By SteveJack
I was going to call this article, “What happens when Steve Jobs retires?” or “Apple after Steve Jobs,” in deference to taste, but then I decided that I wanted as many people to read it as possible, so… I succumbed. I just want you to know that I felt a pang of guilt typing that headline on a Mac.
Steve Jobs is Apple. Apple is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs without Apple still managed to produce the foundation for what Apple became NeXT (after they paid him $400 million) while, in his spare time, heading a movie studio that only produces runaway box office hits. Apple without Steve Jobs produces Performas.
As a very minor Apple stockholder, I get the proxy statements, I check off the “yes” boxes to give Steve jets, millions of options, jet fuel, more options, whatever he wants, and I wonder what in the hell happens if Steve gets hit by a bus biking on over to the Palo Alto Apple Store some Saturday.
Steve Jobs is 48 years old. Reportedly, he is a vegan and in very good health. May he live to be one hundred! May he live forever, but that’s probably unlikely. So, I’m back to the beginning; what happens when Steve Jobs dies? Or, a bit more hopefully, when he doesn’t feel like leading Apple Computer, Inc. anymore and decides to kick back and relax? Since Jobs returned to lead Apple, every Apple shareholder, employee, and avid company watcher has asked themselves this question at some point, “whither Steve Jobs?”
Pixar has John Lasseter and a crop of young, talented directors to carry on post-Steve. But, who will lead Apple? Is Steve grooming someone, yet? Is it too early to worry about it? And what about that bus, God forbid?
I mean, come on, we all lived through the Scully, Spindler, and Amelio years; Apple barely did. On the face of it, the closest Apple has to a successor-in-grooming is Phil Schiller. No offense, Phil, but the RDF hasn’t rubbed off. Leading Apple is a very tricky proposition. Only one man so far has pulled it off successfully. Twice. The key ingredients seem to be a quest for perfection, a passion for the technology and the company, and the ability to relate Apple’s ideas to the world with style. Jobs is truly the charismatic force that propels Apple forward in the face of tremendous odds.
Right now, it looks like Apple’s best hope, and a very good one at that, is Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Vice President of Industrial Design, the London Design Museum’s “2003 Designer of the Year,” and chief designer of the original and current iMacs, iPods, iBooks, PowerBooks, Power Mac G5, and more. He seems to work well with the engineers responsible for the hardware. He is obviously a meticulous genius. And he has “that certain something” which, importantly, comes across on camera and in person. Whether he has the extremely rare “vision thing” that Jobs possesses; well, that’s still an open question.
Watch Ive in the Power Mac G5 intro video. Ive first appears about 40% in, at the 2:50 mark of the 6:33 minute video. Note that he is almost wearing a black mock turtleneck already. Contrast his presentation style and enthusiasm with the other Apple presenters. Can you sense the almost Jobsian, call it Junior Jobsian, aura? Ive has “it” while all of the other Apple employees in the video are just nice people talking about a computer. And Ive should only get better with time. Could we be watching Steve Jobs’ successor, Apple’s future CEO, in the 31-year-old Ive? Watch and see if Ive begins to join Steve on stage during keynotes soon.
Jonathan Ive, Apple Computer CEO circa 2025. It has a pretty nice ring to it, doesn’t it? You heard it here first. I think Mr. Ive could pull it off. And I think Jobs thinks so, too; in about twenty years, bus drivers willing.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
I agree with greenscreen, the Colonel is dead but we still have the chicken!
Even though Steve runs Apple part time (he has been spending half his time at Pixar for a long time now), and there are thousands of brilliant people at the company that do the real work, perception is everything.
Even if it was announced he was cutting back his Apple commitment to two days a week to spend more time at Pixar, the world press (and especially the Mercury News) would go berserk with sky-is-falling articles… Even preparatory spin control would be hazardous. What to do?
Perhaps they are working on the Emergency CEO Hologram. “Please state the nature of the corporate emergency! You’re sh*t! F*ck!”
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If Steve succumbs to that great hard drive in the sky, he will be replaced by Walt Disney.
Here is the thing, which you appleficianados always miss. It does not matter that the products, or the head of the company, or the commercials, make YOU feel good. The vast unwashed of pc users and those who are not yet using computers are the people who have to be appealed to. Apple has to improve its market share in the US and take advantage of the HUGE yet to be developed markets overseas. If it does not either the products are not as good as you think, or, more likely, the way apple advertises sucks. I have always thought that Jobs is much more interested in being a player, hanging out with Yao Ming and Minime, winning awards for ads and case design, and enjoying the above mentioned perks, than he is in running a business that competes. He has created a cult that supports his lifestyle nicely, while demanding little of him. Things would be different without Steve, and they might be a lot better. It might be worth trying (again) before Apple becomes insignificant.
