It’s often said that Steve Jobs is the greatest orator in the computer industry, and while that’s a bit like being the least gaffe-prone Coalition minister or the plumpest Pussycat Doll, it is, nonetheless, both true and important. I remember when Gil Amelio was the boss of Apple and, one year, probably 1997, we arrived to hear his keynote speech at Macworld Expo San Francisco, and he started talking, and after two-and-a-half hours had gone by we looked at the clock and found five minutes had passed, and after two-and-a-half hours really had passed we began to wonder if he would ever stop, or if we might have to arrange for our families to fly out and join us.
Dr Gilbert Frank Amelio, you see, was no orator. He knew plenty about making computers: an IEEE Fellow with 16 patents to his name, he’d begun his career at Bell Labs, contributing to the production of the first CCD, the wonder chip that would revolutionise digital imaging. And he knew quite a lot about running computer companies, too: joining Apple after five years as CEO of integrated circuit giant National Semiconductor, he correctly identified many of the structural, cultural and financial problems that had led the company to stagnation in the 1990s, and by slashing costs brought it to a position where it could buy Jobs’ company, NeXT, and bring him back.
But it was only after his return, and the subsequent sidelining of Amelio, that Apple became great again. One man could get the numbers right, but not the vision. One man could talk passionately, inspiringly and with genuine insight, the other just for a heck of a long time. Coincidence? I think not.
At the launch of the iPad 2, Steve himself gave us a clue to why this might be so. What he said at the end of his presentation was so unexpected, poignant (given his state of health) and apposite that I’ll quote it verbatim:
‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.’
‘And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in, and they’re looking at this as the next PC… And our experience and every bone in our body says that that is not the right approach. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.’
‘And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon but in the organisation to build these kinds of products.’
Now, looking at the likes of Microsoft, which never learned to innovate, and Google, which seems doomed to have only one meaningful idea, it’s clear that corporate culture can foster or destroy whatever it is that Apple has and they don’t. And Jobs’ point is that it’s not just about corporate culture, it’s about culture culture. Liberal arts: the education worthy of a free citizen. Rationality. Humanity.
Steve graduated neither in humanities nor in computer science. He attended random classes at an obscure liberal arts college, where something seems to have rubbed off. The first Mac’s proportionally spaced fonts, then unique in a desktop computer, were owed to a course in calligraphy. ‘It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture,’ he told a Stanford commencement assembly in 2005. ‘Ten years later, we designed it all into the Mac.’ Bill Gates’ Windows would later copy the typographical functionality, but what it never reproduced was the sense of this beauty and subtlety and history being designed in, not bolted on.
What Steve Jobs’ Apple has isn’t a recipe, or an attitude, or even an architecture, actually, although I’m sure Wall Street liked that bit. It’s not a way of looking at the world; it’s a way of being in the world. It’s more than just talk, and it’s worth talking about.
Adam Banks
