The election of Howard Dean as DNC chair reminds me of the day when Steve Jobs was asked back as the interim CEO of Apple Computer. And I take that as a hopeful sign.
I was working at Apple the day Steve came back, and I've been in and out of the company a few times in the years since. I've watched with interest as he literally reshaped the company into what it is today. I wanted to write a bit about the parallels that I've seen, and how I think Dean's chairmanship will be good for the Democratic Party.
Some of you are saying: "But Drew, Apple doesn't have a lot of marketshare. They are hovering in the single-digit percentages and the market is literally dominated by the other manufacturers. Is that really the model we want?"
You'd be almost right in that concern, but for one thing. Computers and politics are not the same. Computers are expensive physical objects, and there's a lot more inertia in the computer world.
There is one thing Apple did not have in 1997, and now has in spades. Something that is the lifeblood of any political party:
Influence.
More after the jump.
First of all, let me back up and provide a little background for those who aren't tech-heads like me.
History
Steve Jobs was one of the two co-founders of Apple, along with Steve Wozniak. Loosely speaking, Jobs handled the business half, and Woz handled the technology. They grew the company together through its hugely successful line of Apple ][-series computers. Later on, Jobs created the original Macintosh, which was released in 1984.
(It's all more complicated than that, of course. Jobs was inspiring and visionary, but also famously hard to work with and frankly kind of a prick at times. I'm deliberately glossing over the details. Read this timeline, or see the excellent Macintosh Folklore page if you want more details. At any rate, everyone agrees that the Mac would not have been the Mac without Steve Jobs, and we'll leave it at that.)
Only two years later, Jobs was forced out of Apple due to internal strife. He left and started a few other little companies: NeXT and Pixar, both of which wound up doing more insanely great things.
In the meantime, Apple started into a decade-long decay. It wasn't nearly as fast as self-proclaimed pundits claimed -- Apple's impending doom has been predicted at least 43 times since 1995 alone, according to the Apple Death Knell Counter, and it hasn't happened yet -- but it was decay nonetheless. By the mid-90s it was clear that unless something happened, the company would dwindle away into obscurity.
The Return
Obviously Apple has not, in fact, faded into obscurity. So what happened?
What happened was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
In December of 1996, Apple bought NeXT. At least, that's what officially happened. Some describe it as a clever reversal, wherein NeXT acquired Apple and was paid $400M for their trouble. There's some truth to that; from the inside it was pretty clear that the NeXT management and engineers took over Apple's R&D.
Steve was named interim CEO, and remained "interim" CEO for several years. Eventually he took the reins officially, but by that point it was just a technicality. Apple was on its way out of its decline, and it belonged to Steve Jobs again.
Today it seems clear that he's turned the company around. How did he do it? Two words: Vision and Focus. Jobs had a long-term plan, and he was relentless in simplifying things.
(Perhaps that's starting to sound like something you'd like to see done to your favorite political party.)
Focusing the Hardware
One of the first things Jobs did when he came in was to look at the entire product line of computers that Apple was selling. I can only imagine he must've shaken his head in dismay.
The products the company was producing were not clearly defined. From my perspective inside the company, I could see basically how products were created. Each one came about because someone high up enough had an idea, got together enough political support within the company to make it happen, and then it was kind of dumped out there on the public to see if it would sink or swim. LCs, Centrises, Quadras, Performas, Powerbooks, Towers, Servers ... there were lots of model numbers and no clear definition of the role of each. Was a 2400 better or worse than a 5300? How about an 8150? And what the heck was up with the 6218? Different product lines were competing with each other. There was even one product line, the Performa, that somehow managed to compete with itself.
In short, it was too many cooks in the kitchen. Each individual model was the product of a few team leaders who worked together closely, and usually turned out to be decent enough on its own. But the product line as a whole was essentially a bunch of ideas shoved together; classic "design by committee", and it showed.
(Sound familiar?)
