One Infinite Loop, Apple's street address, is a programming in-joke -- it refers to a routine that never ends.
But it is also an apt description of the travails of parking at the Cupertino, California, campus. Like most things in Silicon Valley, Apple's lots are egalitarian; there are no reserved spots for managers or higher-ups. But there is one Mercedes that doesn't need to search long for a space, and it belongs to Steve Jobs. If there's no easy-to-find spot, Jobs has been known to pull up to Apple's front entrance and park in a handicapped space. (Sometimes he takes up two spaces.) It's become a piece of Apple lore -- and a running gag at the company.
Employees have stuck notes under his windscreen wiper: "Park Different."
Jobs' fabled attitude toward parking reflects his approach to business: for him, the regular rules do not apply.
Everybody is familiar with Google's famous catchphrase, "Don't be evil." Google and Apple may have a friendly relationship --
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board -- but by Google's definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods?
Yeah, Apple doesn't do that either.
But by flouting the Google mantra, Apple has thrived.
It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers,the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications -- like the rest of the internet. While Apple's tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they've helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors.
Sometimes, evil works.
No product escapes Cupertino without meeting Jobs's exacting standards, which are said to cover such esoteric details as the number of screws on the bottom of a laptop and the curve of a monitor's corners. "He would scrutinise everything, down to the pixel level," says Cordell Ratzlaff, charged with creating the OS X interface. Even the most favoured employee could find themselves on the receiving end of a tirade. Insiders have a term for it: the "hero- shithead roller-coaster". Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer: "More than anywhere else I've worked before or since, there's a lot of concern about being fired."
But Jobs's employees remain devoted. That's because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma -- he can make the task of designing a power-supply feel like a mission from God. Andy Hertzfeld, lead designer of the original Macintosh OS, says Jobs imbued him and his coworkers with "messianic zeal". And because Jobs's approval is so hard to win, Apple staffers labour tirelessly to please him.
Apple's successes in the years since Jobs's return -- iMac, iPod, iPhone -- suggest an alternative vision to the worker-is-always-right school of management. In Cupertino, innovation doesn't come from coddling employees and collecting whatever froth rises to the surface; it is the product of an intense, hard-fought process, where people's feelings are irrelevant. "Steve proves that it's OK to be an asshole," says Guy Kawasaki, Apple's former chief evangelist. "I can't relate to the way he does things, but it's not his problem, it's mine. He has a different OS."
In recent years, the tech industry has come to embrace candour: what an April 2007 Wired cover story dubbed "radical transparency".
But Apple takes a different approach to PR. Call it radical opacity. Apple's relationship with the press is dismissive at best, adversarial at worst; Jobs speaks only to a handpicked batch of reporters, and only when he deems it necessary. (He declined to talk to Wired for this article.) Apple appears to revel in obfuscation. For years, Jobs dismissed the idea of adding video capability to the iPod. "We want it to make toast," he quipped at a 2004 press conference. "We're toying with refrigeration, too." A year later, he unveiled the fifth-generation iPod, complete with video. Jobs similarly disavowed the suggestion that he might move the Mac to Intel chips or release a software developers' kit for the iPhone -- only months before announcing just that.
At times, Apple's secrecy approaches paranoia. Talking to outsiders is forbidden; employees are warned against telling their families what they are working on. But Apple's radical opacity hasn't hurt the company -- rather, the approach has been critical to its success. It took Apple nearly three years to develop the iPhone in secret -- a three-year head start on rivals. Apple has been known to poke fun at its rivals' catch-up strategies. When the company announced its Tiger operating system, posters taunted, "Redmond, start your photocopiers."
Jobs's tactics also carry risks -- especially when his products don't live up to the expectations that come with such secrecy. The MacBook Air received a mixed response after some deemed the slim-but-pricey subnote-book insufficiently revolutionary. But Apple's opacity has on the whole, been a success -- and it's a tactic that most competitors can't mimic.
Back in the mid-90s, as Apple struggled to increase its share of the PC market, every analyst was quick to diagnose the cause of the computer-maker's failure: Apple waited too long to license its operating system to outside hardware makers. Microsoft dominated by encouraging computer manufacturers to build their offerings around its software -- giving Microsoft a stranglehold on the software market. Even Wired joined the fray; in June 1997, we told Apple, "You shoulda licensed your OS in 1987" and advised, "Admit it.
You're out of the hardware game." Oops.
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he ignored everyone's advice and tied his company's proprietary software to its proprietary hardware. He has held to that strategy, even as his Silicon Valley cohorts have embraced the values of openness.
Android, Google's operating system for mobile phones, is designed to work on any participating handset. Even Microsoft has begun to embrace the movement toward web-based multi-platform applications.
Not Apple. Want to hear your iTunes songs on the go? You're locked into playing them on your iPod. Want to run OS X? Buy a Mac.
Want to play movies from your iPod on your TV? Buy an Apple-branded connector. Apple is the one vertically integrated company left, a fact that makes Jobs proud. "Apple is the last company in our industry that creates the whole widget," he told a Macworld crowd.
But not everyone sees Apple's all-or-nothing approach in such benign terms. The music and film industries, in particular, worry that Jobs has become a gatekeeper for all digital content. Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music, has accused iTunes of leaving labels powerless to negotiate with it. "Apple has destroyed the music business," NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker said.
Yet consumers don't seem to mind Apple's walled garden. Yes, the iPod hardware and the iTunes software are inextricably linked -- that's why they work so well together. And now, PC-based iPod users, impressed with the experience, have started converting to Macs, further investing themselves in the Apple ecosystem.
If Apple represents the shiny, happy future of the tech industry, it also looks a lot like our cat-o'-nine-tails past. In part, that's because the tech business itself more resembles an old-line consumer industry. When hardware and software makers were focused on winning business clients, price and interoperability mattered more than user experience. But now that consumers make up the most profitable market segment, usability and design have become priorities.
All this plays to Steve Jobs's strengths. No other company has proven as adept at giving customers what they want before they know they want it. Jobs exerts unrelenting control over his products and how they're used. And in a consumer-focused tech industry, products matter. "He's at the absolute epicentre of the digitisation of life," says Geoffrey Moore, author of the marketing tome Crossing the Chasm. "He's totally in the zone."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
