Where do I start? Fortune points out for many businesses, 2000 – 2009 has not been the best decade. Starting with the dot-com bust, Enron, and now the flurry of bad news in the last two years, we don’t have a lot of success stories.
But then there’s Apple. Who doesn’t have an Apple product? iPods, iPhones, and Mac computers are only three products, but most people between the ages of 7 and 85 have tried an Apple product at some point.
Fortune points out that Steve Jobs isn’t perfect. Like many wildly successful people, he can have a difficult personality and demands the best from everyone. But, he’s had both a cultural and business impact, not to mention a battle with disease and doing all he can in the context of a bad economy.
Steve Jobs is 54. This means he may still do more, and we’ll be writing a similar article about him 10 years from now. Fortune discusses other iconoclasts who have changed an industry: Henry Ford of ford Motors, Juan Trippe of PanAm, and Conrad Hilton of the eponymous hotels.
Jobs is a businessman and a celebrity. Apple has a higher valuation than Google. In this bad economy, Apple is sitting on $34 billion of cash or cash equivalents. The iPhone is a leader, the iPod is a leader and Apple stores are now the cool place to hang out for so many people of all ages.
Jobs’ current run of success started back in 1997 when he returned to Apple. I’m old enough to remember when John Sculley, recruited from corporate giant PepsiCo, was running Apple. One can only wonder what would have happened to Apple had Steve jobs not come back. Consider what would happen in a world without iPods!
2000 was a bad year for Apple. 2001 brought the debut of iTunes, to the chagrin of DVD sellers everywhere, although they probably did not recognize the impact at the time. Remember the original Napster, and the illegal downloads? iTunes debuted in 2001 and changed the purchasing of recorded music. The CD which was already in trouble, rapidly started to go the way of the Dodo bird.
In 2002, Jobs said, “we’re the only company that owns the whole widget – the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can do things the other guy can’t do”. And so he proved that Apple can do things the other guy can’t do.
Apparently the Apple Board was not in favor of company owned retail stores, but Jobs forged ahead anyways. He is described as an incredible detail-oriented and had an enormous fingerprint on the design and development of the stores. Apple owns a patent on the glass staircase that appears in every store.
Jobs made deals with record labels back in 2002 before anyone realized the power of iTunes. Someone is sorry, I’m sure, they didn’t come up with a competing product.
When the iPhone came along in 2007 both Jobs and Apple were very circumspect about the new development. They fully understood that sometimes it is best to be quiet and let the world guess what’s happening. At Apple the media relations team reports directly to Jobs, to make sure he has complete control over messages to the outside world.
The one dark moment in recent history is the options backdating scandal. Jobs managed to apologize, make good with the SEC, and there have been no similar situations since then.
But Jobs is human, like everyone else, and health problems happen. He had a liver transplant, no small item. His recent illness has raised the question, what would happen to Apple without Steve Jobs? Jobs even has fans outside his company such as Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos. Certainly those three are heroes to others, but to them, Steve Jobs is their hero. Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape and many other successful ventures, likes to ask “what would Steve Jobs do?” That’s a question we should all ask.
I just love my ipod and can't wait for whatever the next great thing is from Apple. I passed by an Apple store last night and it was packed with people!
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