Free Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky

littered with the “crapware”—a favorite Steve Jobs put-down—that other PC makers inflict on their customers. On the downside, the focused mind-set delays the introduction of features that everyone knows customers want and that Apple has every intention of giving them. “How long did it take to get ‘cut and paste’ into iOS?” asked one frustrated former executive—an iPhone user, obviously. As a point of fact, it took two years; iPhone 3GS, introduced in June 2009, was the first in which Apple’s mobile operating system incorporated the basic computing ability of cutting and pasting text. The first iPad had no camera, giving customers a reason to buy an iPad 2 when it came out a year later.
    Perhaps Apple’s most radical act of refusal is the way executives at the highest ranks will not chase revenue for revenue’s sake. It’s not that Apple isn’t interested in making money, naturally, nor that it hasn’t done a good job at it. The point is that the Apple culture doesn’t begin with an exploration of how to make the most money. “Steve’s talked about the goal of Apple, and the goal of Apple is not to make money but to make really nice products, really great products,” said Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, at the Art Center College of Design’s Radical Craft conference in 2006. “That is our goal and as a consequence if they are good, people will buy them and we’ll make money.” Indeed, Apple’s behavior is littered with examples of downright revenue avoidance. PC makers put crapware on their computers—antivirus software, subscription offers, and so on—precisely because the revenue is lucrative. Apple forgoes such opportunities time and again, convinced that high-quality products will ultimately generate more profits. It’s a classic long-term approach.
    Even the way Apple does collect money from its customers reflects its minimalist mind-set. Recognizing that waiting in line is a major downer for customers, and one that slows the sales process, Apple figured out how to empower its “sales specialists” in retail stores to check out customers from the floor. Anything at all to speed up and simplify the experience was a good idea. “We measuredhow fast could we turn around something at the Genius Bar, because that made people smile,” recalled George Blankenship, a former top executive in Apple’s retail unit. “How fast can we get people through the register? Well, let’s get rid of the register. Why do we even need a register?” (Apple retail employees takecredit cards or iTunes account numbers from anywhere on the floor.) In the words of Rob Schoeben, the former product marketing executive: “Apple obsesses over the user experience, not revenue optimization.”

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    W hen Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, it looked like big companies everywhere.
Like other companies
is precisely what Jobs did not want Apple to be.
    The company had grown bureaucratic under the prfitofessional managers who supplanted the co-founder. Apple had factories in the United States and around the world. Multiple committees existed to address various corporate imperatives. Among its managerial ranks, fiefdoms had arisen, each with budgeting power and sometimes-competing agendas. Among the things the Apple of the mid-1990s lacked was a cohesive mission.
    From the moment Jobs returned, the corporate culture changed. Now it would move in unison, fiefdoms would be banished, and employees would focus on whatever it was they did best—and nothing else. To this day, graphics runs graphics; logistics controls logistics; finance worries about the bottom line. Today’s corporate structure makesfor a marked contrast with what Jobs encountered upon his return from NeXT.
    Apple’s approach to advertising at the time of Jobs’s return is indicative of how it had lost the tight focus and the entrepreneurial
oomph
of a start-up. Jobs would tell the story of confronting sixteen divisions at