Quite an interesting week to be Steve Jobs. This is something of a guess, as Jobs hasn’t spoken to me… mainly because I haven’t made him very, very angry – which seems to be the prime mover of most of his interactions with the media.
The point is that, rather astonishingly, for the first time in over 20 years, based on stock price, Jobs’ Apple is for at least this week a bigger technology company than Microsoft.
That is hardly a reliable bellwether – the situation could easily have reversed by the time you read these words, so volatile are US markets at the moment. Yet it is still an astonishing high-water mark.
There was a time in the 1990s when some commentators, without success, alas, tried to get us to start calling that Redmond based behemoth led by Bill Gates ‘Big Green,’ as a worthy successor to IBM’s fading Big Blue status – as credit to the company’s fantastic ability to coin money for investors. If Apple, once basically sidelined to be a hobbyist and publishing company niche player, has turned the tables, well, hats off. (For the sake of accuracy, the scores on the doors this week put Apple’s market cap at $222bn, $3bn more than MSFT at $219bn: the last time Apple was seen by the market as a better buy than Ballmer’s mob was 1989).
But this is also a week that’s seen Apple dragged in to a very nasty controversy about its relationship with Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer whose Shenzen (Southern China) plant seems to be a most unhappy place to work and which has been the focus of a spate of worker suicides.
The problem for Apple is that that site is where a lot of its popular iPhone and iPads get physically assembled (some Dell and HP kit is also put together there too, note). In the way that these things do, there is now a social networking meme that says no-one should buy an iPad until the Foxconn situation is sorted out. Given that Apple plans to launch the thing in Europe this Friday, that does seem a tad unlikely.
Apple has also – for some reason only really known to the mysterious forces that drive Jobs – got into a quite ludicrous spat with Adobe, mainly because, it seems to the layman, Jobs just doesn’t like the latter’s Flash animation software. So it won’t run on his company’s kit.
Jobs should care less. He’s achieved a turnaround since his return to the company he founded that will be the stuff of MBA theses for decades. The world is quite literally a different place since 2001 when the ix range (iPod, iPhone and iPads) came onto the market.
The ix is also why business IT people can’t afford to ignore Apple the way they used to (I once worked for a firm so determined to exterminate the last bastions of Apple-dom that the internal project team was called ‘Operation Scrumpy’ – geddit?).
Apart from some very rich City people, no-one bought a NeXT computer, Jobs’ Apple-interregnum device and no-one talks about the iMac as a Windows killer. But users want ix kit – and for every BlackBerry corporate IT approves (it’s a much, much better business PDA, from security of the network on down), a staffer will just use his iPhone and soon you will be trying to support his iPad, too.
So there’s a story there about the rise of consumer tech and its influence on business tech, one you are probably familiar with. The ‘app store’ metaphor alone has changed all IT – think of the G-Cloud and what Whitehall wants to do to the way packages are bought and used in the public sector: thanks again, Steve.
My thought today is different. Apple has done very well – but it is still at heart quite an odd outfit. Dealing with it as a journalist has never been anything other than horrible, frankly: the words ‘control freakery’ are all you need to know about that.
But it’s odd because it’s Jobs’ Apple and always will be. Different, arrogant, uncompromising, unique. So let’s give Steve his day in the sun, commend him for his fantastic contribution, and be realistic as a CIO that while you’ll never sign a PO for Macs again, you will for ix kit – as you do, almost certainly, as a consumer and parent anyway.
