Short cuts

Short Cuts is normally irreverent (OK, rude) in its coverage of industry figures, but just this once we’re being serious, as we remember one of the undisputed giants of the IT business.

Published: 01/11/2011 | Last Revision: 15/12/2011

Memories are long in the Short Cuts office, stretching back to the 1970s and the birth of the microcomputer industry. Apple was always a part of it, and, except for a disastrous period without him between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steve Jobs was always leading Apple from the front. Given Apple’s shut-tight hardware policy today it might seem strange that they popularised the open-up-the-case, plug-in-what-you-like expansion bus slot with the Apple II, one of the most successful micros of the 8-bit, pre-PC age. One beneficiary of this was a small outfit called Microsoft, who plied a trade in Z80 second processor cards complete with CP/M operating system. This allowed users to run applications, such as the market-leading WordStar word processor, that Apple’s own OS didn’t support. However the Apple II turned out to be the end of the company’s ‘Garage’ phase, based on the engineering excellence of co-founder Steve Wozniak. From then on Jobs, no engineer but an intense product visionary, took the lead. He had his epiphany during a 1979 visit to Xerox’s PARC development centre, and became the Guru of the GUI. Then the greatest industrial mid-race horse-switch of all time took place as IBM, until then the high priests of closed architectures (and regularly sued because of it), produced the expandable and clonable PC (complete with Microsoft OS), while Apple launched first the Lisa and then, in 1984, the Macintosh, with not an expansion slot in sight and a warning that unscrewing the case would invalidate the warranty.

Jobs’s greatest coup was getting thousands of developers to fill his iOS App Store with low-cost offerings, so turning the tables on Windows.

It was a decision which would relegate Apple to niche player for the next 25 years, as IBM’s relaxed attitude to seeing others copy its design created the ‘PC Compatible’ industry which came to dominate desktop computing. The long-term winner wasn’t, however, IBM, but Microsoft, who eventually saw ‘PC Compatible’ replaced by ‘Windows Compatible’. Steve, meanwhile, stuck to his guns, producing superior operating systems that only ran on Apple hardware, and superior hardware that didn’t have a lot of application software to run on it apart from a half-hearted version of Microsoft Office and a few heavyweight media and design tools. Eventually investors lost faith, and in 1985 replaced him with the man he’d hired to manage the company, ex-Pepsi executive John Scully. This left Jobs jobless and Apple with the worst of both worlds – a go-it-alone product line without Steve’s design flair and ability to inspire fanatic loyalty in colleagues and customers alike. The company came close to going bust. Jobs returned in 1996, purchased along with his NeXT company by a desperate Apple. He’d spent his time at NeXT doing what he did best – whatever he wanted to – and Apple’s stockholders never again made the mistake of trying to make him do anything else. This was just as well, as during his NeXT period he’d stumbled accidentally into the entertainment business (he initially bought Pixar for its IT systems, not Toy Story), and what he’d learned there helped to make Apple’s fortune. First though there was the desktop to sort out, as the Apple board let him launch the iMac with Bondi Blue casing and no floppy disk drive, and replace the venerable Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP-derived OS X. Then Steve turned his gaze to the music industry, and they let him go ahead with the crazy idea that a computer manufacturer could take on the giants of consumer electronics in the fledgling portable MP3 player market. When he had the even crazier idea of taking on the giants of mobile telephony, they let him do it with a miniature tablet computer disguised as a phone, following it later with a full-size tablet that by then seemed to most people to be just like a phone made bigger. For someone with a reputation for going it alone, Jobs turned out to be pretty good at getting key collaborators onside. His second-greatest coup was persuading a panicking, change-resistant record industry to let him sell individual songs for a flat rate of 99 cents each, turning the iPod into a one-stop music ecosystem (which shrewdly included iTunes for Windows). His greatest, however, was persuading thousands of developers to produce apps for iOS and sell them through Apple’s Store on Apple’s terms, at prices nearer to songs on iTunes than shrink-wraps on software vendors’ shelves. Macs may have been short of applications, but Jobs made sure the iOS devices had the biggest range ever assembled, before most people who had one even realised they’d bought a computer. Jobs’s legacy may turn out to be to have taken Apple’s mobile platform to the critical mass where it can remain a permanent, major market-share player alongside Android (and perhaps one other) in the cloud-connected appliance market – the only time a single-vendor consumer standard has ever achieved that (as Sony, producers of Betamax, know only too well). Or it might not, and Android may swamp iOS just as Windows did the Mac. Either way, no one person has driven the industry in quite the way that Steve Jobs did, and almost certainly no-one will again.