HAUNTED EMPIRE
Apple After Steve Jobs
Yukari Iwatani Kane
Harper Business/HarperCollins Publishers
371 pages; $27.99
Is there a company on earth that has been more thoroughly examined at ponderous length than Apple? There are books about its early years, books about Steve Jobs' ouster from the company in 1985, and books about his triumphant return in 1997. Recently there was a book dissecting Apple's internal culture; another profiling its design wiz, Jonathan Ive; and a third charting Apple's tempestuous relationship with Google. All these volumes now orbit around Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, the definitive chronicle, considering the imperious co-founder himself opened the door to his secretive empire as he battled pancreatic cancer.
Into this crowded oeuvre comes Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, a well-reported but premature evaluation of the post-Jobs era by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane. The book is confidently written and contains a few reporting gems for committed Apple watchers. But ultimately it falls under the weight of the unanswerable question that it poses at the start: "Can a great company stay great without its visionary leader?" Analysts, investors and Apple fans may be reserving judgement, but Ms Kane's answer is a pretty conclusive no. The post-Jobs Apple of her estimation is hapless, lost without its iconic chief executive, and ricocheting between disasters like the worker suicides at its Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn and the embarrassing shortcomings of new products like Apple Maps.
At the centre of Ms Kane's account is Tim Cook, Jobs' handpicked successor, a fiercely analytical executive so skilled in the combat art of supply-chain economics that he called himself the "Attila the Hun of inventory". Ms Kane traces Mr Cook's story back to Robertsdale, Ala, the small rural town where he grew up. He was a standout student and a trombone player in the school band. After studying industrial engineering at Auburn University, he was recruited by IBM and fell into the computer revolution, even though he had never been a PC enthusiast.
The portrait that emerges is hazy and somewhat colourless, because Mr Cook, a workaholic, has himself disclosed so few personal details to colleagues and appears to have no close friends willing to enhance the picture.
Mr Cook is unfailingly rational, except when it comes to dealing with Apple's suppliers, at which point he apparently channels his inner Khrushchev to obtain the best deal terms. Ms Kane charts the ramifications of that strategy: brutal, dehumanising conditions in the factories of Apple's Chinese manufacturing partners.
The final third of Haunted Empire devolves into a retelling of the setbacks that have bedevilled Apple over the last few years. There are overhyped press events to unveil unspectacular upgrades; services that don't work as well as advertised, like the voice-activated assistant Siri; and Mr Cook's firing of Scott Forstall, chief of the division that makes the software that runs iPhones and iPads. These tea leaves have been scrutinised by the vast Apple commentariat, and little new light is shed on them here. Ms Kane also gives blow-by-blow treatment to Apple's patent battle with Samsung, which culminated in a lengthy trial in a San Jose, Calif, courtroom in 2012. It's "a complex case swirling in arcane and often dreary technicalities," Ms Kane writes. Indeed. The judge in the case lost patience with the lavishly lawyered sides as they jockeyed for position in the inevitable appeal, and so will readers.
Apple's problem, if it can really be called that, is that it has always been limited by its own orthodoxies. It wants to make beautiful products that people love, as Mr Cook is fond of saying in interviews. It also wants to control every aspect of its products, which means it exerts strict control over its software and hardware and usually declines to let other companies license its designs. That philosophy allows Apple to produce meticulously constructed, high-end devices and to set its prices accordingly. The strategy also opened the door for Microsoft with its Windows operating system running on PCs in the late 1980s, and the same dynamic is now recurring with Google's Android operating system running on phones and tablets from Samsung and others. Android's popularity around the world, particularly in low-income countries, is less the result of Tim Cook's lack of imagination than of Steve Jobs' core philosophy and unwavering aesthetic.
In fact, Haunted Empire reminds one of just how many problems Apple's co-founder handed off to his successor. It was Jobs, furious at his putative allies at Google, who steered Apple into its endless patent battle with Samsung over Android. And it was Jobs, aiming to dethrone Jeff Bezos as the king of digital books, who clumsily herded book publishers into a pricing scheme that attracted the attention of the Justice Department, and which a judge later found to be unlawful. In a sense, Mr Cook is still cleaning up messes left by the man whom the world roundly crowned, in a period of understandable mourning, as an unparalleled business genius.
Jobs set an unmatchable standard for Tim Cook and for all future Apple CEOs. But he haunts the empire in more ways than that.
