- “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” is a really exciting new book.
- Follow the paths of two men who shaped the post-Steve Jobs period at Apple: Tim Cook and Jony Ive.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
When Apple founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs died in 2011, there were two competing narratives that dominated the conventional wisdom about the company’s prospects.
Some were sure that without the larger-than-life leader who had guided Apple’s impressive turnaround since his dramatic return to the company in 1997, Apple’s best years were behind it. Others, however, were convinced that “the culture of innovation, thinking differently, taking risks and executing” would live on and continue to introduce revolutionary products to the world.
In the end, neither account was correct.
Fifteen years after the introduction of the iPhone, that product still accounts for the majority of the company’s revenue, and despite billions spent to transform the car and healthcare, no truly revolutionary new product has emerged. And yet, during the intervening years, the company has not only vastly outperformed the broader market, but also its peers at FAANG and Microsoft.
The story of this unexpected outcome is told with precision and sensitivity by Wall Street Journal reporter Tripp Mickle in the genuinely fascinating After Steve: How Apple Became A Trillion Dollar Company And Lost Its Soul.
The book follows the parallel paths of the two key players who shaped the post-Steve period at Apple: Tim Cook, Jobs’ handpicked technocratic successor, and Jony Ive, Jobs’s creative soul mate.
For a long time, Jobs was haunted by the fragility of the big tech franchises that had preceded Apple.
The fate of Hewlett Packard, where Jobs had a summer job, was particularly heavy in his final days: “They thought they had left it in good hands, but now they’re taking it apart and destroying it,” Jobs complained. Given his own obsession with the product, one wonders what Apple’s likely fate really would be if Jobs left it in the hands of someone who, he confided to his biographer Walter Isaacson, “wasn’t a product person, but I know”.
Where after Steve What really stands out is painting a vivid portrait of the key business and creative decisions made by the two central characters, essentially depicted as the left and right brains of modern Apple.
As the book’s subtitle suggests, Mickle is more of a right-brained guy, and his heart clearly belongs to Ive. His portrayal of Cook is, however, endearing in its own right. The CEO grows in the role and finds alternative growth paths as the new products I’ve designed turn out to be less revolutionary than expected. Mickle gives Cook enormous credit for bringing Apple into services, making investors value the company “more than a legacy hardware business that rises and falls depending on the popularity of each iPhone launch,” or such. once even if the next innovative new product ever arrives. .
after Steve he describes Cook’s era as “the triumph of method over magic”. But while Apple’s reliance on services may extend the lifespan and monetization potential of its legacy products, some of the growing service lines have their own inherent risks. Music and video subscription products, for example, are unlikely to be profitable and will face more focused competitors. And the company’s most profitable service, the estimated $15 billion annual payout Google provides to be the company’s default search feature, could simply go away if the federal government wins its pending antitrust lawsuit against Google.
At the end of the day, the shadow of what economist Bruce Greenwald calls “the toaster curse” hangs over all consumer electronics companies. Every new product, no matter how innovative or how many services your competitive defenses support, will eventually become just another toaster.
Apple may not require Jony Ive, who left the company in 2019, to fill the need for continued creative innovation, but Tim Cook’s ultimate legacy will depend in part on whether he can find a way to reconcile method and magic in what he does. which somehow became the most important thing. valuable company, of any kind, in the world.
Jonathan A. Knee is Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School and Senior Advisor at Evercore. His most recent book is “The Platform Delusion: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Age of Tech Titans”.