Why It's Not Over For Apple

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To listen to Mike Elgan out at Cult of Mac talk, you’d think that, when Steve Jobs announced he was stepping down, Apple closed its Cupertino campus, smashed every iPad in storage, lit all their patents on fire and coated their faces in the ashes, wailing with despair for their lost master and commander. Ah, but he had a point. Apple won’t be the same without Steve Jobs. But where he and I part company is that I don’t think Apple will be any worse off with Tim Cook.

While Steve Jobs has been nothing but instrumental in the rebuilding of Apple as a company–from Think Different to the endless line of iDevices–the one thing that folks like Mike Elgan seem to forget is that Steve Jobs did not pull every iPad from his very brow. He did not assemble a pile of dirt, breathe into it, and lo, there did emerge the iPhone. He did Think Different, make no mistake there, and indeed many of the designs we know and love of Apple’s probably wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for him.

But to take Jobs’ incredible record of fostering and leading on innovation and positing from there that Tim Cook et al can’t possibly compete because Steve Jobs will no longer be involved in every little detail not only does an incredible disservice to the entire Apple corporation as a whole, but even to Jobs himself.

Consider Apple like its namesake, an apple. Every apple has several parts. The skin that holds it together and faces the world, the meaty pulp, the stem that holds it to the larger tree, and the core that contains the seeds. Steve Jobs was the skin of the Apple. He went to the trade shows. He held up the products. He made “one more thing” famous. But he was not the apple. He was not Apple. He was the face of the apple that everyone saw, but he wasn’t the apple.

What Jobs himself knew was that he had a lot to do with things, so much so that he brought the rest of the apple together. He had a hand in the hiring of the engineers and programmers and everybody else who made all these great Apple products. And the part that those like Elgan didn’t consider? Even Jobs admits it.

I read a great account of an internal meeting at Apple in 1999 from a guy named Marc Hedlund. Hedlund described the meeting, featuring Steve Jobs who came out to wild applause. Jobs let it go on for a while, and then tried to settle down the crowd. Eventually he got the crowd under control, and he said something that got that everyone applauding once again. Something that shoots holes in Elgan’s argument. What did he say? He said this:

“That’s an awful lot of applause considering that you guys are the ones who do all the work.”

Hear that, Mike Elgan? Hear that, everybody who thinks Apple is going to be worse off because Steve Jobs is leaving? The skin of an apple is important. It presents a face to the crowd. It holds the fruit together. But if you take that skin off, you’ve still got a viable apple. The meat is there, the core is there, the stem is there. Apple will be different without Jobs’ leadership, that’s true. But Jobs put a good team in place. Cook, the programmers, the engineers–everyone else that made Apple Apple is still there and still in play.

Steve Jobs knew who really ran Apple. He just led them.

And that’s why this isn’t the end of Apple, just something new.