Read Online Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Adam Lashinsky
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though, if you’re a content company or a technology company. Just pick one. I know which I’d pick.” Said a former Yahoo! executive who was in the room: “It was humiliating. We knew he was right. But we also knew we were incapable of choosing.” (Yang didn’t last nearly as long as a second-time CEO as Jobs did. He gave up the job again in 2009, and Yahoo! has continued its steady decline—in part because of its inability to choose.)
For its part, Apple has chosen to say no repeatedly. It didn’t make a phone for years, often protesting—arguably disingenuously—that it didn’t want to be in the phone business. Apple actually started developing the iPad before the iPhone, but it switched gears out of a sense that the timing wasn’t right for a tablet. (The iPhone debuted in 2007; the iPad came three years later.) After havingstruggled to maintain a significant business selling to corporate customers over the years, Apple deemphasized the “enterprise” altogether. Today, Apple has sales teams that service businesses. But even sizeable companies will buy from Apple resellers, who can offer business-oriented customer service.
Sidelining business-to-business sales is a significant omission in a big tech company’s strategy. Jobs explained it away by saying that Apple preferred to sell to users, not IT managers. What’s more, with the popularity of its mobile devices, Apple has been succeeding in big corporate environments by marketing to employees rather than information systems professionals. As a result, Apple says 92 percent of the
Fortune
500 is testing or deploying iPads anyway, just as if Apple had crafted a major initiative to sell to them. In effect, employees have dragged their employers into buying the technology the workers want, a phenomenon called the “consumerization” of IT—a trend Apple has led.
Tim Cook used to say that Apple could put its entire product line on a conference room table. That’s a result of the winnowing process that occurred in the post-1997 era. Where once there were multiple computers for sale by Apple, the new team sold only four: two desktops and two notebooks. To this day, Apple offers essentially four versions of its iMac: two sizes of screens, two sizes of processors. (To appreciate the tightness of this assortment, compare the current roster of iMacs with the multiple, horribly named all-in-one PCs Hewlett-Packard offers on its website.)
Simplicity is in the DNA of the company, but also in its lean organizational structure. “Apple is not set up to dotwenty amazing things a year,” said a former executive. “At most it’s three projects that can get a ton of attention at the executive level. It is about editing down. The executive team is always looking at picking technologies at just the right time. The minute you’re doing a hundred things, you can’t possibly do things the Apple way. Most companies don’t want to focus on one thing because they could fail. Winnowing ideas from twenty-five to four is horrifyingly scary.”
Saying no is a shock to the system for newcomers to Apple. An executive whose company was acquired by Apple described the process of getting used to turning down deals that didn’t meet strict financial terms, shunning attention from the news media, and adhering to rigid pricing schedules. “[The power of restraint] probably gets instilled into you as much as anything else, the minimalist approach of not overreaching on deals, not overreaching with PR, not overreaching in your conversations, not overreaching on anythile,ng on ang,” the executive said.
The art of refusal extends to the products themselves. Internal critics often pointed to Jobs’s inability to bless more than a handful of projects with his attention. But avoiding “feature creep” is a hallmark of good product design that’s taken seriously at Apple. On the plus side, this is what leads to a music player with one button or a desktop computer that isn’t
For its part, Apple has chosen to say no repeatedly. It didn’t make a phone for years, often protesting—arguably disingenuously—that it didn’t want to be in the phone business. Apple actually started developing the iPad before the iPhone, but it switched gears out of a sense that the timing wasn’t right for a tablet. (The iPhone debuted in 2007; the iPad came three years later.) After havingstruggled to maintain a significant business selling to corporate customers over the years, Apple deemphasized the “enterprise” altogether. Today, Apple has sales teams that service businesses. But even sizeable companies will buy from Apple resellers, who can offer business-oriented customer service.
Sidelining business-to-business sales is a significant omission in a big tech company’s strategy. Jobs explained it away by saying that Apple preferred to sell to users, not IT managers. What’s more, with the popularity of its mobile devices, Apple has been succeeding in big corporate environments by marketing to employees rather than information systems professionals. As a result, Apple says 92 percent of the
Fortune
500 is testing or deploying iPads anyway, just as if Apple had crafted a major initiative to sell to them. In effect, employees have dragged their employers into buying the technology the workers want, a phenomenon called the “consumerization” of IT—a trend Apple has led.
Tim Cook used to say that Apple could put its entire product line on a conference room table. That’s a result of the winnowing process that occurred in the post-1997 era. Where once there were multiple computers for sale by Apple, the new team sold only four: two desktops and two notebooks. To this day, Apple offers essentially four versions of its iMac: two sizes of screens, two sizes of processors. (To appreciate the tightness of this assortment, compare the current roster of iMacs with the multiple, horribly named all-in-one PCs Hewlett-Packard offers on its website.)
Simplicity is in the DNA of the company, but also in its lean organizational structure. “Apple is not set up to dotwenty amazing things a year,” said a former executive. “At most it’s three projects that can get a ton of attention at the executive level. It is about editing down. The executive team is always looking at picking technologies at just the right time. The minute you’re doing a hundred things, you can’t possibly do things the Apple way. Most companies don’t want to focus on one thing because they could fail. Winnowing ideas from twenty-five to four is horrifyingly scary.”
Saying no is a shock to the system for newcomers to Apple. An executive whose company was acquired by Apple described the process of getting used to turning down deals that didn’t meet strict financial terms, shunning attention from the news media, and adhering to rigid pricing schedules. “[The power of restraint] probably gets instilled into you as much as anything else, the minimalist approach of not overreaching on deals, not overreaching with PR, not overreaching in your conversations, not overreaching on anythile,ng on ang,” the executive said.
The art of refusal extends to the products themselves. Internal critics often pointed to Jobs’s inability to bless more than a handful of projects with his attention. But avoiding “feature creep” is a hallmark of good product design that’s taken seriously at Apple. On the plus side, this is what leads to a music player with one button or a desktop computer that isn’t
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