The Rift

In recent weeks, there have been numerous conversations about what Apple will be like without Steve Jobs at the helm.

It is a perfectly justifiable question. The first time Steve left, the company went in the crapper.

The key here is simple: when Apple’s board ousted Jobs back in 1987, he wasn’t the leader he is today.

The most obvious example of this to me is the feud the started between the Macintosh team and the rest of Apple.

In 1983, Apple released the Lisa, an all-new type of machine, complete with GUI and a mouse.

The Lisa didn’t do well for many reasons. The price was too high, and it had issues with … well … working correctly. The Lisa’s biggest problem wasn’t technical, however, as I wrote last year:

The biggest problem for the Lisa was Apple itself. In January 1984, the Macintosh was released at a shockingly-low $2,500. The Mac had many more features than the Lisa and a larger software library. The Macintosh outsold the Lisa very quickly, and was soon the system of choice for Apple customers.

The reason the Lisa had so much competition internally was Steve Jobs. In 1982, after being removed from the Lisa team, Jobs gathered Apple’s brightest engineers and designers¹ and holed up in an office off-campus to build the Macintosh.

Brian Lam at Gizmodo, in a lengthy piece on Jobs’ career explains what the relationship² was like:

Steve Capps of the Macintosh team hoists a pirate flag above their building. The Lisa team steals it, but it is retrieved and stands for over a year.

This rift was also present with the Apple II team. The Apple II line of computers was Apple’s cash cow. Its baby. With the Macintosh’s GUI and ease of use, the II quickly felt outdated, and Jobs pulled no punches about the fact he believed the Macintosh was the way forward.

The Steve Jobs of today still has the vision and foresight when it comes to products as he did in the 1980s. But instead of tearing Apple apart, since his return, Jobs has worked to pull Apple together, as a united front of products and ideas, set against the world. John Gruber may have said it best:

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.

Since his return, Jobs has been hard at work, building a leadership team that can move forward in a cohesive, positive way. The Jobs of the mid-1980s was just as concerned with seeing his vision fleshed out, but his tactics were far from what’s needed to run a company.

The Macintosh, the iPad and the iPhone are all parts of a bigger machine that marches on. If there are any rifts inside Apple, the public doesn’t see them. In place of a pirate flag, there’s a gleaming, white-walled fortress.