Steve's solution to all this -- and to people who were comfortable with the old chaotic system, it was only brilliant in hindsight -- was to focus and simplify. He cancelled projects, and killed whole lines of computers. He redefined the goals of one existing project to create the consumer-oriented iMac, which famously gave people a cute, easy-to-use, affordable computer that made it easy to get online just as the internet boom was starting. He took that whole complicated product line and trimmed it down ... to four boxes.
Steve's original four boxes were:
Desktop Laptop
+---------+---------+
| | |
Consumer | iMac | |
| | |
+---------+---------+
| | |
Professional |PowerMac |PowerBook|
| | |
+---------+---------+
The fourth box is empty for a reason. Steve himself left it empty for several years. He'd created the iMac, and then looked at the previous mishmash of a product line and had the insight that you could condense all the existing products into roughly three categories ... and yet there was one obvious fourth category missing. Obvious to him, anyway.
It took a while to make it happen. But the company followed through on his vision; several years later the iBook, the first consumer-oriented laptop, was released. And it was a hit.
See what a little vision and focus can do?
Focusing the Software Interior
During Apple's decade of decline from 1987 to 1997, new software technologies were cranked out and then abandoned at an astonishing pace. As a software developer during that period, I can tell you that you found yourself hanging on Apple's every word to find out what the "next new thing" was. In hindsight that was a sign of a problem. Lots of new concepts were launched, flourished briefly, and then faded into obscurity.
The list of dead technologies is amazing: OpenDoc, Cyberdog, AOCE, QuickDraw GX, QuickDraw 3D, Newton, Cocoa (the kid's programming language, not the modern Cocoa), Pink, Copland, MagicCap, ScriptX, and even more that are too obscure to mention here. Many of these technologies served as inspiration for other companies or the open-source community, but they were not successes for Apple.
All these dead initiatives. All great ideas in theory, but Apple was simply unable to make them happen. They were getting trounced by the competition.
(Sound familiar?)
So what happened? Steve came in and focused things.
Remember, Jobs came in with NeXT, which already had the seed of a next-generation software platform. They'd spent ten years building it up from nothing. It was still very unfinished, and not used by all that many people. It was by no means ready to drop into the much larger Macintosh market without quite a bit of work. But everyone who took the time to really look at it agreed that it was really well-designed at its core, and was doing all the right things.
(Hey DFAers... sound like any organization you know?)
One of the important decisions that was made was to ditch the proprietary NeXT operating system, which was descended from an old, out-of-date branch of BSD, and reinvent it with modern free open source software.
Lately, a lot of people here have been talking about open source as a result of the ongoing blograking of Jeff Gannon. I think it's a fair parallel, but let me point out bluntly that open source is not a total solution to every problem. Nor is it a panacea. Some things seem to be unsolvable or painfully slow by traditional open source methods -- for example: consistency across multiple projects and creating great user interfaces. Open source is terrific at making parts, but not so good for creating a whole.
There is no unifying vision in open source projects when you consider them all together. In fact, the power really comes from the complete lack of a single approach. What open source has going for it is a kind of dogged, organic persistence; many heads examine the problem, many different approaches are tried, and anyone can pick up a project where someone else leaves off. Many projects are started, but eventually there is a Darwinian process of natural selection and one or two solutions gain the necessary momentum and outlive the rest.
It takes a lot of time. A well-focused commercial software company with the right leadership can beat free open source initiatives any day of the week... in the short term. But in the long term, the power of the open source community cannot be denied. The shared information accumulates slowly but inexorably. There is a common pool of ideas, and everyone is given the ability to stand upon the shoulders of those who have gone before. Everything is open, and ideas grow organically because you are encouraged to steal what you want.
(Hey Kossacks, does that phrase ring a bell?)
Jobs saw that potential, or his engineers saw it and he was smart enough to listen. When Apple embarked upon its next-generation operating system, Darwin, it embraced open source in two ways: one, it leveraged existing open source projects to gain a lot of ground very quickly, and two, the source was opened for others to see and use and contribute to.
This plan did not take shape overnight; they first presented it in 1997, and it took four years before it became a reality, and a few more years before it really grew into something great.
