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How Apple Does It -- Printout -- TIMEhttp://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1118384,00.html1 of 57/4/2009 3:46 PM
 
Sunday, Oct. 16, 2005
How Apple Does It
By Lev Grossman / Cupertino
This is partly a story about a company called Apple Computer. It's also partly a story about a fancy newiPod that plays videos as well as music and that could dramatically change the way people entertainthemselves. But it's mostly a story about new things and where they come from, about which there are a fewpopular misconceptions.Stop and look at Apple for a second, since it's an odd company. It has been around long enough and has ahigh enough profile that it's easy to forget that. While most high-tech firms focus on one or two sectors,Apple does all of them at once. Apple makes its own hardware (iBooks and iMacs), it makes the operatingsystem that runs on that hardware (Mac OS X), and it makes programs that run on that operating system(iTunes, iMovie, Safari Web browser, etc.). It also makes the consumer-electronics devices that connect toall those things (the rapidly multiplying iPod family), and it runs the online service that furnishes content tothose devices (iTunes Music Store). If you smooshed together Microsoft, Dell and Sony into one company,you would have something like the diversity of the Apple technological biosphere.Why would anybody run a business like that? If you follow conventional wisdom, Apple is doing it all wrong.Try to do everything at once, and you won't do anything well. Worse, the way Apple operates is not howyou're supposed to foster innovation, or not in the U.S., anyway. Under the traditional, capitalist, AdamSmithian model, new and better things arise as a result of freedom and open competition, but Apple isessentially operating its own closed miniature techno-economy. What is this, Soviet Russia? Why notlicense Mac OS X to Dell, see what hardware it comes up with and let the market decide whose ride isflyest? Is Steve Jobs afraid of a little healthy wrasslin' in the great American bazaar?And yet ... this is the company that gave us three of the signature technological innovations of the past 30years: the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPod. In the past six weeks alone, Apple has shipped threeimpressive new products: an ultra-tiny iPod called the nano, the video iPod and a nifty feature called FrontRow that lets you run your computer from across the room, lying on a sofa, clicker in hand, withoutcrouching over a keyboard. That is cool stuff. So, where does it all come from?Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he'll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of theConcept Car. "Here's what you find at a lot of companies," he says, kicking back in a conference room atApple's gleaming white Silicon Valley headquarters, which looks something like a cross between an IvyLeague university and an iPod. "You know how you see a show car, and it's really cool, and then four yearslater you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in thepalm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!
How Apple Does It -- Printout -- TIMEhttp://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1118384,00.html2 of 57/4/2009 3:46 PM
 
"What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers,and the engineers go, 'Nah, we can't do that. That's impossible.' And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take itto the manufacturing people, and they go, 'We can't build that!' And it gets a lot worse."When Jobs took up his present position at Apple in 1997, that's the situation he found. He and JonathanIve, head of design, came up with the original iMac, a candy-colored computer merged with a cathode-raytube that, at the time, looked like nothing anybody had seen outside of a Jetsons cartoon. "Sure enough,"Jobs recalls, "when we took it to the engineers, they said, 'Oh.' And they came up with 38 reasons. And Isaid, 'No, no, we're doing this.' And they said, 'Well, why?' And I said, 'Because I'm the CEO, and I think itcan be done.' And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit."There are two lessons to be drawn from that story: one about collaboration, one about control. Appleemployees talk incessantly about what they call "deep collaboration" or "cross-pollination" or "concurrentengineering." Essentially it means that products don't pass from team to team. There aren't discrete,sequential development stages. Instead, it's simultaneous and organic. Products get worked on in parallelby all departments at once--design, hardware, software--in endless rounds of interdisciplinary designreviews. Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them andproud of it. "The historical way of developing products just doesn't work when you're as ambitious as weare," says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. "When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop aproduct in a more collaborative, integrated way."Everybody you meet at Apple will echo that precise sentiment, in almost Stepford-like unison. Not only havethey all drunk the Kool-Aid; they all have the same favorite flavor. They're on a hot streak, and they know it.("The Sony guys are over there across the street with binoculars," jokes a senior vice president. "Theyrented space on the fourth floor." High-tech trash talk!) It's almost eerie: Apple employees all like oneanother, and they have a strong sense that they are the chosen of the earth, and they're not going to be a jerk about it, but all others who dwell on this mortal coil are missing out by not working here.The second lesson of Jobs' parable is about control, and to that extent, it's a lesson about Jobs himself. Heis one of the technology world's great innovators but not because he's an engineer or a programmer. Hedoesn't have an M.B.A. either. He doesn't even have a college degree. (He dropped out of Reed Collegeafter one semester.) Jobs has a great native sense of design and a knack for hiring geniuses, but aboveall, what he has is a willingness to be a pain in the neck about what matters most to him.Sure, Jobs is perfectly pleasant to be around. And he pays attention to what you're saying, but if hedisagrees with it--if, hypothetically, you're maybe airing a pet peeve about the fact that iMacs have all their ports in the back, where they're hard to get at--he'll come storming back and hammer at you until youchange your mind or at least shut up. When he generously introduces you to the guy who runs Apple'siTunes development team, Jobs makes it clear that you're welcome to meet him but you can't print hisname. Jobs doesn't want competitors poaching his talent. "You can mention his first name but not his last
How Apple Does It -- Printout -- TIMEhttp://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1118384,00.html3 of 57/4/2009 3:46 PM
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