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One might write in a notebook personal memoir, private dreams or family news that noone is supposed to read but oneself, or possibly fall into the hands of close associates, family, in one's final estate. But writing for an audience that one may never know of, future readers, needs a publishable form. That is one thing that the web can do since websites are regularly saved in caches, even long after the hosting has ceased and the site is no longer available on-line. Even then the chance of getting read is offset by the cost of writing, which is almost zero, and the huge volume of material out there. So like any winnowed artifacts to posterity, much will be lost, expunged, ignored and destroyed, and of what survives, some will ressonate with future readers in some way prehaps in a way totally unintended by its author, but the web is such a corpus, even to think that the Library of Congress is saving tweets, that larger efforts are also getting saved somewhere.
TopI was channel surfing the other day and came across a series on Bloomberg News talking about entrapaneurs with celebrity who were successful and why they succeeded. Now I have written about how I think people in business and their investors are for the most part stupid and shortsghted, how there isn't much wisdom in markets, that consumers are lazy and ignorant and that the disaster we are going through is due to all that stupidity and greed in us all but embodied in financial markets the world over. I used to be in awe of economists and entrapaneurs and investors because I didn't know what they really did and now I know that they are wishful thinkers, con men, and greedy, the fallen angels of human nature and inclination.
But I do admire some people who are successful, even ruthless, even as marketers, or obsessives. Steve Jobs is all of these, and I can see what he did correctly as compared with his contemporaries and competitors, one of whom I worked with, namely Scott Mc Nealey, and I can identify by comparing my first hand knowledge of Sun microsystems, now owned by Oralcle Corp, and Apple Corp after Jobs took over. I think I can identify the critical difference as hinted at by the Bloomberg program and how it relates to the pitfalls of so-called Free Markets and peope like Bloomberg, himself, and what he represents in New York City.
The program I saw gave a concise history of Apple from its founding in 1980, Sun was founded in 1982, and the histories of the two companies couldn't have turned out more different, although there was a crossing point in their possible destanies when the Apple board of Directors forced Steve Jobs out and made John Scully the CEO around 1990. More on that later. Jobs went off to run Next Computers which failed because of its expensive hardware, but gave to the world its innovative software which eventually it would sell on it own. When Jobs came back to Apple in 2000 it was to revitalize a failing company that hed lost its vision of what it was. John Scully later admitted that it had been a mistake to remove Jobs and he almost drive Apple into the ground. I did read his book, but I have ignored it as possibly self agrandizing and not analytical as to the mistakes made, and yet in the decline and fall of Sun Microsystems there are clues as to what may have gone wrong, and what might be poisoning the minds of most people in business.
Most of the heavy lifting, the creative and innovative work in the world is done by a few percent of the people who are alive at any one time. The rest are fellow travelers, and I mean the projurative connotation of that phrase, that most people cannot innovate and think on their own. I think that generality extends into high tech and it doesn't mean that people aren't smart. There is a book _Talent is Overrated_ which is based on research done about who actually produces, its thrust is wrong headed trying to find how management can promote innovative thinking, they can't and the more they try the more they repress creativity, so the book is all wrong. Organizations are for the uncreative majority to use social influiences to leverage the roles created for them to create security for themselves, this has nothing to do with creativity. Creativity happens anyway, dispite the office politics and the wise manager would leave well enough alone because he cannot control it. Many managers are no so wise.
Far from being the geeky engineer that he is Steve Jobs does have great acuity for marketing and what excites consumers, in fact he was much better at it than Scully who came from marketing at Coca Cola, but the Apple Board was blinded by conventionality and what they thought investors would think of Scully as opposed to the unconventonal Jobs, and it is always so. This is the same reason Human Resources operations who screen job applicants are so wrong, they filter for conventionality and team players and fail to recognize those who will really innovate their business. It is better for the people who do the work to screen, and keep the HR types out.
Jobs had rare talent in both areas of his business. He knew how the product line of Apple needed to change, he was very well grounded in hardware and especially software and at the same time he knew how to make consumers excited about the products with exceptional designs, a far-reaching view of what the potential of the technology was, and a gift for expressing that vision. One can see how all of this is firmly based on demonstrated technology, that many others were using at the same time, how The software for the new Macs was the basis for the iPhone, iPod, and now iPad, how flash memory would make all these devices possible, after all Darwin is based on Next's OS and BSD Unix, and Next Step was based on Motif (X11) and that Sun Microsystems had done the same things 20 years before in Sun OS 4.4, and yet in Mac OSX and iOS, Apple would be blazing new markets while Sun would be getting bought out by Oracle. Why?
TopMaybe I ought to look for inciteful criticism of why John Scully almost drove Apple Corp into the ground, but based on what Happened to Sun Microsystems I have a theory. There is a prelude to all this. I worked for a year in 1994 at Pyramid Technology Inc. in San Jose Ca. The following year after I quit they were bought out by Seimans and the former CEO and others came close to serving time for defrauding their customers. It turned out that many of the customers I saw when I did the same technical support job for UNIX at Sun in 1997 were the same banks and financial institutions who had been Pyramid's customers. Even the manager I had at the latter came to Sun at about the same time and he apologized to me for the mess.
