Steven Johnson Goes Deep Into Steve Jobs’ Head

Steven Berlin Johnson riffs on some conventional wisdom from Robert Wright, who suggests that Jobs is repeating the mistake of not licensing Mac technology, since he’s doing that same play with the iPhone:

The Microsoft approach harnessed positive feedback. The more models of Windows computers, competitively priced, the more people would buy Windows computers. And the more Windows computers people bought, the more programmers would write their software for Windows, not Apple. And the more Windows software there was, the more attractive Windows computers would be. And so on. That’s how Windows wound up with around 90 percent of the desktop operating system market.

With the iPhone, Jobs is again forgoing this positive feedback. He’s not licensing the operating system to other handset makers. There’s only one kind of iPhone — love it or leave it.

Meanwhile, Google is following a variant of the Microsoft strategy…. Why is Jobs choosing the same path that, last time around, kept him from conquering the world?

Johnson separates the two parts of this, pointing out that Jobs was dumped at Apple after inventing the Mac. It was Sculley than fumbled the future he teed up. As Johnson says

I’m not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed. I think the way Jobs looks at it is this: he built a beautiful, revolutionary machine in the Macintosh, attracted incredible hype for it and passionate early adopters.

And then he got fired.

I’m sure somewhere in Jobs’ head he thinks that if he had been running Apple instead of John Sculley, the Mac could have out-innovated and out-marketed Microsoft through the late eighties and early nineties, and kept Windows from dominating the planet. In other words, it wasn’t that Apple erred in following the closed platform strategy. They erred in that they had the wrong guy running the company. That may well be delusional, but the fact that AAPL now has a larger market cap than MSFT, twelve years after Jobs’ return to Apple, has to give one pause.

Exactly. The ‘Microsoft won because they licensed Windows’ argument is an untestable theory: we can’t go back in time and let Jobs keep his job and see what happens.

Even more compelling than AAPL’s market cap versus MSFT is the rise of potent new game-changing strange attractors, like iTunes, iPhone, and now iPad. Jobs has demonstrated his ability to out-innovate, and Microsoft now looks like a one-trick pony.

To do so, Jobs has had a very closed model of product, but one that delivers truly deep value. Microsoft used a more open model — at least in distribution — but the benefits of their approach only work based on mass adoption and low cost: it’s shallow value.

Ballmer admitted today that Microsoft is — at best — in fifth place in the phone marketplace. The ‘fight everyone on every battlefield’ strategy that Microsoft has relied on is starting to look a lot like the last days of Rome.

Jobs and Apple are meanwhile moving from strength to strength: dominating digital music players and distribution, then the smart phone market, then the tablet, next the battle for the living room with a next generation Apple TV device/service that will build on the strengths of iPhone, iPad, and iTunes.

But we continue to hear the wisdom of 1999 repeated, that Apple blew it and Microsoft triumphed. I wonder how many copies of Microsoft operating systems will be sold in 2020?