I think that this article takes on a lot of points, some obvious and some needed to be thought about.
Now we all know that Steve cannot die, but just incase this can happen here is my take on it.
I disagree with Greenscreen and Dawn, and for the fact of you compairing chicken to computers, well thats just a really stupid statement.
Chicken, sorry Steve, is food. Kill it, cook it, and eat it. If it was that easy in computers, dont you think that Jobs and McNeal would of had Gates for dinner?
If and when it does happen and all of Steve’s lives are cashed in like a “get out Jail Free” card, someone(s) will never be able to fill those sneakers.
Without Steve there is no innovation. He’s pushing the entire industry. He’s one of the few (maybe the only one) who’s got the ‘vision thing’.
The tech industry better come up with a life conservation plan for him or they’re fried. Geez, M$ couldn’t update any of their products once they cannot try to copy his ideas anymore and the PC industry would simply stop working alltogether. Tablet PCs ?!?!? Puh-leeze!
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But I’m pretty sure TheSteve has all bases covered for the future. His Steveness reinvented himself when Pixar bought Apple (!). He learned from his old mistakes and is firmly on his way to achieve perfection for himself as for Apple.
When I look at what he’s done since then and where Apple is heading I feel quite confident that this guy thinks of EVERYTHING now and he’s got his apprentice somewhere in the wings.
I’ve been following the way of the Mac for ages and have never before had a more intense feeling that the real Mac revolution is just about to start kicking the entire industry up and down the stairs.
When Steve Jobs dies…
… first of all, let’s hope that’s a *long* time in the future. Second, Steve is the best thing that has happened to the computer industry since the microprocessor was invented.
I imagine that what happens depends on when/how steve leaves apple, how long he stays in charge at 1 Infinite Loop, and what market position Apple is in at the time.
If he kicked off today, that would pretty much be it for Apple. If he retires 20 years from now with Apple in a dominant market position, someone else could probably keep it going.
There’s a reasonable chance Steve will outlive me, even though I am much younger than he is. (I don’t exercise, I suffer form severe depression, and I over eat.) I hope he does outlive me – I would be really sad if something happened to him.
Residue on the bus, suggestive of removed colored butterfly stickers, will lead investigators to Washington State, where an “obnoxious bald man” will be found amongst Cheetos crumbs and an abundance of shorted AAPL confirmation slips. A 3-ring binder entitled “Best Viruses to Promote Product Upgrades” is found on the coffee table, stained heavily by an undetermined white fluid. Also a copy of “The Idiots Guide to Borrowing Intellectual Property”. Usama Bin Laden and Sadam Hussien are subsequently found in the bedroom, but further investigation into the bus incident is halted, as the courts cite, “We must ‘protect’ the 95%”
For 2003 and in the near forseeable future, Apple would be in a tough spot.
Steve Jobs is effective because he’s savvy in all the skills required to run such an iconic company.
He’s been a hacker, a geek, a salesman, and arty enough to get respect from the engineers, marketing and design – you know how hard that is? By being a hacker and a geek, a salesman and a design freak – only he has the respect of all three branches of Apple and outside, the most important group, Mac buyers.
And unlike some other Apple CEO’s that were one or maybe two of the above groups, only he is revered by all four groups and thus the respect.
And Pixar’s success only adds to his aura. While he’s always been creative at Apple, the outside world defined him as a pioneer in personal computers but pretty much stopped at that – now along with being a “tech” geek, he has won respect from the entertainment industry and its creators.
you can’t replace a once-in-a-lifetime guy. Look at it this way, Bill Gates does not have all that’s necesssary to run Apple (regardless of how hated he might to Apple engineers). He’s a geek’s geek but he has zero design sense.
Woz could step in for a year to calm the waters but your candidate list of engineers who are marketers who are chrismatic and who has the respect of mac buyers – out of 6 billion people on Earth – pretty short freaking list.
Does anyone remember an interview Steve Jobs gave prior to the release of the original iMac where he joked about including five golden tickets in randomly selected iMac boxes? Each person who discovered one of those tickets would get a 5 year supply of Macs (I guess that meant a new one each year, or something like that), plus a tour of the factory.
I could see Steve doing that.
