WIRED speaks the utter truth about the one positive factor regarding Apple Computers:
Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. ^
Steve Jobs can be a jerk, but he’s a messianic fascist, a petite dictator with one goal: to unite design and function. While weak on the technical end, in terms of interface and industrial design his products are excellence: they look beautiful and fit easily into the hand or click of the mouse.
Some of us will never buy Apple because of the flip side of his company, which is its inability to pursue a consistent strategy, and the sheer dishonesty of it all. A computer isn’t a lifestyle. Apple isn’t a philosophy. Rather, as this article points out, it’s a reversion to the management thinking of 100 years ago:
Over the past 100 years, management theory has followed a smooth trajectory, from enslavement to empowerment. The 20th century began with Taylorism — engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s notion that workers are interchangeable cogs — but with every decade came a new philosophy, each advocating that more power be passed down the chain of command to division managers, group leaders, and workers themselves.
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Jobs, by contrast, is a notorious micromanager.
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But Jobs’ employees remain devoted. That’s because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God.
A completely well-designed product inspires faith. That faith inspires a sense of mission. Mission goals make people agree to work together because of mutual need. With this mutual need, they are able to cut out the busywork that takes up most of each office day and become far more productive by being more effective.
On the consumer end, Apple builds a brand like no computer company has recently. While I will argue that much of it is illusion owing to numerous technical missteps and betrayal of certain core audiences, it’s undeniable that for the average computer buyer Apple connotes reliability in the same way Mercedes did fifteen years ago.
Says Palo Alto venture capitalist Jean-Louis Gasse, a former Apple executive who once worked with Jobs: “Democracies don’t make great products. You need a competent tyrant.” ^
While the fascistic attributes of Jobs/AAPL are daunting, there’s no denying that two factors influence Apple’s success. First is the idea that employees don’t need empowerment as much as they need strong leadership, because strong leadership stays on task and eventually finds a strategy. Second is the idea that products cannot be produced by committee: somewhere, there needs to be a bottleneck where all aspects of design — interface, appearance, technical and marketing — are unified.