Apple after Steve Jobs

Of all the iconic brands associated with the company Apple, perhaps the most iconic of all is Steve Jobs himself. His face, rendered in black and white in ads or on book covers (such as Walter Isaacson’s fascinating 2009 biography), beard scruff, wire-frame glasses and turtleneck intact, has become the thing that defines Apple as a unique, innovative, different-thinking American business.

In Haunted Empire, tech writer Yukari Iwatani Kane shows how that legacy has also become a kind of curse for Apple.

The book also explores a corporate culture that has evolved around the success of Apple and a tech industry that cares more about patent wars and cheap manufacturing than innovation and “the next new thing.”

Kane’s book may seem like a hatchet job, setting up the company Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created as a Goliath destined to fall, but the story reveals itself to be more complicated than that.

Her thesis — that Jobs’ obsessive attention to detail, gift for mystery and intuiting products people would want to buy fled the company at the same time he died of pancreatic cancer — is a little extreme. As with most things, there’s a case to be made on both sides.

What is clear is that Jobs helped engineer major paradigm shifts in the electronics industry, shifts that have guided the tech world since his death. Without Jobs, and Apple’s zen designer Jonathan Ive, the world would not have the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Those four electronic devices not only tapped into existing industries but created enormous new ones — digital music stores and app designs and boutique computer shops, and a whole culture built around introducing new versions of products every year. It’s a pretty enormous legacy to live up to, and it’s not surprising that customers, now jacked up by a hundred different variations on Apple’s success, would find themselves asking, “What have you done for us lately, Apple?”

And it’s also not surprising that Kane should find some major chinks in the armor of such a powerful iconic company. She finds a lot, of course, because Apple is now in a position of playing catch-up since its innovations have shaken up the market enough to allow hordes of competitors.

The strongest competitor, at the moment, is Samsung, now the biggest smartphone maker in the world. How Samsung achieved this is a separate book altogether, but Haunted Empire makes clear that having a fierce, take-no-prisoners approach under CEO Lee Kun-hee, one that matched if not surpassed Apple’s own formidable corporate prowess, helped. (Actually, the bigger challenge to Apple’s closed-system approach was Android, the open-system software developed by Google, which now drives more phones than Apple could ever hope to assemble.)

Going back to Jobs’ reign of Apple, it’s not as though the scruff-bearded dreamer was ever exactly considered a pussycat: he not only led a relentless attack on corporate mediocrity largely through bullying and swearing and threatening people in public, he helped create a similar yabang attitude among Apple’s executives. Tough negotiations with foreign suppliers and manufacturers, not to mention Apple’s blue-streak swearing managers, gave them a negative reputation among Asian executives, according to Kane.

True, that patented arrogance nearly led to Apple’s demise several times — not only when Jobs was famously ejected before being brought back to “save” the company, but in the early days, when Jobs was hardly thought of as the visionary of Silicon Valley that he would become, but rather just a flake and an irritant.

The branding of Jobs gradually took hold though, capped by a series of charismatic appearances at annual product launches that demonstrated how passionate we could all become about electronic devices. It’s no exaggeration to say that every phone maker since then — Nokia and Samsung, especially — has sought that “magical” moment in yearly product rollouts. As it turns out, capturing lightning in a bottle is never so easy.

Kane looks at the usual suspects in predicting Apple’s decline. CEO Tim Cook, who took over for Jobs when he was on medical leave, is said to lack his predecessor’s charisma. This is a malady that seemingly cripples many a tech company, and she cites Sony, which suffered a lack of focus after its cofounder Akio Morita died. Even Finnish innovator Nokia had plans to build touchscreen phones and tablets before Apple did, but a closed corporate structure shied away from moving away from its “strengths” into something so radical. (Nokia is now owned by Microsoft.)

Another chink in the armor comes with the Foxconn story, which broke just as Apple was racking up unprecedented sales of its iPhones and iPads. When dozens of Chinese Foxconn factory workers leapt from windows to their deaths in 2011, overwhelmed by 16-hour shifts and seemingly unstoppable world demand for Apple gadgets, it placed Apple in a bad light, possibly for the first time. Of course, Apple got the spotlight mostly because it was the biggest at the time — dozens of other tech firms manufacture at Foxconn. And the fact that Foxconn is no anomaly among Chinese factories in terms of worker abuse was beside the point; the maker of iPads was seen to be blind to the suffering that goes into making such gorgeous products.

Yet another chink came with feature glitches that plagued Apple even as they seemingly ruled the world: a faulty antenna design that meant dropped calls for iPhone 3 users; the introduction of Siri, which proved to be not so much a game-changer as a cute gimmick; and the rollout of Apple Maps in iPhone 4 that was riddled with inaccurate directions and became a worldwide joke.
Then there were the patent wars. Kane details a tech culture in which filing patents has become a company’s form of amassing a war chest. Of course, such patent madness has been present since Thomas Alva Edison’s time, but it’s never been the multibillion-dollar business that it is today. For every single detail on a new cellphone, internal and external, the makers, if they have the means, seek a patent. And all those patents tend to stifle innovation, as small inventors fear being hauled into court.

All these patents add up if you’re Apple or Samsung, who went head to head in a series of court battles over design infringement. Apple may have won a billion-dollar ruling in a California court against Samsung a few years ago, but this hardly put a dent in Samsung’s $35 billion electronics division profits. Meanwhile, Apple faced hearings before the US Congress over whether it was paying rightful taxes in the United States (it houses its intellectual property offices in Ireland, where corporate taxes are virtually non-existent). 

All this intrigue makes for fascinating reading, and Kane has tapped into the subject — Apple — that continues to stoke the public’s imagination. Yet at the end of the day, she doesn’t so much peek under the mysterious hood of Apple to reveal its flaws as she does compile news stories that have spun some fairly bad PR for the company. No coup de grâce, in other words; just a lot of anecdotal evidence. Still, even if her conclusion is premature, this is a well-researched, gripping read. 

Perhaps schadenfreude is behind some of the Apple backlash; Apple had been so big for so long, it’s not unusual for many — especially in the relentless blog-driven tech media — to press for weaknesses. But Kane does locate something that seems to really be missing at the heart of Apple: a sense of Quo Vadis. Of course, nobody really knows what Apple has left up its sleeves, but until a new game-changing technology emerges from the Cupertino-based company, there’s less and less of a thrill when each new version of an existing Apple gadget rolls out.

Yet it’s a telling indication of its true legacy, ghostly or otherwise, that, until Apple decides to come out with, say, its own version of a smartwatch (as Samsung has, though not exactly to wide acclaim), the world is pretty much taking a wait-and-see approach.