韩国十大耐看男明星:Apple without its genius will be less lovable...

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Apple without its genius will be less lovable

By Jason Pontin

The first time I met Steve Jobs, he walked out of the room. It was 1994, he was chief executive of NeXT Computer and exiled from Apple, and I had asked him why he made beautiful, expensive machines that only a few enthusiasts wanted. He swore at me, barked “I created the Mac and it’s still the best!” and was gone. Five years later, after he had returned to the company he co-founded, I wrote that he had saved Apple, but said I didn’t care, because Microsoft enjoyed a near-monopoly in personal computer software and so controlled computing. This view was conventionally savvy, but wrong. Mr Jobs has turned out to be much more influential than Bill Gates.

As competitors, Apple and Microsoft have been the two poles of technology. Microsoft sold its software, uncomfortably bundled with the hardware of manufacturers, to corporations. Its customers were IT functionaries whose concerns were cost and risk; its products were ugly compromises, developed in response to market research, which no one loved. But Apple sold integrated hardware and software directly to consumers. It strove to elicit passionate fandom from its customers; its products were simple, elegant, genuinely novel devices.

Today, Apple enjoys near-monopolies in tablet computers and music players; its iPhone outsells all other smartphones. More surprising, its computers’ sales have outpaced Windows personal computers for several years.

As Microsoft wanes, Apple waxes. The latter’s market capitalisation is more than $355bn; the only company of comparable value is ExxonMobil. By contrast, Microsoft’s capitalisation is about $211bn. Mr Jobs has succeeded by turning hundreds of millions of people into Apple enthusiasts.

The strategies of the two companies derive from the characters of their founders. If Mr Gates ever cared about beauty it was at the level of software: as a young man, he wrote what developers call “elegant code”. But aesthetic considerations were irrelevant to his ends. (“The only problem with Microsoft,” Mr Jobs said in 1996, “is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”) Mostly, Mr Gates was motivated by a desire to govern the standards for personal computers, whose early buyers were enterprises.

But Mr Jobs isn’t really a technologist: he has never written code, and he is not an engineer. He combines and refines borrowed ideas (from Xerox Parc most famously, but also from typesetters, industrial designers and artists).

He does not care about the computer industry for itself, which is why he has been able to expand Apple’s business beyond computers to music players, phones and tablets. Instead, he wants people to do things they couldn’t do before: create documents on laptops with fonts that only professional printers once used; listen to music on phones; read books, play games and watch movies on slim, crystalline screens.

The paradox of this preoccupation with delighting people is that he disdains questioning customers. How he imagines creations like the Apple II, which predated the IBM PC by four years, or the first Macintosh, whose ease of use was universally imitated but never surpassed, is, by his own account, “hard to explain”. He “pushes” at the technology, and “pulls” at what consumers might want, then merges the two points of view. In short, he really is that overused word: a visionary.

What will Apple be like without its obsessive tutelary genius? There are years of Jobs-inspired products in development. The perfectionist culture he created will persist. Tim Cook, the company’s long-time chief operating officer and now CEO, wrote to his staff that “Apple won’t change”. But, of course, it will. Mr Jobs’s tastes and visionary abilities are unique. More, the cult of personality surrounding him and the confidence of his board, employees and investors made Apple that rarest of things: a publicly traded corporation, with all of a large company’s impact, that was as innovative as a start-up. Mr Jobs could ignore vulgar consensus, take risks, kill unsatisfactory projects and demand that his engineers and designers build “insanely great” machines because it was indisputably his company.

Here is the concern we should feel at Mr Jobs’s resignation, beyond any grief at the passing of a golden era. The dark aspect of his mostly benign despotism is how he used Apple’s monopolies to bully partners, publishers and competitors to do things his way. This arrogance is ingrained at Apple and will persist, as will its culture of perfectionism, at least until people start buying other devices. In technology, we deplore monopolies such as the one Microsoft once possessed and seek to regulate them, not because they exert monopolistic pricing (they do not), but for suppressing innovation in everything they touch. We forgave Apple’s monopolies because of the things Mr Jobs made; we loved his Apple because his ambition was justified by the wonder of his innovations. But Apple without Mr Jobs, inevitably less innovative, will not be lovable.

The writer is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review

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