But an incredible thing happened from my perspective as a software developer: Apple stayed focused. The "next new thing", amazingly, stayed the same every year. At developer conferences like WWDC, they would talk about the OS in the same way year after year. I remember at one WWDC, someone (perhaps Steve) made a joke about how the presentation hadn't changed much from previous years... and how that was the point. Steve and his guys had laid out the vision, the general outline of the plan; and then they spent years focusing and filling it in. Today, eight years later, they are still working from the same vision.
Focusing the Software Exterior
So the MacOS used open source under the hood. But the visible exterior was kept under Apple's control and proprietary, for a variety of practical and business reasons. Many parts of the original NeXT OS lived on and evolved in this fashion -- in particular, Aqua and Cocoa.
This created what is in many ways a hybrid OS; using open source at the bottom and yet retaining the old model for the very top layers. By keeping the top layer to themselves, Apple (and therefore Steve Jobs) retained tight control over their most valuable intellectual property and most aspects of the Mac "user experience". Steve was free to implement his vision.
Jobs is often characterized as incredibly picky when it comes to the look-and-feel of the Mac; the things that make a Mac into a Mac. And honestly, it's true. He controls those things with an iron grip.
There is plenty of room for innovation, and new ideas, and not everything is controlled all the time. But he drives that vision forcefully. There are certain things where he overrules all dissent and has the final say on what happens. He forces the team to create something that really lives up to his idea of how it should be. Not everyone loves every decision he makes, but they put up with a little micromanagement in order to help fulfill his vision.
Did it work? Definitely. Today, nearly everyone who sees the Mac OS X interface finds something that makes them say "Wow." Aqua is frequently described as "lickable" because of its beautiful bright colors, photo-quality icons, smooth use of transparency and drop shadows, and even the almost-but-not-quite-gratuitous genie effect used to minimize windows. Even people who don't want to use a Mac for whatever reason find themselves almost wishing that they could have everything the Mac does.
Focusing on Music: Creating a Market
No discussion of Apple would be complete without mentioning the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, which is where Apple -- somewhat surprisingly -- has been really taking off lately. The company is the #1 source for purchasing downloadable music, and is so huge that the competition might as well be nonexistent. (I blogged about this not too long ago; the numbers are just amazing.)
What made the iPod and iTunes so successful? A lot of things, certainly. But overall it was again Steve's vision and focus that made it possible.
Apple had tried and failed to make small portable gadgets before. (Anyone remember the QuickTake? The Newton?) The company had pretty much given up on it until Steve came along and decided that the time was ripe once again. The iPod would never have existed but for the fact that Steve believed in it and made it happen.
The iPod certainly would not have been so simple and easy to use without Steve to focus it and strip away unnecessary features. iTunes itself was once a much more configurable MP3 player application called SoundJam, but was stripped down and focused into the lean, mean music machine we know today. The iTunes music store's flat-rate pricing of 99 cents per song was only possible because Steve spoke so convincingly of his vision to the major record labels.
Today Apple dominates the market in both portable MP3 players and downloadable music sales; something nobody could have anticipated back in 1997 because those markets did not exist. Under Steve's leadership, Apple went from passively working within the existing paradigms all the way to creating a brand-new market and growing it from nothing.
And Everything Else
I've really only touched upon a few things, the things that I can speak of most fluently. But after Steve came to Apple, the same sorts of things happened throughout the company. The shape and color of the Macintosh line, the ID and PD, even the packaging, were redesigned to fit Steve's vision -- radically. The hardware design on the motherboards changed to use more off-the-shelf components, streamlining the design process and making the computers cheaper. The LaserWriter line was discontinued. The amazing Apple Cinema Displays were introduced.
And you could see Steve's touch, his vision and focus, working in every change.
Bringing It Back to Politics
Nice article about computers. But what does this have to do with politics?
I see in the Democratic Party a lot of the things I saw in Apple at the start of 1997. An organization that's functioning and hobbling along, turning out products but not really doing anything great. Internal politics make it hard to get anything done, and sometimes the things that get done are counterproductive. There is a devotedly loyal, but shrinking, customer base. The vision seems to be gone, and there is too much middle management. At the end of 1996 I was just about to start an internship with Apple, but found myself questioning whether I really wanted to work for them in the long run; and I know there are some of you in the same place with the Democratic Party.
