“It’s a simple statement to place on a technology product — alongside the obligatory ‘Assembled in China’ — but it speaks volumes about the emphasis Apple places on the work of Mr. Ive, the company’s shy, unassuming and relatively unknown senior vice-president of industrial design,” Hartley reports. “While the Apple spotlight is focused on the computer titan’s bombastic chief executive, Steve Jobs, among the hordes of Macfaithful, Mr. Ive is often hailed as the design genius who helped fuel Apple’s turnaround from also-ran computer maker to the king of high-end electronics.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Also-ran?!” Also-rans do not dictate the direction of the market for well over 30 years. An example of an also-ran computer maker would be Compaq. Or Gateway. Also-rans, by definition, do not lead; they follow at a great distance. If Hartley is referring to units shipped (market share), okay, fine, but that’s the only measure that would work – not revenue share and certainly not mind share. By any objective measure, the PC industry’s leader for over three decades has clearly been Apple. Hartley would have done better to use the dreaded “niche” in that spot instead.
Hartley continues, “The 43-year-old Briton is responsible for leading the design team that created many of the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s signature, culture-shifting products, including the colourful iMac, the iPod music player, the iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer… His work has become the focus of design-school case studies, while his creations, including the original iPod, have joined the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.”
“Although Mr. Jobs receives the lion’s share of the credit for Apple’s rise from the doldrums to a company with a US$215-billion market capitalization today, Mr. Ive is seen by many analysts as the man who helped turn many of the Apple founder’s ideas into products,” Hartley reports. “There are even whispers that Mr. Ive is on the short list to replace Mr. Jobs as chief executive when the Apple founder eventually steps down.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “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…” – SteveJack, MacDailyNews, August 20, 2003