Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs PDF
Preview Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs
Dedication For Patrick Contents Dedication Author’s Note Prologue: I Used to Rule the World 1 The Disappearing Visionary 2 Reality Distortion 3 Vertical 4 Attila the Hun of Inventory 5 The Next Lily Pad 6 Ghost and Cipher 7 Joy City 8 Into the Fire 9 Looks Like Rain 10 Thermonuclear 11 The Innovator’s Dilemma 12 Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies 13 Fight Club 14 Typhoon 15 Revolt 16 Velvin 17 Critical Mass 18 Holy Grail 19 The Red Chair 20 Manifesto Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher Author’s Note This is a work of nonfiction, based on five years of reporting, including three years that I spent covering Apple for the Wall Street Journal. All of the names and details described are real. When I embarked on this project before Steve Jobs’s death, I had planned to chronicle how the CEO and his team had rescued Apple from near bankruptcy and turned it into a breathtakingly successful empire. About a year into my reporting, however, I realized that a more compelling story about the company’s leadership transition was unfolding right in front of me. Having previously covered Sony and seen its decline following the departure of its founder, I was particularly interested in how Apple would handle these challenging first years in an increasingly complex business environment. And so I started over again with one question—can a great company stay great without its visionary leader? I thought that if any company could, it would be Apple. Although I had access to the company’s media events and some of its executives during my reporting for the newspaper, Apple chose not to grant any further access apart from one shareholders’ meeting. Even so, I was able to draw from more than two hundred interviews with nearly two hundred sources who have firsthand knowledge of Apple’s world in the United States, Europe, and Asia. They include Apple executives and employees—past and present—as well as business partners, lawyers, friends, and acquaintances who have come into close contact with Apple’s inner circle at various points in the company’s history. I also interviewed former Foxconn and Samsung employees, executives, consultants, and business partners. Because of the secretive nature of all three of these corporate giants, most of these sources asked not to be named for fear of repercussions. A couple of sources feared reprisals from the Chinese government. In pursuit of this story, I traveled around the world, starting with the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, before heading for Chicago, Boston, London, Frankfurt, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo. I visited Tim Cook’s hometown of Robertsdale, Alabama, interviewing the CEO’s former teachers, driving by his high school, and having fried chicken at Mama Lou’s restaurant. I attended the Apple v. Samsung trial in San Jose, visited a black market in Shenzhen, and watched the waves of workers entering the gates of Foxconn’s massive complex in Longhua. In Taipei, I went to Hon Hai’s headquarters in the industrial Tucheng district, where stern-looking guards forbade me from taking photos of the building from their side of the road. I also scoured public records of Apple’s corporate dealings and reviewed thousands of pages of court transcripts, internal memos, company emails, and other documents, all of which helped me piece together parts of the story. Though I witnessed some of the scenes and dialogue in the book firsthand or watched them on videos, other sections are reconstructed from interviews, transcripts, and research. By necessity, some details are based on the recollections of my sources. Mindful of the vagaries of memory, I have made every attempt to confirm their accuracy. When I mention someone by name, readers should not assume that the subject granted me an interview. Many of the statements or occurrences unfolded before an audience or became widely known quickly as they were shared inside Apple. In many sections, I consulted experts in various fields for help in providing background and context on technical subjects such as patent law, corporate governance, and software design. I also drew on the insights, observations, and reporting by esteemed journalist colleagues around the world, who generously provided material to supplement my reporting and are mentioned by name in the acknowledgments. To tell this truly global story, I relied extensively on news articles and books written not just in English but also in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Having been partly educated in Japan, I had no trouble reading the Japanese articles. For the Chinese and Korean materials, I relied on assistants fluent in those languages. For specifics on how each chapter was reported, please see the endnotes. Prologue I Used to Rule the World That Wednesday, the empire went silent. Across the country, from Boston to San Francisco, Apple stores shooed away customers in the middle of the day and locked their doors. In Chicago, the staff hung a white curtain across its glass storefront. In Washington, D.C., a security guard stood watch in front of the entrance. In Manhattan, the lights and computers were still on, but the floor was eerily vacant. Inside all of these stores, employees gathered around video monitors for the start of the memorial service to honor the untimely death of their visionary leader. Steve Jobs had been battling cancer for years, so his passing in early October 2011 had not been surprising, but it was no less devastating. In Apple’s Tokyo store, employees openly cried. It was the middle of the night, but they had come in just for this occasion. They had been present