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The Sacred and the Profane
Objects are often considered holy or sacred if they are used for spiritual
purposes, such as the worship of gods. Steve Jobs became the innovation
economy’s Jesus—and his shining achievement, the iPhone, became the
conduit for his worship, elevated above other material items or technologies.
We thus have, in essence, fetishized the iPhone, and in the process opened
the door to a new kind of corporate extremism to emerge. While this
extremism doesn’t put us in actual physical danger (I don’t believe
employees of Apple are violent radicals), this kind of secular worship is
dangerous. Why? Because when we allow an enterprise to run unchecked and
lawless, we’ve lost respect for the proper standards they, versus other firms,
get to play by. The resulting two-tiered system creates a winner-take-all
environment that adds further fuel to the flames of inequality. Simply put,
Apple in the Steve Jobs era got away with behavior—not least Jobs’s own
actions regarding backdated stock options awarded to him by Apple
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—that
no other U.S. company CEO would have gotten away with. At some point,
the American people, and the U.S. government, decided that Jobs and Apple
were no longer constrained by law. Things remained that way until Mr.
Jobs’s death.
Was it worth it? You decide. In the first decade of the twenty-first century,
following Jobs’s return to Apple, the company embarked on the greatest run
of innovation in business history. In those ten years, Apple introduced one
earth-shaking, 100-billion-dollar, category-creating new product or service
after another. The iPod, iTunes/Apple Store, iPhone, and iPad … there has
never been anything like it.
During those years, the consumer electronics industry was a chocolate
factory, and Steve Jobs its Willie Wonka. Every winter at the annual
Worldwide Developers Conference, Jobs would stand on stage and announce
one new product upgrade after another—then start to exit the stage, stop,
turn, and say, “Oh, and one more thing …” and change the world. Suddenly,
what had been a comparatively minor customer convention became an agora.
The world’s stock markets held their collective breaths. News reporters
gathered outside Moscone Center at dawn, previewing the next few hours.
And Apple’s competitors sat watching newsfeeds, hearts in throats, in terror
of what would hit them next.
It’s easy to forget now just how stunning Apple’s decade was. The iPod’s
introduction, in late 2001 after the twin shocks of the bursting of the dot-com
bubble and 9/11, played the same role as the Beatles’ appearance on
Ed
Sullivan
just months after the Kennedy assassination: it was a bright light in
the darkness that signaled hope and optimism. Then, Jobs used his
Hollywood muscle to force an overreaction (that, of course, rewarded Apple)
on the audio download piracy, started by Napster, that threatened to destroy
the music industry. That set the stage for the masterpiece—the iPhone—that
had Apple fanatics all over the world camping out in front of electronics
stores. And finally, the sublime iPad. The unsung hero of Apple’s success is
Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms
of Apple, and who set about partnering with them similar to the way a
vampire partners with a blood bag.
Could Apple have maintained this pace into the current decade had Steve
Jobs survived his illness? Probably. Because for all of his less than savory
traits, he accomplished one important thing: he turned Apple, after the risk-
averse years under John Sculley, into a company—arguably the biggest
company ever—that made taking risks its
first
option. Unlike every other
Fortune 500 CEO, Steve Jobs punished careful thinking, and history recorded
the results. Steve Jobs—not Bob Noyce at Intel or David Packard at HP—
became the first person to found a company and then make it the most
valuable company in the world. Stores, touch screens, and a reheated MP3
player all, at the time, made no sense.
For all the good that Jobs did for Apple, he was also a destructive force
inside the company. He bullied employees; his attitudes around philanthropy
and inclusiveness were small; his mercurial personality and megalomania
kept Apple perpetually in borderline chaos. His death ended the company’s
historic run of innovation, but it also let Apple, under Tim Cook, focus on
predictability, profitability, and scale. You can see the results on the balance
sheet: if profits are a sign of success, in fiscal year 2015 Apple was the most
successful firm in history, registering $53.4 billion in net profit.
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If Apple were anything but a Fortune 500 tech darling, Congress would
have implemented tax reforms.
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But most politicians, like other privileged
classes around the world, feel a tiny rush when they pull out their iPhones.
It’s no contest: Apple—versus, say, Exxon—is likable. C’mon, Think
different.
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