But I gave Apple a chance, and watched it turn around. The Democratic Party is not lost. Like Apple, it has attracted some great people even during its time of decline. The party just needs those two things: vision and focus.
Kos, I love what you've done, and dKos is very important... but blogs are not going to be responsible for either.
People post diaries saying "Help us create a vision for the Democratic Party!", but that's a very naïve view of it. That's not the way it works. Visions are not created in committee. Vision comes from the mind of exactly one person. Someone with the genius to come up with it, the words to express it, the skill to get it started, the humility to recognize mistakes and adapt it, and the strength to stand up and fight for it.
And like open source, the blogosphere is the very opposite of focus. Viewed as a whole, blogs include everything. It's always too much rather than just enough.
So where is that vision and focus going to come from? Well, when I read Dean's acceptance speech for the DNC chairmanship, and more recently the plan on Democrats.org, I saw both of those things.
The acceptance speech was described as "low-key", "modest", and even boring. But forget what the pundits say and pay attention to what he said:
- We have to win locally.
- We will run in every race.
- We are the party of balanced budgets.
- We are the party of security -- domestic security, international security, job security, health security, education security, voting security, and Social Security.
- We are not going to let anyone spread distortions about what our beliefs are.
- We're going to get out there and spread the message from person to person.
Honestly, call it boring all you like. He did a fantastic job focusing in on those issues -- our issues. And organizationally he is saying the same things he has been saying for a long time. If you look at what he's been doing with DFA, he certainly has been following through with that vision consistently.
What about the plan? Take a look at it:
- Show Up! Never concede a single state, county, district, or voter. Build a truly national party that wages a permanent campaign in all 50 states.
- Strengthen State Parties and the Grassroots. Better integrate state and national party operations and support Democrats organizing in local communities.
- Focus on Our Core Values. Articulate core Democratic values strongly and clearly, and show people how our agenda for reform reflects those values.
- Take Advantage of Cutting-Edge Technologies. Leverage the Internet and cutting-edge technologies to better organize, empower, and communicate with people.
- Train Tomorrow's Leaders. Strengthen our leadership institutes so we can recruit new talent, cultivate new leaders, and elect Democrats at every level of office.
To me, those bullet points read as vision, focus, focus, focus, and vision, in that order. They are the same points as above, and the same points he has been making for a long time now.
It would be music to my ears if Dean were to keep on giving almost the exact same speech about the party every year for the next ten years. Every year the same points, with updates on the progress.
That's exactly what Jobs did. He came in with his vision and it wasn't the way things had been done before. People thought he was crazy. (I sure thought so a couple times. I mean, what kind of a stupid name is "iPod"? Shows what I know.) But he kept at it. He stuck to his vision, explained it, fought for it, and focused the company as tightly as he could to fulfill it. The vision evolved as time went on, but the core of it was always the same.
These days, other computer companies are all looking to Apple for their leadership. The Mac experience is once again the gold standard that software companies aspire to. Heck, even HP and Dell are selling iPods now. Think about that for a second. The competition is literally out there promoting Apple's brand for them -- now that's influence.
By the way, I really am not an Apple super-fan or loyalist; I grew up with a PC and switched to a Mac in high school simply because it was more fun to write code on. I know a lot of this stuff about Steve sounds worshipful; it's not meant to be. These are the things he actually did after coming to Apple, which I know from firsthand experience and discussions with other engineers. Even I'm kind of impressed now that I list them all out. He did not do them alone; he surrounded himself with good people and he certainly capitalized on good luck, good connections, and the massive amount of talent, cash, and infrastructure at Apple Computer and NeXT. But I believe in credit where credit is due, and Steve deserves a lot.
My highest hope for Howard Dean as chair of the DNC is that he will have the vision and focus to do for the party what Steve Jobs did for Apple. I have looked closely at Dean and I think he could very well be the guy to do it. And to that end, he will have my whole-hearted support.
Will he have yours?