One of Tim Cook’s first acts as CEO is to institute a corporate matching program for charitable giving by full-time employees.
Seems like we were talking about this just two weeks ago.
I suspect we will see more examples like this in the coming months: choices Jobs would never have made that are actually, you know, pretty good ideas anyhow.
The first all-company meeting I attended as an employee was in January of 2003, the day after a Macworld keynote that introduced iLife, Safari, Keynote, and the “year of the notebook”.¹
For these meetings many employees would line up early in the morning outside Town Hall for a chance at a seat in the room with Steve—and a chance to step up to the microphone during the Q&A. (Some call-in questions were taken from remote buildings and offices, but Town Hall was where the action was.)
Jobs is a master in this arena, and his ability to control the conversation while projecting an air of emotional openness and candor is something to see.²
I recall the question of one particularly clever employee (who was known for being confrontational). “Apple used to have a corporate giving program, and matching for employee donations, and now we don’t. Will we see that being reinstated?”
Steve paused for a beat, allowing the room to ripple with some mild discomfort, then said slowly “Apple’s corporate giving program is… you all get to keep your jobs.”³
“Look,” he said, “there’ve been a lot of layoffs. Dell, HP, everyone in our industry is laying people off. Our plan is to do what we can to keep everyone on board, to increase our R&D budget, and to innovate through the downturn. Then when people have money again, they’ll be ready to buy our products, and we’ll be years ahead of our competition.”
We can talk and blog and pontificate about products and product design and user experience as contributing to Apple’s success, but when we talk about why Apple has been successful as a business I think you need to talk about inventories, supply chains and profit margins (Cook), the retail store experience (Johnson) and this.
Hats off to the man.
¹Recall that iMacs still looked like swinging lamps, and iPods had been able to connect to PCs for just six months (with sync via MusicMatch).
²You get a sense of it in his 1997 WWDC keynote.
³Kind of a dick thing to say to one’s employees, but he pulled it off as a laugh line. I have a hard time imagining another CEO who could do the same.
An “It Gets Better” video from employees of Apple Inc. (YouTube link)
You don’t always need to disclose your name to show your face and speak your truth.
In the days following the iPhone 4 announcement (and again once the phone was in people’s hands) I was pointed to what seemed like multiple articles and blog posts assessing Apple’s claim that the human eye could not distinguish pixels on its Retina display (including one that used macro photography for its analysis).
Imagine my surprise when I visited an Apple retail store and found that I could clearly see blocky pixelation artifacts on iPhone 4 where I’d never been able to on any previous model of iPhone.
No, not on the hardware itself.
On the wall graphics.
Apple only has two options: either give up the mass market in the U.S. and accept slow growth in U.S. sales while Android undermines the iPhone’s base, or launch a CDMA 1X+EVDO Verizon iPhone very soon.
600,000 pre-orders on the first day of iPhone 4 availability, primarily to existing customers, suggests that Apple can continue to reap plenty of revenue selling to its slowly growing U.S. customer base.
Technology is almost certainly not the limiting factor here — I imagine a CDMA iPhone 4 is ready to go, or close to it, today — so it’s a matter of other influences, such as product timing with the GSM iPhones, supply chain delays, or contractual issues with the carriers.
I’d like to think about some of those “other influences” for a moment, specifically the marketing and branding ones.
Does the CDMA phone have a different name? How does the package differ? Are there CDMA versions of both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4? How are the different models messaged in the Retail and Online stores? Do AT&T and Verizon share the stage in the television and print advertising? Most critically, how does Verizon communicate “now we’ve got iPhone” without communicating “…too!” The obvious choice would be for Verizon to do its own iPhone advertising campaign. AT&T will want to do its own competitive advertising as well, so as to continue its emphasis on their network’s simultaneous phone-and-data connection. Let’s all imagine how well those campaigns will go over with Steve Jobs.
Again, Apple does sell iPhone in countries with competing carriers. But currently ALL of them get the exact same phone.*
All of it (the marketing, the contractual carrier issues, manufacturing, supply chain and inventory, adaptations in Retail, connection to Verizon’s activation servers) adds up to a nontrivial amount of hassle for Apple, so that they can embrace an America-centric technology (Can anyone point me to data showing a global CDMA share above 17%? I haven’t found one.) that Tim Cook went on the record as saying “doesn’t really have a life to it after a point in time.”
I’m not saying Apple will never sell a CDMA phone in the U.S. But it may continue to decide that the path to selling more phones runs through India or China, rather than Verizon in the U.S., and allocate its attention and resources accordingly.
