa.
The difference between making hardware and
making software is analogous to the difference between making razors and making
razor blades. You may make more money on each razor--but your margins will be a
lot higher on the blades, and you will sell a lot more of them. Now, it's
possible to make razors profitably. Compaq is an $18-billion company, and Dell
Computer is Wall Street's new darling, and all they make is razors. But it's a
tougher business. Price pressures are constant. It's hard to distinguish
yourself from the crowd, though Apple's name would have helped its case. And
most important of all, there's no romance in it. No one really talks about how
much better a Compaq is than a Gateway. Computers that cost about the same seem
to run about the same.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells only blades. Word, Money, Excel, even
Windows: All these are blades. And Microsoft sells those blades to whoever
wants them. Gates doesn't care what kind of machine you run his software on. He
just wants you to run his software.
This, of course, is the other path Apple could have taken.
It was actually the path Gates recommended in a now-famous 1985 memo that
suggested that Apple license the Macintosh operating system--with its graphical
interface and windows--to three to five other manufacturers who would build
compatible computers. In 1985, the Mac OS was dramatically superior to DOS,
which was the operating system for all IBM compatibles. Going strongly into
software, then, would have capitalized on what people really loved about Apple,
which was not the Mac itself, but the interface. Had Apple allowed Compaq,
Hewlett-Packard, perhaps even IBM to build hardware running the Mac OS, it
might very well have seen its software become the industry standard.
Instead,
Apple chose to go it alone--in part because it would have been hard to watch
other companies selling $2,000 clones of the Macs that Apple imagined it could
have been selling instead. That was a mistake of short-term thinking, though it
was an understandable one. The preposterously high margins Apple was able to
earn in the early-to-mid 1980s, when it was selling Apple IIs to dealers
for three times cost and earning 72-percent gross profits on Macs, undoubtedly
blinded the company to the fact that consumers would not ignore price forever.
Those short-term considerations might have been overridden, though, except for
one thing: Jobs' insistence that Apple be the sole standard-bearer of the
digital revolution. Jobs didn't want to make just blades. Jobs wanted to make
the razor, the blades, and the packaging. And if he'd had his way, Apple would
have forged the stainless steel, too. (According to one account, Jobs once
"fantasized about a factory in which the raw materials that came in would be
not semiconductors but sand." Insert the appropriate "castles built on ..."
metaphor here.)
Jobs' quest for complete control also meant
that he didn't want his machines to be able to talk to other companies'
machines. In fact, this hostility to compatibility permeated even the company's
attitude toward itself. When the Mac was introduced, hundreds of thousands of
people owned Apple IIs. But the Mac was incompatible with its predecessor. You
couldn't upgrade; you had to abandon. Apple made it hard even for Macintosh and
Lisa, its entry into the business market, to work together, though both were
designed at the same time. It's as if, for Jobs, the basic criterion for an
"insanely great" product was its radical difference, which is to say its
isolation, from everything else.
What's truly striking,
though, is that Jobs has never really let this idea go. After he left Apple, he
founded NeXT and tried to go the hardware-software route again, until he had to
sell the hardware unit to Canon and the software to, yes, Apple. Upon returning
to Apple, he began criticizing almost immediately the company's 1995 decision
to finally allow a limited number of companies to manufacture Mac clones,
calling these firms "leeches." Somehow I doubt that Bill Gates thinks of Dell
as parasitic because its computers run only on Windows. In this respect,
bringing Steve Jobs back to save Apple is like bringing Gen. George McClellan
out of retirement to save the Union Army.
The remarkable fact is that,
at this very moment, Apple Computer is a larger company than Microsoft. The
difference is that Microsoft earned $3 billion more last year than Apple did.
Every computer Apple makes costs a lot to make. Every additional copy of
Windows 95 costs Microsoft ... oh, just about nothing. That could have been
Apple's world, and it isn't because the company imagined it could be all
things. If only Apple had decided to be The Way and let someone else be The
Light.
