Who am I to write a goodbye to Steve Jobs. I've never met the man. The closest I've been was among the thousands of shocked and excited keynote speech audience members when the original iPhone was introduced to the world - a day I'll never forget as long as I live. I also heard that a presentation I helped to create at Genentech was viewed by Steve though I don't know if it's true. Yet Apple has been at the center of my entire career for over 20 years. Some of those years were pretty dicey. At some points along the path, companies began switching from Apple to Wintel in droves and throughout it all, I never left the platform. I moved from one Apple-based company to the next fending off countless attacks on my decision to support the platform. I've been called everything under the sun, an Apple bigot, a Kool-Aid drinker, a religious follower, etc. I'll admit that at during some of these darker times at Apple, when Steve was not at the helm, Apple shares were trading in the teens, and it's future seemed in doubt, it took the conviction of a religious follower to stick by Apple's side. I admit now that my loyalty during those times was probably more driven by my hatred of Windows than my love of Macs.
At one point in my career, I felt as if I was a crucial part of Apple's survival. At some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, I was at least one of the main "Mac guys". There were some very talented gals as well - (*cough* Jennifer Alex *cough* *cough*) working diligently to make sure that the Macs being threatened by looming PC's put their best feet forward and worked flawlessly. I remember supporting almost 400 Macs by myself at one point - a ratio unheard of in the PC world at the time. I recall my boss having to explain to his boss at Cisco why he was hiring so many new techs by simply saying, "You're switching to PC's".
When Steve returned to Apple (a stock purchase moment that I passed up and will forever regret), things started coming back into focus. In the real world, outside of the Steve Jobs Distortion Field, things were still a struggle. The purchase curves of IT departments was very slow and people highly endeared to PC's were in pretty high places in corporate America. As the saying goes, you could never be fired for recommending Microsoft and companies continued to drop Apple in droves. Government seemed to be the last bastion of Apple haven so I went to work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). After some time, fresh IT blood from outside was brought in at the lab at high levels in the organization and the switch to Windows began in earnest there too.
But here's where the story changes. Steve did something unbelievably clever. He abandoned corporate America - at least directly. He decided to turn Apple back to its roots and focus on the consumer. I think he knew that if consumers loved and bought Apple devices for their homes, they'd want to use them at work and if the right people at the right levels in the organization started demanding this, that IT departments would have to change. I worked with a man at LLNL named Don Mendonsa who really taught me something I carry to this day. He once told me, "A professional IT organization should be able to provide whatever tools its employees need - Mac, PC or Unix - to make that employee successful. Period. The sign that your IT organization sucks is that they shove some preconfigured, locked down machine in your lap and ask you to be productive." I've never forgotten that.
I saw this writing on the wall that day I stood at the iPhone release keynote. LLNL was changing their entire email and calendaring infrastructure just to gain access to blackberries. A project that cost you and I millions of dollars, basically just to use a device I knew was destined to be toast. I wrote a white paper with real data that showed the mistake the lab was about to make and I became infamous with the PC-blooded. I'd essentially shot my future self in the head. It was time to move on.
As I write this, Apple has gone from being an asterisk in history to being the largest company in America. More people own iPhones than Blackberries by millions and Research in Motion (RIM) which makes the Blackberry is in serious trouble. I know better than to think that those "visionary" IT people at LLNL will be held accountable for their willful ignorance. No, the government has a way of protecting the guilty by spreading the blame thin enough so that no one person has a fireable amount of it.
In the end, I was glad to be wearing a Steve Jobs team shirt even though he never knew I wore it. I think that's the best part of the Steve Jobs story. So many of us evangelized on his behalf, so many of us saw his vision or believed in his ideas that we were able to move the entire world to bolster Apple's success and he never asked us to or even cared if we did. I didn't always agree with Steve, but I learned to suspend my disagreement because more often than not, he turned out to be right (Steve, I know you're up there. You're still wrong about Flash on iOS devices).
I'm saddened by the loss the world has suffered. Yet I don't feel that Apple's future is in doubt. There are those who directly link the company's success to Steve Jobs the person. But I promise you, the success had more to do with Steve's principles than his vision. He looked at things differently than others but I suspect he instilled that perspective in the people he's left behind. It's up to them (and us) to continue to see things the way he saw them. To demand power but to always present that power through simplicity. To not settle for "good enough" even if it goes against popular business models. To toss 100 bad ideas or iterations in search of the right one. These are principles that are now taught at Apple to executives. Steve didn't just build iPods and iPhones, he built a company. A company I'm proud to say I've stood alongside of for most of my life. Rest in peace, Steve. Thank you for your contributions to our lives but thank you more for your contributions to mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment