ANALYSIS:Jobs may have been the driving force behind Apple's success, but he did not do it on his own
STEVE JOBS’S departure as chief executive of the company he co-founded in 1976 and which this month briefly eclipsed Exxon Mobil to become the most valuable in the world is the culmination of events that began in December 2008.
That month Apple announced that Jobs would not appear at the annual MacWorld conference the following January for one of his legendary “Stevenote” addresses.
On the eve of that conference the iPhone maker delivered a bolt from the blue: Jobs made a rare public statement on his health, claiming his weight loss was due to a “hormone imbalance”. In fact, Jobs ended up having a liver transplant just months later in April 2009, leaving his chief operating officer, Tim Cook, to run the company.
There was vocal criticism from investors that Jobs had been less than forthcoming about his true state of health, although the stellar performance of Apple’s shares has quelled much of that. From a low point of around $90 in December 2008, Apple stock hit $400 earlier this month. Investors who kept faith with the notoriously autocratic chief executive were well rewarded.
Jobs and Apple were more upfront at the start of this year, announcing that the chief executive was taking “medical leave of absence” with Cook stepping in for him, albeit without the chief executive title that was bestowed upon him late on Wednesday night.
In effect Cook has spent more time running Apple in the past 2½ years than Jobs has. It is something investors seem to be taking comfort in: although there was an initial panic sell-off, driving the share price down 7 per cent in after-hours trading, Apple shares were down just 1.4 per cent at lunchtime in the US yesterday.
Jobs is the icon, the figurehead and the driving force behind the unparalleled success of Apple in the past decade. But look behind the hype and he has not done it on his own.
A key lieutenant is Jonathan Ive, the head of design, whose first Apple creation was the iMac. It was also the first product that suggested Jobs was going to do something different when he returned to Apple in 1997.
Jobs has his name on an unprecedented number of Apple patents – from the glass staircases used in Apple stores to the power adaptors on the latest Mac computers – but it is Ive and his team who turn those design insights into products.
Head of marketing Phil Schiller has filled Jobs’s shoes as the public face of Apple. While lacking his boss’s unique brand of showmanship, he is a safe pair of hands and clearly no slouch at marketing.
Cook was largely written off as the “operations guy” when speculation began in earnest about who could replace Jobs in the top spot. Cook is a very different type of executive to the passionate Jobs and was seen as a perfect counterbalance for him. The concern now is that without the mercurial founder to bounce off, Cook may be exposed as the ideal number two, but not a born leader.
In his first reassuring move, Cook yesterday e-mailed staff saying that “Apple is not going to change” and promising to preserve the company and culture that Jobs built.
Apple also has a product road map for at least the next year, and maybe even for the next five – this is a company that leaves nothing to chance. The iPhone 5, and possibly a lower-cost iPhone 4, could be unveiled as soon as next month. The third iteration of the iPad is expected to debut early in 2012.
Cook has overseen an overhaul of how Apple produces its products. His decision to outsource manufacturing totally has benefited the over 2,000 Apple staff in Cork who run its supply chain for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Cork employment is almost double what it was when the factory made iMacs.
If Apple does stumble post-Jobs, analysts seem to agree that it is Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and its Google-powered smartphones which are best positioned to benefit.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt described Jobs as “the most successful CEO in the US of the last 25 years”, while Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop called him a “visionary in the computing industry”.
It’s true praise when it comes from your competitors. And there is little doubt that Apple would have become a quirky footnote in the history of computing if Jobs hadn’t returned to the fold in 1997.
But there is also a risk of overplaying what is really a change of title for Jobs. He will continue as chairman of the company he founded in his parents’ garage for as long as his deteriorating health allows. Medical wisdom would have you believe a man who has had pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant does not have a good prognosis.
But if his amazing run at Apple has taught us anything, it’s that you shouldn’t bet against Steve Jobs.