Apple After Steve Jobs
Yukari Iwatani Kane
Harper Business/HarperCollins Publishers
371 pages; $27.99
Is there a company on earth that has been more thoroughly examined at ponderous length than Apple? There are books about its early years, books about Steve Jobs' ouster from the company in 1985, and books about his triumphant return in 1997. Recently there was a book dissecting Apple's internal culture; another profiling its design wiz, Jonathan Ive; and a third charting Apple's tempestuous relationship with Google. All these volumes now orbit around Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, the definitive chronicle, considering the imperious co-founder himself opened the door to his secretive empire as he battled pancreatic cancer.
Into this crowded oeuvre comes Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, a well-reported but premature evaluation of the post-Jobs era by the former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane. The book is confidently written and contains a few reporting gems for committed Apple watchers. But ultimately it falls under the weight of the unanswerable question that it poses at the start: "Can a great company stay great without its visionary leader?" Analysts, investors and Apple fans may be reserving judgement, but Ms Kane's answer is a pretty conclusive no. The post-Jobs Apple of her estimation is hapless, lost without its iconic chief executive, and ricocheting between disasters like the worker suicides at its Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn and the embarrassing shortcomings of new products like Apple Maps.
At the centre of Ms Kane's account is Tim Cook, Jobs' handpicked successor, a fiercely analytical executive so skilled in the combat art of supply-chain economics that he called himself the "Attila the Hun of inventory". Ms Kane traces Mr Cook's story back to Robertsdale, Ala, the small rural town where he grew up. He was a standout student and a trombone player in the school band. After studying industrial engineering at Auburn University, he was recruited by IBM and fell into the computer revolution, even though he had never been a PC enthusiast.
The portrait that emerges is hazy and somewhat colourless, because Mr Cook, a workaholic, has himself disclosed so few personal details to colleagues and appears to have no close friends willing to enhance the picture.
Mr Cook is unfailingly rational, except when it comes to dealing with Apple's suppliers, at which point he apparently channels his inner Khrushchev to obtain the best deal terms. Ms Kane charts the ramifications of that strategy: brutal, dehumanising conditions in the factories of Apple's Chinese manufacturing partners.
The final third of Haunted Empire devolves into a retelling of the setbacks that have bedevilled Apple over the last few years. There are overhyped press events to unveil unspectacular upgrades; services that don't work as well as advertised, like the voice-activated assistant Siri; and Mr Cook's firing of Scott Forstall, chief of the division that makes the software that runs iPhones and iPads. These tea leaves have been scrutinised by the vast Apple commentariat, and little new light is shed on them here. Ms Kane also gives blow-by-blow treatment to Apple's patent battle with Samsung, which culminated in a lengthy trial in a San Jose, Calif, courtroom in 2012. It's "a complex case swirling in arcane and often dreary technicalities," Ms Kane writes. Indeed. The judge in the case lost patience with the lavishly lawyered sides as they jockeyed for position in the inevitable appeal, and so will readers.
Apple's problem, if it can really be called that, is that it has always been limited by its own orthodoxies. It wants to make beautiful products that people love, as Mr Cook is fond of saying in interviews. It also wants to control every aspect of its products, which means it exerts strict control over its software and hardware and usually declines to let other companies license its designs. That philosophy allows Apple to produce meticulously constructed, high-end devices and to set its prices accordingly. The strategy also opened the door for Microsoft with its Windows operating system running on PCs in the late 1980s, and the same dynamic is now recurring with Google's Android operating system running on phones and tablets from Samsung and others. Android's popularity around the world, particularly in low-income countries, is less the result of Tim Cook's lack of imagination than of Steve Jobs' core philosophy and unwavering aesthetic.
In fact, Haunted Empire reminds one of just how many problems Apple's co-founder handed off to his successor. It was Jobs, furious at his putative allies at Google, who steered Apple into its endless patent battle with Samsung over Android. And it was Jobs, aiming to dethrone Jeff Bezos as the king of digital books, who clumsily herded book publishers into a pricing scheme that attracted the attention of the Justice Department, and which a judge later found to be unlawful. In a sense, Mr Cook is still cleaning up messes left by the man whom the world roundly crowned, in a period of understandable mourning, as an unparalleled business genius.
Jobs set an unmatchable standard for Tim Cook and for all future Apple CEOs. But he haunts the empire in more ways than that.
©2014 The New York Times News Service