How successful are former Apple executives?
Tue, Nov 11, 08
Apple is one of the most admired brands in the world and its financial turn around over the last half decade has probably been the most notable in modern American corporate history. Under Steve Jobs’ leadership, Apple has managed to remap not one but three major industries: personal computers, digital media players and smartphones. Year after year, Apple comes up with well-designed products that are the envy of consumers. So it’s no surprise that other companies are eager to hire Apple alumni in hopes of acquiring some of that design and management stardust to turn around their own houses.
Does it work? Consider three prominent alumni who left Apple after the return of Steve Jobs in 1997:
John Rubinstein at Palm
Long-time Jobs’ colleague from NeXT days, John Rubinstein ran Apple’s hardware engineering and later headed the new iPod division. He retired from Apple in 2006 and later joined Elevation Partners (co-founded by former Apple CFO Fred Anderson), which bought 25% of Palm Inc., in 2007. Rubinstein became Palm’s executive chairman and began leading all of Palm’s research, development and engineering. Rubinstein also recruited Mike Bell from Apple, where he was VP of CPU Software.
One of Rubinstein first major acts at Palm was the cancellation of Foleo a year ago, shortly before the introduction of Apple’s MacBook Air. Foleo (which the Palm founder Jeff Hawkins considered “the best idea I’ve ever had”) was a $499 “smartphone companion” laptop looking for a problem and the cancellation forced Palm to write off $10 million in R&D expenses.
Palm’s next major product to launch under Rubinstein was the Centro. Accused of lacking any significant innovation, at $99 Centro targeted the lower end of the smartphone market with sales fraction of the iPhone’s and at much lower profit margins.
Tim Bucher at Dell
When John Rubinstein took over the new iPod division in 2004, his replacement for Macintosh Engineering was Tim Bucher. Only six months later, however, Bucher was abruptly fired and he sued Apple for wrongful termination in turn. Subsequently, Bucher co-founded Zing Systems. Zing wrote the software that allowed SanDisk to launch the Wi-Fi enabled MP3 player Sansa Connect which hooked up with Yahoo! Music to take on Apple’s iPod.
In 2007, Dell, still under pressure to create a rival to the iPod, purchased Zing where Bucher remains as the chief product officer. BusinessWeek thus described Bucher’s mission at Dell:
Now Bucher is again squaring off against his former company. He’s spearheading an ambitious plan at Dell to break Apple’s dominant hold on the digital entertainment market. He won’t challenge Apple head on, with iPod knockoffs or a Dell version of the iTunes music store. Instead, Bucher’s 120-person team is trying to create a potent alliance among Apple’s many rivals, from cell-phone makers and record labels to online music sites.
Tim Schaaff at Sony
After he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs often referenced Sony as a company to be admired and emulated in his early keynotes. Over the ensuing decade, however, the fortunes of Apple and Sony have reversed, perhaps not coincidentally.
So much so that in 2005 Sony CEO Howard Stringer wooed Tim Schaaff, Apple’s Vice-President of Engineering for Interactive Media Group, as Senior Vice President of Software Development, responsible for “developing and deploying a unified, intuitive Sony ‘look and feel’ to user interfaces and functionality across our entire product line.”
What’s holding them back?
In each case, Palm, Dell and Sony acquired Apple executives with the conviction that they’ll be able to turn around their beleaguered companies. The assumption was that there was something in the Apple process that could be isolated, translated and transplanted. There are many facets to the “Apple way,” but these three explain why teleportation of former Apple executives is not one of them:
• Focus. Take Palm. What OS does it run? Palm, once a 3Com subsidiary, owned both hardware trademarks and PalmOS. In 2003, Palm separated from 3Com, then spun off the hardware division to PalmOne and the OS to PalmSource. PalmSource then changed its name to Access Systems, selling the rights to the “Palm” name back to Palm, Inc. PalmOne then became Palm, Inc., again. Palm soon introduced WinCE based Treo 700 phones thereby confusing everyone as to whether it even supported its own PalmOS. Access, in the mean time, moved to a new Linux-based OS. Its PalmOS 6 was thus left at the alter, ready to ship but nobody, not even its parent Palm, willing to support it. Incidentally, during these roller-coaster years, the CEO of PalmSource was none other than David Nagel, former head of Apple’s R&D.
