On Wednesday, May 26, 2010, just after 2:30 p.m., the unthinkable happened: Apple became the largest company in the tech universe, and, after ExxonMobil, the second largest in the nation. For months, its market capitalization had hovered just under that of Microsoft — the giant that buried Apple and then saved it from almost certain demise with a $150 million investment in 1997. Now Microsoft gets in line with Google, Amazon, HTC,
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{2} It’s Okay to Be King
Mike Evangelist (yep, that’s his name) still remembers one of his first meetings with Jobs. It took place in the Apple boardroom in early 2000, just a few months after Apple purchased the American division of Astarte, a German software company where Evangelist was an operations manager. Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime head of marketing, put Evangelist on a team charged with coming up with ideas for a DVD-burning program that Apple planned to release on high-end Macs — an app that would later become iDVD.
“We had about three weeks to prepare,” Evangelist says. He and another employee went to work creating beautiful mock-ups depicting the perfect interface for the new program. On the appointed day, Evangelist and the rest of the team gathered in the boardroom. They’d brought page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program’s various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work.
“Then Steve comes in,” Evangelist recalls. “He doesn’t look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. ‘Here’s the new application,’ he says. ‘It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.’ “
“We were dumbfounded,” Evangelist says. This wasn’t how product decisions were made at his old company. Indeed, this isn’t how products are planned anywhere else in the industry.
The tech business believes in inclusive, bottom-up, wisdom-of-crowds innovation. The more latitude extended, the greater the next great thing will be. Nowhere is this ethos more celebrated than at Google, where employees are free to spend some of their working hours building anything that strikes their fancy. A few of these so-called 20%-time projects have become hits for Google, including Gmail and Google News.
Apple’s engineers spend 100% of their time making products planned by a small club of senior managers — and sometimes entirely by Jobs himself. The CEO appoints himself the de facto product manager for every important release; Jobs usually meets with the teams working on these new gadgets and apps once a week, and he puts their creations through the paces. “He gets very passionate,” Evangelist says. “He’ll say, ‘This is shit, we can do much better.’ “
How can it be wise for so few people to have the authority — not to mention the time — to make most of the creative decisions at a company as large as Apple? Bottlenecks do result. According to one former Apple engineer, a staff of about 10 “human interface” designers is in charge of the entire Mac operating system. With such a small group making decisions, Apple can put out only one or two new products a year.
But this approach works because Jobs and his team know exactly what they want. A more decentralized company like Google may launch dozens of products a year, but more of them fail. (Have you Waved much lately?) Apple hits for a high average. And Apple’s strong management keeps the troops focused. “Everybody knows what the plan is,” says Glenn Reid, a former Apple engineer who created iMovie and worked on several other iLife apps. “There’s very little infighting.”
“I still have the slides I prepared for that meeting, and they’re ridiculous in their complexity,” Evangelist says, remembering how everyone in the room understood, immediately, that Jobs’s rectangle was right. “All this other stuff was completely in the way.”
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