when Jobs had stopped by a few years before, and it was inconceivable for them not to bear witness to his last gathering. On the other side of the world, at Apple’s One Infinite Loop headquarters in Northern California, it was morning. Fans from near and far had made a pilgrimage to the campus, placing flowers, balloons, and notes in a makeshift memorial alongside the sidewalk in front of Jobs’s office building. As employees headed to the courtyard for the ceremony, they passed a colorful string of a thousand paper cranes hanging on a tree in a Japanese symbol of peace. The American, Californian, and Apple flags at the entrance flew at half- staff. Posted signs asked employees to refrain from putting up photos online. Secrecy was law at Apple, but it was particularly important on this day. The company wanted to mourn the loss of its CEO quietly, away from the public’s gaze. One enterprising television station dispatched a helicopter that hovered over the campus with a video camera that captured the scene. The live footage showed people packed around the company’s outdoor amphitheater. Fall was coming, and the leaves on the trees were blushing red. Thousands of employees filled the courtyard. More lined up outside as shuttle buses delivered workers from Apple’s satellite offices. Jobs’s widow, Laurene, sat discreetly to the left of the stage. Dressed in black, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, she flashed the barest of smiles. Apple employees whose offices faced the courtyard looked out from their balconies. Next to them, draped on the buildings, were massive black-and-white photos of Jobs two stories high. The deification of the fallen emperor had begun. In one photo, a young Jobs sat in lotus position, cradling an original Macintosh computer in his lap. In another shot from 2004, Jobs clasped his hands, a hint of a smile suggesting a quiet confidence, almost as if he foresaw Apple’s coming ascendency. The third image would adorn the cover of his biography—a bearded Jobs with his hand touching his chin—a portrait of a man who knew he had changed the world. Nearby lay stacks of white program books with the title “Remembering Steve.” Inside was a copy of a commencement speech that Jobs had given at Stanford University in 2005. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” it said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” Lost in the inspirational messages was the hubristic side of Jobs: arrogant and controlling, an obsessive-compulsive tyrant. Now that he was gone, these complexities only added to his myth. Although Apple’s faithful were gathered to celebrate their CEO’s extraordinary life, many in attendance were eager to prove that Apple would endure without him. The executive team had been running the company for some time, but they were painfully conscious of the immense challenge ahead. The world would be watching for any sign of faltering. Former vice president Al Gore, a member of Apple’s board of directors, told the crowd to have faith. Jobs had prepared them for this moment, instilling the passion and drive to dream up transformative products. “Keep on skating to where the puck will be,” he said, repeating the Wayne Gretzky line that Jobs used to quote. The crowd was comforted when Jonathan Ive, Apple’s lead industrial designer, appeared onstage. He and Jobs had created Apple’s beautifully designed products. He was Jobs’s closest colleague. “He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished,” Ive said. “His, I think, was a victory for beauty, for purity, and . . . for giving a damn.” Now it would be up to Ive to keep those ideals from slipping away. The same was true of Jobs’s other lieutenants. Each shouldered the responsibility for Apple’s continued success. Tim Cook, the company’s new CEO, was known as a stoic. But as he stepped to the microphone to talk about Apple’s loss, his voice cracked. “The last two weeks for me have been the saddest of my life by far,” Cook admitted. Jobs, he said, had been called “a visionary, a creative genius, a rebel, a nonconformist, an original, the greatest CEO ever, the best innovator of all time, the ultimate entrepreneur. He had the curiosity of a child and the mind of a genius. All of these are true and the fact that all of them were embodied in one man is amazing. But for those of us who knew and loved him, none of these words, by themselves or in total, adequately define who Steve was.” Cook summarized Jobs’s thinking eloquently, quoting some of Jobs’s most famous credos. “Simple can be harder than complex. . . . You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. . . . Just figure out what’s next.” Knowing what to do next was one thing. Executing it was another. Apple’s business in the past few years had become much more complex. Bigger, more global, and higher profile, the company now had much to lose. Apple was engaged in a fierce global battle against rivals in the smartphone and tablet markets, and it was under greater scrutiny from the government. Cook had to manage a sprawling supply chain in Asia, while also satisfying the public’s insatiable appetite for “insanely great” products. Jobs’s stupendous feats had built their expectations to stratospheric levels, and each success made the next one that much harder to achieve. Jobs didn’t expect Cook to do what he would have done. He didn’t even want Cook to ask that question. “Just do what’s right,” he had advised. After working side by side with Jobs for almost fifteen years, Cook found his absence inconceivable. How would Cook make his mark in a company so infused with Jobs’s persona that even the bottle of water placed at his side was Glacéau Smartwater—Jobs’s brand of choice? Apple was Jobs and Jobs was
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