In contrast, Apple has had one principal OS over the last decade for its desktops, servers and now mobile devices. Apple just became the most popular handset marketer to consumers in U.S. with a single model sold by a single carrier in less than two years. Steve Jobs is often described as a “control freak” but is there anything Rubinstein at Palm needs more than focus?
• Integration. Take Sony. Sony Corp has over 185,000 employees in 1,006 consolidated subsidiaries worldwide, with operations in audio, video, music, movies, chemicals, insurance, semiconductors, cellphones, games, banking, leasing and a thousand other industries. Faced with this obscene lack of focus, Sony CEO Howard Stringer took on “synergy” between hardware and software divisions as the new mission of the company. The ex-Apple Tim Schaaff was hired to create the framework for all Sony divisions to pull in the same direction.
Three years into the “synergy” journey, though, there’s very little to show for it. Many inside and outside Sony remain skeptics, says BusinesWeek:
“[Schaaff] came in lecturing everybody, saying ‘Well, we did it this way and this way at Apple,’” says one executive in Sony’s consumer electronics division. Others grouse that Schaaff has demonstrated little of Jobs’ take-charge attitude. “To expect a storm-the-castle, everyone-pulls-in-the-same direction attitude, forget it,” says another executive who has worked with Schaaff.
Sony has a bewildering array of subsidiaries and world-class hardware and content businesses like no other company in the world. What Sony doesn’t have is a way to integrate them, the way Apple’s desktops, iPods and iPhones are intertwined with iTunes cloud services and music, video and app stores. Schaaff may have brought his Apple pedigree to Sony but it doesn’t seem all that valuable at a conglomerate that remains hopelessly disjointed.
• Design. Take Dell. The enterprise-oriented Texas company has never really had any success in competitive consumer markets. One of its most spectacular failures has been the quick death of its iPod-killer DJ Ditty MP3 player. Last year, Dell began to reposition itself as the new anti-Apple and a “cool” brand, while simultaneously selling $700 PCs at Wal-Mart. Shortly later, Tim Bucher was brought in to inject a megadose of Apple innovation magic.
Unfortunately, other than supply chain management and direct online sales, Dell has no other core competencies. Its R&D operations are minuscule. Unlike Apple, Dell’s corporate life never depended on continuous design innovation.
Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” At Dell — with no OS of its own and no UI or application expertise at all — design is still a veneer. At the very moment Dell bought Bucher’s Zing to compete against iTunes, it also hired Ed Boyd from Nike to spruce up the top of its laptops with funky designs.
Tim Bucher or no, Dell just doesn’t get design. So it’s no surprise that Dell is abandoning its Zing quest in digital music, according to Wall Street Journal.
Lipstick on a pig
Under Steve Jobs, there hasn’t been any significant exodus of talent from Apple to competitors. For these three alumni, it’s been a difficult journey: so much is expected of them in corporate environments without an integrated, pervasive and focused design culture, which makes Apple the envy of the tech industry and system design such an elusive endeavor.
Daily question: Pay to read?
Mon, Nov 10, 08
For about $250 you can get the New York Times print edition home delivered daily for a year. That will get you thousands of stories, facts, stats, pictures and so on.
Or for the same $250 you can join several other people to fund the research and reporting of 10 suggested stories you’d like to read.
An upcoming “networked journalism” service from spot.us is simple in principle: anyone can submit story ideas, journalist can pitch stories they want to cover, anyone can pledge and donate money, and if the story gets enough funding, it will be reported and published for all to read. It’s an open marketplace of ideas that can be turned into journalistic coverage that otherwise would go unnoticed or under-reported. That’s the idea:
By November 2009, will spot.us still exist?
A map is worth a thousand pictures…when animated
Fri, Nov 7, 08
It is no secret that the newspaper industry is in serious financial trouble. Many argue that the age of newspapers as we know it is over. The only interesting part of the debate seems to be what “newspapers” could become if they fully embraced digital reality.