American mindshare matters, to be sure, especially among developers deciding how to divide their time between developing for iOS or Android.
But as Jobs enjoyed implying in his WWDC keynote, 100 million iOS devices means there are a lot of Verizon customers who already own an iPod touch or iPad.
I’m guessing a CDMA Verizon iPhone will be available within 6 months.
I will note that in the iPhone 4 marketing screenshots, the “AT&T” has been removed from its catbird position in the titlebar between the signal-strength bars and 3G icon.
Not that this means anything. Carrier names were removed internationally (from the marketing images, not the phones) for the iPhone 3GS launch, allowing Apple to use image assets across countries.
But I’m sure for those who need this phone to exist, this couldn’t have been a change for convenience or consistency’s sake. Right? RIGHT?
*Except maybe China.
“That’s the thing about Apple marketing. They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.”
—Gina Trapani, via Daring Fireball
While I also think the new FaceTime video on apple.com is well-done and emotionally affecting, I’m going to call hogwash on the assertion that Apple marketing aims for the heart.
Apple, [Jobs] said, has always been at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. It’s a very liberal-artsy comment in itself, which is only appropriate since it was preceded by slides and slides of techie info.
This may be the single greatest factor differentiating Apple from its competitors. It’s the secret sauce, the thing that makes everything from iPods to Genius Bars to WWDC at least a little magical: they benefit from a broad, humanist perspective, and a focus on what resonates with actual humans.
What Neven is attempting here is a bit of what Jobs himself was (I suspect) attempting: to find simple, repeatable language to explain the project Jobs has been engaged in from a gut level all along. To communicate to his own team at Apple a concise conceptual framework they can carry forward after he is gone, and to deliver specific words and images that the pundits and obituary writers can use in their memorials of him, because quite frankly he doesn’t trust them to get it right.
I suspect this is just one of many such conceptual frameworks we’ll see Jobs float about the Apple mission, as he refines his thinking over time. Note how the iPad’s ridiculous tagline dropped “Our most advanced technology” and swapped “product” for “device” in the time between the keynote and the launch. These larger ideas about Apple are operating in an ontological space that similarly defy verbal expression.
Because while the humanistic consciousness may be shared by Ive and Forstall and Ron Johnson and department leads throughout the company, the “Liberal Arts” idea seems like an attempt by Jobs to get at something bigger. Because while the company could continue to develop great products and experiences without Jobs, it is difficult to imagine any of these (yes I’ll call them) men walking into the executive offices of Condé Nast, or NBC, or the Wall Street Journal, and saying “Let me tell you what your customers want.”
I look to writers like Neven and Gruber to help find words for those things that Apple and Jobs aren’t saying. Because the press releases, the keynote slides, and the web copy can never reveal the entire picture.
The question in this instance is whether Jobs will find the best language first.
p.s. Neven this is how you spend a romantic getaway weekend?
The tagline for the iPad may be turgid and laughable, but it is admittedly an improvement over some of the alternatives that Jobs had considered.
We MAKE THINGS from THE FUTURE.
You will understand it when you see it.
If you remember just FOUR THINGS about it…
Don’t make us say it.
You people just don’t fucking get it. Ever.
We made it. It’s awesome. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM.
So apparently I have to spell it out for you people.
Fuck it, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.
LOOK, IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT IT’S FOR.
It’s useless to even talk to you right now.
Yes we are driving to the future but we will turn this car around, mister.
No one. Ever. LISTENS to me.
Curiously, enough, President Obama borrowed one of Jobs’ alternate taglines for his State of the Union address just a few hours later:
[I]f anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know.
Meanwhile, inside Apple’s marketing department, the business and political issues surrounding the inclusion or non-inclusion of Flash on the iPad and iPhone are not of heightened concern.
Note the NYT Flash Video widget clearly visible in the lower left-hand corner in the screenshots shown on launch day. On an iPad this rectangle should show the broken plug-in icon (as seen in today’s demo).
It’s not a big deal, as these things go. All marketing (and software) ships with bugs. The website will be corrected/updated before the product ships (possibly before you are reading this), and I know some people who know some people who will get it right before it shows up four feet tall and glowing on the wall of an Apple retail store.
And while there are might be people high up at Apple who care very much whether an image suggests the existence of Flash on an iPad (see for instance the cheat used on Jobs’ static Keynote slide), the Photoshop artists and web producers (and—updated—video producers) preparing for launch day might very well be cut off from communicating with someone who would know.
Or who might remember fixing THIS EXACT MISTAKE two and a half years ago.
