Ten years ago, give a week or two, Steve Jobs returned to Apple Computer, the company that he had co-founded in the now-hazy garage beginnings of the personal computer era. The company was a fiscal, organizational and technological mess.
Under Jobs’ leadership, the company has regained a solid, if still small, foothold in the industry, still as a manufacturer of computers as well as prominently a seller of consumer A/V devices and content services. This turnaround was no small accomplishment. For many, it’s a modern miracle, with Jobs being given the major share of the credit along with Svengalic status.
However, concern on the street grew in December that Jobs’ tenure may come to an end, not by a coup by the board of directors as happened in 1985, but from legal troubles around stock options and perhaps a cover-up.
In the street’s imagination, Apple is Jobs. Or perhaps the other way around: Jobs is Apple. Whatever. This theory is still all about Jobs cracking the whip in Cupertino and speaking the Mac gospel to the public at the annual Macworld Expo and Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynotes.
But is that right? Is this personal identification necessary for the continued success of Apple?
The latest scare stems from investigation of hundreds of companies, in and out of the tech field, for having backdated stock options. On Dec. 27, Law.com reported that federal prosecutors were examining whether Apple executives “apparently falsified” stock option documents.
On Dec. 29, Apple filed its quarterly and year-end reports and defended Jobs.
“The special committee, its independent counsel and forensic accountants have performed an exhaustive investigation of Apple’s stock option granting practices,” according to a joint statement by Al Gore, the chairman of special committee, and Jerome York, the chairman of Apple’s Audit and Finance Committee.
Click here to read more about Apple’s filing and legal problems.
At the same time, Jobs reportedly hired his own legal team to handle his personal defense. So, things could get uglier. Or not.
Before heading into Apple’s existential questions about Jobs, let me give you a piece of Jobs’ history that you may not know: His return was foretold by prophecy.
Near on 10 years ago, I was frantically tearing up a year-in-review special report due for the Jan. 6, 1997, print edition of MacWEEK. All the timelines and stories needed rewriting to accommodate the just-announced news of Apple’s selection of Jobs and his NeXTstep OS. Throughout 1996, the word was that Jean Louis Gasse of Be and the company’s BeOS were all but a done deal.
One assignment that I handed out for this special report was an interview about Apple’s upcoming year with a local Silicon Valley psychic. If it was good enough for Nancy Reagan, why not for Apple?
Before the confab, MacWEEK reporters checked the pulse of developers, and the mood was dark.
“Apple has squandered the attention that I was willing to pay over the course of the past few years, and most especially during the past few months. It’s time for me to pay attention to vial development platforms,” one developer said, pointing to the Windows market.
Worse, when the NeXT squad arrived in Cupertino, they came as heroes riding in to save the day (meaning they were seen as conquerors by the existing Classic Mac and Copland teams). There was a lot of bad blood inside the software groups over who knew best for the Mac and the Mac interface.
It took Apple a good year and a half to sort out the road maps and to present a new vision for the future of the Classic Mac OS and the new Unix-based one, now called Mac OS X. The plan that Jobs presented in the spring of 1998 included a refined and workable plan to run Classic applications under OS X; Quartz, a new PDF-based graphics engine; and a laughable schedule that predicted the release of Mac OS X Version 1.0 in fall of 1999.
Jobs spent a lot of time at these conferences talking to developers in town-hall meetings. I witnessed one of these sessions, where he was very ingratiating to the audience. This personal effort helped restore the confidence of ISVs—along with increasing sales of iMacs and PowerMac hardware.
This transition could have gone terribly wrong. But it didn’t. Apple now has a growing group of large and small developers writing for the platform, which is the largest base of Unix desktops.
For comparison with the dog days of 1997, there were some 4,200 developers from 48 countries at the 2006 WWDC in San Francisco, not counting the 1,000 Apple engineers. More than a half-million people are registered with Apple’s Developer Connection site, the company said, although many of them must be enthusiasts, IT managers and other fellow travelers.
With this success, it’s hard to remember back to the 2005 developers conference when Jobs revealed Apple’s shift to Intel processors.
“It’s good news, but one of the scariest things Apple has announced in long time,” said Leonard Rosenthal, chief innovation officer at PDF tool vendor Apago, of Alpharetta, Ga., immediately after the 2005 WWDC announcement. While he said it was the “right decision,” he told me that sales could take a hit. “There’s big-time uncertainty.”
Notice the comments of Eric Prentice, CEO of Dr. Bott, a Wilsonville, Ore., peripheral vendor. He worried over the number of times that Jobs had reiterated a line about Apple’s health during the speech, as if that repetition were somehow a sign that the company really wasn’t in good shape and that developers needed extra doses of assurance.
“But I have faith in Steve,” Prentice said.
Again, we see the trust of the Mac community in the word of Steve Jobs. He said the transition would be good for the platform, and we buy the message.
Of course, I’ve left off many other important actions that Jobs had a hand in, and some readers may consider them even more important. But I’ve focused on something only Jobs seems to possess: the trust of the Mac industry.
So we return to the question: Can Apple do without Steve Jobs?
Perhaps the answer can be found in another question: Do we see the need for Jobs to spend this trust capital in the near future?
I don’t see it. Is there a problem or looming transition on the order of OS X? Certainly not in the future move toward 64-bit computing. Or in content services on the consumer side.
The installed base appears content, although the summer’s issues with the MacBook notebook may herald a concern for the future.
Mac sales are up, and Mac customers are purchasing software and peripherals. From what I hear from developers, Mac customers still purchase more third-party products than their Windows counterparts.
To succeed, Apple must continue to execute on its plans. That’s what Jobs said in 1997. And that can be accomplished without Steve Jobs.
Please note that I’m not saying Apple would be better off without Jobs. No way. He’s amazing and entertaining. I wish him only health and job security for the years ahead.
But the current FUD around his status should stop.
What do you think? Can Apple, the Mac and the iPod do without Steve Jobs? Let us know here.
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