I can’t believe that nobody’s mentioned Avie Tevanian. Who cares about personal reality distortion fields, what matters is a CEO that is passionate (personally passionate — eloquence is not required) about the product, and who better than the person most responsible for the current OS design? It’s his baby, let him shepherd it. As for Jonathan Ive, I have yet to see his passion or understanding go more than case-deep. What nearly drove Apple into the ground was not the lack of Steve Jobs (though we are obviously way better off with him) … it was Gil Amelio’s totally misreading of the Apple culture and his attempts to apply a cookie-cutter to the Apple business. Read Amelio’s memoir it is absolutely hilarious the way he looks at the creative independence of Apple’s business units and marvels at how any computer company could operate like this, and proceeds, totally blind, to discard all of the innovation value inherent in this kind of culture. My CEO ratings: Jobs1: 3. Sculley: 2. Spindler: 0. Amelio: -5. Jobs2: +5. As long as we don’t get another Amelio, Apple will be just fine.
one of the mental errors within the macintosh community is that “amelio” was somehow a bad manager or bad for apple. that is all, way WRONG… i’ve seen those comments year after year – so MANY people are missing what actually happened. Amelio was brought in to clean up before JOBS could return. SPINDLER is where the problem(s) started, and to a lesser degree Sculley. All Amelio did was CLEAN up the company for JOBS to RETURN. Hardly anyone knows, but JOBS CALLED AMELIO, shortly after he joined the board at Apple… Steve wanted to stop over for a “visit” when Amelio was still head of National Semiconductor. Steve wanted Amelio to shepard his return to “Apple”… Remember this is BEFORE he was CEO of Apple… Months later, Spindler is out, Amelio in… THEN it was time to CLEAN HOUSE. I was there, Amelio did a lot of repair, even though to the outside public it looked liked he was hurting Apple. Not so! It was steve in the background all along, Amelio was just doing the dirty work. – SO… please refrain from bad mouthing Gil… he was the fall guy, plain and simple. Thanks for your attention.
re: ^
no.
To say that personality and charisma doesn’t matter is to say that Apple is Dell. NO! Apple is not a mass market product. Doesn’t appeal to tight wads or people who can’t afford the high touch items that Apple sells. It’s never going to be a mass producer. If that were the case, Apple wouldn’t be Apple anymore.
I say, Jonathan Ive has the vision thing down pat. Now, he just needs a little experience which he is getting plenty of. Long live his Steveness (move over Steve, Ive is here now ; )
My, what a lot of posts.
Beddy byes calls, so I’ve had to skim read them; sorry if someone has said this already.
Ive’s the next Jobs?
NO-‘KIN-WAY.
And I say that as a Brit.
Jobs has done what’s he’s done because (in addition to all his other qualities) he’s extremely articulate (and persuasive) in a networky/presentationy way and also exTEEEEEEEEEmely ruthless when he has to be (or sometimes just for fun!). Now I may not have din-dins with Ive and tuck him in at night, but I still think I’ve seen enough to suggest that this really isn’t him; far too self-effacing and reticent.
Some phenomenally talented people are far, far better (and happier) as henchmen. To me, that’s Ive.
I mean – does he even care about economics/marketting/etc. etc.?
I doubt it. And that is to his credit, clearly.
I really couldn’t see him as CEO of a company like Apple.
However, may I direct you to my own CV…
Brother Mugga
PS: What? Can’t a man dream?
It really doesn’t matter, except to Steve and his friends and family.
Steve hasn’t written a line of code in years, and it is obvious that his attention is elsewhere. How else to explain the dearth of effective advertising, and the dog that osX is? Steve has us all on the edge of our seats, and I predict we will stay there for the next ten years as he dribbles out “breakthroughs”.
I teach in two private schools, and both are on the verge of upgrading their systems, each with a half dozen units. Both are using vintage macs now. The first has decided to flip to pc’s via dell @$800 each with monitor. The second is leaning that way but will probably have a couple parents build them. Neither seriously considered upgrading to macs because of price, because there was no perceived advantage to the Mac platform, and because every single person involved in the dozen workstations uses MS at home. Five years ago I bet half the people involved would have been mac users at home, as it is a counter culture free thinking California group overall. Mac’s market share may be holding steady, according to the statistics, but in reality, I think it is slipping badly.
Johnny for president !
If Steve dies soon, it will be a disaster.. may the Great Lord forbid! But, if it happens, who knows who should be the next person to make sure Apple keeps going. Jonathan Ive is absolutely stunning but I have no idea how much he knows about the intricate functions of Apple’s computers. having said that, maybe it maaters not… a al Ronald Reagan.. in which case you need leader who puts a stunning team together. Is that J.I? I have no idea… but he is stunnig at what he does and maybe he can assume the mantle… none of use knows. Let us pray that Steve goes on for a very long time, knowing not what is to come…
Have no fear, Dave is here. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me in a few years, and trust me, I’ve got this entire situation under control.
