"Steve Jobs Is Not Dead"

Steve Jobs may no longer be around to manage Apple, but we’re only now starting to enter the post-Jobs era.

Because product cycles are long, the new Apple gadgets we’re seeing now are all devices Jobs had a real hand in creating. It’ll be at least another six months before we see the first Apple gadgets without Jobs’ ideas.

Apple has been able to move ahead in the past year through a combination of Jobs’ ideas and the team he set up. Scott Forstall’s departure in late October was a telling sign of generational change.

"Steve Jobs Is Not Dead"

Forstall had worked with Jobs since the 1990s, and had a strongly Jobsian personality; Jobs’ pick to head Apple’s retail stores, Ron Johnson, left the company in 2011.

But let’s not overplay the changes here. This isn’t like when Jobs was first ousted from Apple in 1985 and replaced with bozos like Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, who ran the firm into the ground. Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, and most importantly Tim Cook all worked with and learned from Jobs for years.

The company’s missteps, like the messed-up Maps app, might well have happened under Jobs.

Remember that not everything he did turned to gold. He was just good at making people think so—and that, perhaps, is the Steve Jobs magic that the company is missing right now. The Jobs era brought us the G4 Cube, the Motorola ROKR, troubled iPhone 4 antennas, the doomed Ping social network, and an apology for a screwed-up Mobile Me launch. The new Maps app had been in the works at least since 2009, when Jobs was hale and hearty. It’s another one of his projects.

Mobile devices, especially, take years to build. When I talk to carriers and manufacturers, they describe a product cycle of 18 to 24 months from conception to sale. The iPhone 5 may have been in the works even longer. When the iPhone 4S came out, many Apple watchers were surprised because they’d been hearing rumors of a very different iPhone, one with an all-metal body. That concept, from 2011, may have eventually evolved into the iPhone 5.

So Maps and the iPhone 5 are Steve Jobs legacies. How about the iPad mini? Jobs famously disparaged 7-inch tablets, saying that they were only usable by deformed mutants. But it was a common rhetorical strategy of Jobs to curse whatever he was working on at the moment. Jobs said that nobody wanted to read books on an LCD screen, and then released iBooks; he said that nobody wanted to watch video on a handheld, and then released the video iPod. The iPad mini has already sold millions.

Let’s also look at the fourth-generation iPad, which existing users have been criticizing for coming “too soon” after the previous model. Jobs had no problem with mid-cycle course corrections. Remember how he lowered the original iPhone’s price by $200 six months after its release? He might have been better at defusing user anger than the current administration is, but I’m confident that will blow over.

Apple’s corporate structure seems to have changed a bit since Jobs’ death. Tim Cook isn’t taking up all the limelight the way Jobs did, but Apple is still the uniquely secretive place Jobs set up. Yes, there have been leaks, but there have always been leaks—Gizmodo’s iPhone 4 scoop came during the Jobs era. Apple’s PR operation still functions like no other, and we haven’t heard about major structural changes. The system isn’t broken—thanks in part to Jobs, Apple’s stock seems to keep going up and up—so the Cupertino folks aren’t fixing it.

But that might be where Jobs’ death finally starts to matter.


THE IMPENDING DEATH OF STEVE JOBS

 It’s impossible to know much about Apple’s future until the 2013 holiday season. The Jobsian product pipeline will dry up then, and it will be much more urgent for Apple to react nimbly to competitors. Apple’s iOS success has become self-perpetuating because of its terrific third-party developer community, but that doesn’t have an infinite life span.

Apple hasn’t entered a new market since it introduced the iPad in 2010. It hasn’t taken a big bet. Will post-Jobs Apple have the will and bravery to blow things up and disrupt markets the way it did under Jobs with the iPhone and iPad? Apple is no longer an underdog; it’s the leader in tablets, and the world’s most profitable cell phone maker. As Microsoft can tell you, leadership creates a tendency towards inertia.

Tim Cook is a spectacular operational leader, but he hasn’t yet shown himself to be an idol smasher. Without Jobs’ (and Forstall’s) notoriously prickly genius on board, the question isn’t whether Apple can continue to sell lots of its existing product categories, but whether it will be able to anticipate the next one.