Seven years ago, the globally recognisable boss of a certain giant technology company spoke often of the touch-screen “tablet” computer whose development he championed. This pet project was going to change computing for millions of people.
The man was Bill Gates, and the product was the Tablet PC – a device that, while still on sale, has fallen into the limbo reserved for failed electronic gadgets. This week, when Steve Jobs of Apple ended months of feverish speculation by unveiling his own company’s tablet machine – branded the iPad – the echoes were hard to ignore.
Mr Gates has since left the business stage to pursue philanthropy. But for Mr Jobs, who last year took six months off work to fight a near-fatal cancer and undergo a liver transplant operation, it is back to business as usual: sprinkling his pixie dust over inanimate lumps of metal and glass to create objects of desire for the digital age.
Tablets (bigger than a smartphone, smaller than a laptop, and without a keyboard) have been the graveyard of personal computing. If Mr Jobs, 54, can succeed, it will open a new phase in a comeback career. The launch was classic Jobs, points out Jean-Louis Gassée, a high-ranking Apple development executive in the 1980s who later founded a rival personal computing company called Be Inc. “The whole product reflects Steve’s attention to detail and the drive for a minimalist approach – just enough, as opposed to piling on feature after feature,” he said. “It’s from the Steve we know and admire.”
Behind the simple lines of the iPad lie a technological mastery, aesthetic flair and marketing savvy that have long set the Apple chief executive apart. Mr Jobs’ perfectionism, bordering on the obsessive, is summed up in a telling anecdote by John Lasseter, the top creative brain behind Walt Disney’s animation business and a long-time friend.
“He found this one really great black turtleneck which he loved – I think it was Issey Miyaki – so tried to buy another one and they didn’t have any more,” Mr Lasseter confided to the FT recently. “He called the company and asked if they would make another one, and they refused. So he said: ‘Fine, how many do you have to make before I can buy them?’ So they made them – I think he has a closet full of them.”
For anyone who has worked for him, that perfectionism has a downside: a stinging lack of patience that can border on bullying. Approached to comment about his management style for this article, several former employees and associates declined. The fear of Mr Jobs is still powerful, one person said.
One figure who is less cowed is Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder. “Steve can be annoying to people, and he can be obnoxious,” he told the FT in a recent interview. “He would walk into meetings and just say, ‘Forget it. It’s all a bunch of junk. You’re not doing it,’ and walk out, and: ‘You’re all idiots.’”
Mr Job’s harshest critics accuse him of a secretive manner. The accusations dogged him three years ago when Apple blamed two former senior employees for a scandal over the improper issuance of stock options – even though Apple belatedly revealed that Mr Jobs had known about it and received some of the options. Mr Jobs was later exonerated after a review by regulators.
Of course, no one ever said geniuses had to be easy to work with – and “genius” is one word that long-time associates like Mr Lasseter use freely. Larry Ellison, the billionaire head of software company Oracle and a friend, summed up his talent: “He has the mind of an engineer and the heart of an artist.”
That blend is key to his success. He once studied calligraphy and said it influenced the first Macintosh, calling it “the first computer with beautiful typography”. It is evident in his computer-animated hits at Pixar, a company he bankrolled before its sale to Disney in 2006, and in the success of the iPod, the first digital media device not to feel soldered together by ham-fisted engineers.
Yet his career has also been defined by a rare clarity of purpose. Returning to Apple in 1997 – 12 years after losing a power struggle and being ejected – he had to put aside years of bitterness. According to Mr Lasseter: “His simple statement to me about it was: ‘The reason I went back to Apple is that I feel like the world would be a better place with Apple in it than not. And it’s hard to imagine the world without Apple now.’”
In a remarkable speech at Stanford University in 2005, in which he laid bare some of the most sensitive parts of his life – his unwed mother had put him up for adoption, his sacking from Apple, the moment in 2004 when his doctors believed he was dying of cancer – he delivered an eloquent testimonial to what makes him tick. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he said. “Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
Such public declarations have reinforced a feeling that the enfant terrible of the tech world has matured, or sees things in a new light. They add to the impression, stirred by his counter-cultural San Francisco roots, that he stands apart from the judgments of the crowd, with their ordinary measures of success. The trappings of eastern religion have followed him for much of his life, from the Hare Krishna temple he says he ate at each day while “dropping in” as an illicit student at Reed College, to the Buddhist monk who officiated at his wedding in 1991.
This week, Mr Jobs seemed unusually relaxed. Looking less gaunt than for some time, and in his trademark turtleneck, he mixed easily with journalists in San Francisco after the launch – a rare event. Yet he has little to be shy about. Apple’s stock market value has soared to $180bn – above Google and two-thirds that of Microsoft . Mr Jobs’ last launch, the iPhone, accounts for more than a third of group revenues and sparked a doubling of Apple’s shares in a year.
Initial reaction to the iPad has been muted. Like Mr Gates before him, Mr Jobs could fall flat on his face. But if his record is anything to go by, consumers could yet find it hard to live without their iPads.
