Steve Jobs’s announcement that he is stepping down as CEO of Apple is not surprising. He’s a very sick man; and running the world’s largest market-cap technology firm can’t be easy for someone with pancreatic cancer and who-knows-what other ailments.
Lots of digital ink will be spilled about Jobs in the coming days, most of it focusing on his truly marvelous successes.
It’s better to focus on his failures.
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Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.
Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.
Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.
Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.
Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more.
Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.
I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.
All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.
There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.
— Nick Schulz is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of its journal, The American.
Jobs was only able to learn anything because each failure had consequences attached to it. That's not something anyone in Washington ever has to worry about, hence they learn nothing.
And based on how often we re-elect them, apparently we don't either.
I think it was Milton Friedman who reminded everyone that we have a profit and loss culture; the loss is important because it gets rid of things that society doesn't want. (I'm paraphrasing, and probably badly.)
As far as re-electing these bozos, Pogo said it best: 'We have met the enemy, and he is us.'
Even some of Jobs' "failures" were spectacular innovations.
Of course the Apple I and II where the parents of the Apple II Plus and IIe that dominated the education market.
There would be no Macintosh without the Lisa, which was Apple's first go at a GUI-based desktop interface inspired by the original Xerox interface. It's fair to say the Xerox Alto and the Lisa are the Papa and Mama of modern desktop computing.
The NeXT was also probably one of the most innovative computers ever designed, and had a huge cult following in Computer Science departments at the time. It was decades ahead of its time. Its Unix kernel is the heart of Mac OS X.
Jobs' biggest failure was the failure to best Gates at the beginning of the PC revolution.
The major factors were probably:
1. Microsoft's early alliance with IBM gained them huge business inroads (Everybody thought of it as the IBM PC, not the MS PC. DOS was an afterthought in most peoples' minds).
2. Microsoft open-sourced the hardware and licensed the OS, while Apple stayed entirely proprietary, which made the MS-DOS PC market a vibrant one for entrepreneurial hardware tinkerers and large chip and component manufacturers alike.
Actually, MS had little if anything to do with the hardware - that was IBM. And it was, to some degree, proprietary to them. It took Compaq's reverse engineering of the PC hardware to open up the clone rush and bring competition to the PC world.
Steve Jobs' biggest mistake was his failure to buy the GUI interface from XEROX Parc (Palo Alto Research Center). The Xerox engineers there thought it a cheap and unimportant gimmick and would have almost given it away for a nominal fee (just as Bill Gates bought DOS for $50K). Without the proprietary right to the graphic user interface, Apple lost the opportunity to guide the computer design industry for years. Of course, Microsoft didn't use their dominance wisely, so too might Apple have been less than user friendly.
NeXT wasn't quite the nothingburger you make it out to be. Their software formed the basis for the current Mac OS. That saved the Mac platform, which in turn formed the basis for iPods, iPhones, and iPads, which themselves run variants of the NeXT software.
From a technical standpoint NeXT was a raging success. It's just that people didn't know they needed it.
Very good article, but you're wrong about the Macintosh. Jobs was still around for the successful launch of the Mac. He was canned the following year...
I'm surprised the author forgot about that famous "Big Brother" TV ad for the Mac, which Steve Jobs himself had pushed in 1983 and which got aired during the 1984 Super Bowl:
Jobs was canned after the Mac, and he was canned less for any failure on his part in creating product, but more for failure to toe the new company line. New management was brought in, whose strong suit was MARKETING, and Jobs apparently wasn't the a** kisser they wanted. They ran Apple into an almost non-existent company. It was close to being delisted. Jobs came back and saved it. (This is over simplified.)
The point is, Jobs was NOT canned because of the success or failure of the Lisa.
Jobs lost a boardroom fight with John Sculley, the former Pepsi CEO he brought in to give Apple more credibility in the market. Sculley didn't understand computers and certainly didn't have the vision that Jobs had, but he knew how to isolate and finally force out the man who hired him. Apple was in the wilderness for years under Sculley and his successor, Mike Spindler ("Diesel"), and the board finally brought Jobs back to rescue the company. The rest, as they say, is history.
Steve Jobs also learned to be a master of timing. When he engineered the NeXT guppy swallowing the Apple whale, he cut, stabilized, simplified, and then was patient enough to do nothing until "the next big thing" came along. His sense of timing was also honed by his failures and his later successes also were honed by that.
Nick Schulz' last paragraph is like Steve Jobs, highly ambitious, audacious,soul-reckoning: Mr. Schulz dared to put the words "moral" and "Washington culture" in the same sentence. What a fancinating juxtaposition of ideas.
This is probably one of the most prescient economic pieces written at this site in quite some time.
The freedom to fail -- it's what makes a market economic system possible.
Does anyone doubt that the Green Industry failures -- most of the industry, in other words -- will NOT be bailed out by the government? That's actually a unique example, because the entire industry exists in the first place at the whim of the government.
"I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did. "
I think you're giving Jobs way too much credit here. It's not like he came up with these things, and it's not like he wasn't opposed to one or two of them along the way. True, his company under his leadership set the standard for a lot of them, but to say that they exist because of him is just plain wrong.
Yes, but tolerance for failure in the consumer electronics marketplace is slightly different than in the hospital or transportation industries, wouldn't you say?
Learning from mistakes is always good but the idea of government-as-enterprise is tricky when you live in an era of knee-jerk partisan opposition, where every utterance is deemed a failure unless it corresponds to one side's particular notion of correctness. Apple can chose a particular market segment to cater to and ignore others. Government doesn't typically have that option.