It goes without saying that one must please one's customers to some extant, but one survives by not only delivering on promises but by having a clear vision and a clear plan about how to change in the future. This must be grounded in the nuts and bolts of your business and who your customer base is going to be. Sun, as Pyramid, sold high end servers. Sun also sold workstations what would be desktop personal computers as well, but its main core business was highly reliable UNIX operating systems running on servers that stayed up for a long time. I even had a desktop that stayed up for months without needing a reboot. The customers were banks, financial services, and others who ran data centers that needed high availablity and redundancy.
So far so good, but I moved on to back line suppport for compilers in 2000 and let myself get laid off in 2004 because I thought I was getting jerked around by impulsive decisions from management and that because it seemed to me that Sun had lost its vision and focus, that it was concentrating on things that did not make money (Java ) and hurting its core business and constituancy on hardware and operating system. It was spread too thin and it was unclear of how its strategy of giving away core parts of its technology was going to maintain its revenue stream. In the Dot-Gone recession of 2000 it wasn't clear that it could find a good stretegy.
This was right at the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple and turned that company around, even as Sun pushed Linux thin clients, so why did Apple succeed and Sun Fail? For that matter why did Scully fail and why do we have a millase in the whole economy and indeed an intellectual vacuum in the country now? I think all these things are linked, and it may have to do with the fact that Scott McNealey has a business degree from Stanford and not a Computer Science degree.
TopSkeptics have always seem flimflam in Apple's products; afterall they are one and a half times more expensive across the board than comperable competators products which are based on much of the same technology, but they are beautifully designed and reliable. Mac OS is now a clever merge of propietary software and open source, and the hardware is very reliable, much more than the average PC even though both use the same processors now. To be sure Apple's success is due to it seeing both what its customers want and more importantly what innovations will excite them to want more, to meet and create demand, exactly what is at the core of market economics.
To get this right takes rare talent, on the one hand consumer items have to be easy to use, that involves hiding the real complexity behind the scenes. Like any UNIX system, one can be a system administrator and look at logs, read tons of man pages and open a terminal and issue CLI commands. In fact, one wants to do this from time to time in Mac OSX, but it isn't required. Sun required its customers to have a trained system admin although many were just barely trained and some not at all. Apple took a very powerful and complex platform that was more robust and had many more features than any Windows platform before or since, and made it approachable behind its GUI. Linux is approaching this, but it still has a way to go to catch Apple's ease of use. Judging by the number of Mac Books I see around in the coffee shops with WiFi, knowing the innards of UNIX is not required, although it has its uses. What needs to be said is how Apple understands its customers, how skilled its marketing is, and yet how firmly honed its image is and so firmly based on its technology. And its people deliver, sometimes under backbreakig pressure, but their stuff works.
Now, Sun had a proven, solid technology, even after SPARC became obsolete, it still could have made Solaris a force in the Linux inroads into personal computing. It could have made Mac OS long before Apple did. So why didn't it? I think that it was too concerned with the conventional wisdon in its conservative customer base and it was far too concerned with what analysts on Wall Street thought. I'm sure that Apple is delighted with what Wall Street thinks of its stock today, but at the time that Wall Street had all but written Apple off, it was a blessing to Steve Jobs that he could sell his vision inside the company without the scrutany. Sun didn't have this luxery because of who its customers were and because of the makeup of the management team and board, most of them Wall Street insiders. When Scully ran Apple there must have been more of this influience. It consists of too much concern for financials to the detrement of planning and vision. There is too much concern for the stock price right now and not enough attention to what the next planned inovation is going to be. That is at the core of what has gone wrong in the larger economy, that there was too much speculation at the expense of real utility, too much sizzle and not enough stake.
The net result at Sun was that stock price peaked at $127 a share in 2000, was as low as $2.50 in 2003 and up to $5.00 in 2006 when the stock symbol was changed from SUNW to JAVA.
The problem for Sun, which I commented on in 2001 was that its message to the world was comfused. Its marketing was schizoid and scattered, because the company was going off in twenty directions at once. I think the reason I felt so jerked around was that the management starting from the top had gone into reactive mode, not having an idea of who they were and what they were doing, Who was jerking them around? I think it was the customers and their friends on Wall Street, and these people don't relly know what they are doing, as subsequent history shows. It was a culture of pleasing the customer at any cost without any heed of where the strengths of your core industy lay, just the opposite of what Steve Jobs brought to Apple at the same time. The reason for this was that enginnering expertise had been religated to the back burner in favor of image makers, salesman, marketers, who did not have a clear idea of what they were saying, because no clear message came from the top, because the people makeing the decisions were not really grounded in the business. Even Scott McNealy didn't seem to really have a clear idea of what Sun's core business was, and there was no vision of how it might evolve, which is why Sun missed opportunity after opportunity, and why Steve Jobs and Apple have been succeeding the most they ever have at the same time.
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