When Steve dies, Al Gore will take over. The best part about this is this means that Apple has only one transition to worry about–Jobs to Gore. Since Gore is already lifeless, he himself cannot die. And if he did, he could be replaced with a wood carving and no one would noice.
I nominate David Pogue and Guy Kawasaki. Both have the necessary clout and respect of the Mac community. Both are full of innovative ideas (anybody else read Pogue’s novel, “Hard Drive”?). Kawasaki was in charge of the EvangeList for years. Both exhibit lots of charisma.
Apple does *not* need a businessman in the CEO position. It doesn’t need someone to worry about the stock value, and it doesn’t need someone who tries to cut costs.
The CEO position, for Apple, is the idea man. The keynote headliner. The driving force behind Apple’s strive for perfection.
Let Fred Anderson worry about the stock value. Let Ive decide how the machine looks. Let Tevanian keep working on the software, and let Schiller take charge of the marketing. The CEO needs only to guide the group in a similar vision.
I think Pogue and Kawasaki are excellent candidates.
-Jake
From BR:
” Your article suggests that one ought sell Apple short so as to capitalize upon the drop when he departs the scene. Apple continues to move nearer to irrelevancy. In the mainstream no one really cares what Apple does.”
You are so obviously a PC troll it’s sad. EVERYBODY cares what Apple does in the mainstream, usually because Apple does it right. Why do you think that so many Apple ideas have been stolen (excuse me: BORROWED) from your crowd? What Apple didn’t invent, they implemented correctly. This is something Microsoft still has to work on.
Apple isn’t known as the beta tester for the PC industry for nothing.
“What happens when Steve Jobs dies?”
Well, he will either be buried or cremated……. silly question……
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Only my opinion but John Sculley was by far the greatest CEO that Apple have ever had. The time that Sculley was in charge saw Apple at it’s most innovative period.
During this time we saw, the Newton a product at least three years ahead of the market and for the first time we saw cheap consumer Macintosh’s in the shape of the LC.
Steve Jobs is charesmatic but charisma does not make a great CEO, I don’t think people seem to realise but it’s us the users that make Apple great, we are passionate about the product Steve knows how to use that passion to his advantage for one reason, he shares it with us. But if Steve Job’s is such a great CEO why has it taken us three years since his return to have anything that starts to live with a PC in speeed terms, poor management decisions have caused this delay.
A really great CEO would make the brave decision to break Apple in to two companies (software & hardware), release the x86 port of OSX (which they have) and take advantage of a time when Microsoft is at it’s most vulnerable. Job’s can’t do it because he’s too emotionally attached.
So what will happen to Apple after Steve Job’s… Hmm we’ll probably have no more fantastic Expo keynotes and the bank balance will be a lot better because Apple won’t be paying the largest CEO salary of any US corporation.
Sean,
Holy ****, you know nothing about what makes Apple tick!
1. I fail to see how Apple’s poor management decisions have anything to do with Motorola’s inability to boost clock speed at a reasonable rate. I think the move to IBM for processors over the past few years was a fantastic management decision. For those that don’t know, every G3 since the original iMac has been built by IBM. When was the last time you heard about lagging G3 performance? IBM has kept up easily, held back only by the fact that Apple won’t ship a G3 with a higher clock rate than it’s slowest G4.
2. Break Apple in two? One of the biggest things Apple has going for it is the “we make the whole widget” theme. If Apple controls everything, it comes out working better. Why do you think Apple was the first out the door with Plug-n-Play? It’s very, very easy for Apple to ensure that everything is compatible.
3. Release an x86 port? True, this is simple from an OS perspective. However, I think it is one of the worst moves Apple could ever make, for two reasons:
a. The x86 is a tired design. Intel and their piles of cash have managed to keep it alive this long, and that may continue, but programming for the x86 is difficult and involves lots of tricks and special approaches to problems. The PowerPC is an extremely clean design. It’s easy to write PowerPC code, and the architecture as it stands will support years of innovation without resorting to funky Intel-style optimizations to boost the speed. For instance, did you know that the Pentium 4 has an extra 128 data registers, hidden from the programmer, which it uses to make up for the fact that the x86 instruction set only has 8 data registers?
b. Every OS X application would also need to be ported. Many apps (PhotoShop comes to mind) are optimized for the PowerPC’s vector processing engine, and would lose all of their speed if translated to x86. The lack of compatibility between the old PPC apps and the new x86 apps would draw a line in the sand for all Mac users: jump, or fade away. Many would refuse to jump, and the platform would die off.
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