One of the early indicators of that future has been the coverage of the 2008 Presidential elections by newspapers’ online extensions. The New York Times, for example, has been consistently exploring various novel ways of bringing visual clarity and richness online to what would otherwise be dry data in newsprint:
The online versions of newspapers have moved far from the dead-trees-archived-in-microfiche mindset by attempting to become digital centers of research for ordinary readers. As the “newspaper of record” that’s a good thing for the New York Times. The web offers infinite space and flexible time, two items conspicuously absent from print designers’ toolbox. But as gifted as the Times graphic designers are, the editorial approach to information visualization seems still mired in a static, 2D print world.
A recent election results map depicts “difference in support for major parties between 2008 and past elections”:
By clicking on the map, readers can drill down from national to state to county level results in a few clicks:
While this is infinitely better than what would otherwise be endless pages of mind-numbing statistics in newsprint, it’s still quite linear and vertical. What’s missing is a timeline, a “narrative” on the horizontal axis of time. Yes, there’s a handy slider to switch the map to four-year intervals to see snapshots of electoral change, but that requires readers to stitch together the narrative by themselves, which they likely won’t do to full effect.
The analytics problem here is how to visually present the county-level swing between the Republican and Democratic axis across four election cycles, comparing 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004 each to 2008. While the election-over-election differential is interesting, the real story is the transformation:
[I simply extracted and sequenced Times' four maps with a Year/President designation at the bottom. Red: Rep; blue: Dem.] There’s much to improve here, but a single, animated map frames the transformation in an unmistakable manner with an unforgettable conclusion. Research becomes insight…all without the need for any clicks, slides or drill-downs by the reader.
Maps are not enough
On the web, there are many venues to get the facts. What’s scarce is the narrative, the perspective, the insight that ties it all together in a time-effective way. In analytical terms, what’s missing is trend spotting, rendered with clarity that only digital technologies can make possible online. Every day, an unimaginable number of colorful reports and charts are printed to gain “business intelligence” in corporate America. What follows that is an unimaginable number of hours spent daily by armies of analysts to make sense of these reports. Insight is gained only, and very rarely, when the dots are connected in disjointed graphs, reports and maps to detect a trend along the time axis so an action can be taken in the future.
The currency of print-based newspapers has been the snapshot: what happened and when, in the past. To survive and thrive online, “newspapers” need to become trend spotters, trend explainers and thus storytellers of transformation which, when read or seen in small and disparate chunks as newspapers currently vend them, is often impossible to detect or interpret by ordinary readers. The currency of narration online is snapshots over time: animation.
The future of newspapers online, especially for great ones like the New York Times, is to become masters of not maps, facts, and drill-downs, but of the timeline: animate or die!
Daily question: Unexpected visibilities
Thu, Nov 6, 08
Last year, I briefly highlighted an art project called Tattoos for the Blind which pointed towards tactile tattoos in Braille that can be read/felt by blind people. Over the course of a year, nearly two dozen readers have been reading that article every single day, discovering it mostly through Google searches.
Another unusual object made me think about that entry today: Lazarus Wine, made by blind people with a label done in Braille.
Have you come across any imaginative and unusual incorporation of Braille into otherwise ordinary products?
Daily question: Delayed impulse?
Wed, Nov 5, 08
First came this:
It’s the hope that an enforced moment of sobriety or focus just before hitting that email Send button will prevent what you may regret later on:
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
Now this math-based lamp concept by designer Mingyu Jeung:
To turn on the lamp you need to solve a random math problem, even if it means doing a little calculation on the enclosing board to get the answer right:
In the physical world, we’ve had devices to delay impulsive behavior like alcohol breath analyzers in cars to prevent drunk driving or double keys to activate potentially dangerous devices. In the virtual world, this is somewhat new. Imagine overlaying carbon-emission preserving impulse-checks on all sorts of online transactions that may result in downstream physical activity, like packaging, transportation, size, consumption, etc.
Can you think of any “delayed impulse” techniques in the digital world?
