Can Apple turn the corner (again)?

Apple’s share price did well in the twelve months following the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011.

But since then it has been on the slide pretty continuously, some 28% down on the October 2012 peak. Analysts are still not recommending “buy”.

Of course, the innovation kings have been overtaken in the mobile phone market by fast-follower and improver, Samsung. Now they have added competition from the Chinese giant, Huawei. Orders for iPhone 5 parts have been cut on weak demand. Competitors are circling Apple’s leadership in the tablet market, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

The consequence is that Apple has missed Wall Street estimates in the last two quarters and its new product offerings seem less radical and are generating less enthusiastic response.

What’s to be done?

Belated happy birthday, Mr Cooper

My intention had been to post this three days ago, but I’ve been away from wireless electronic media.

26 December 2011 was the eighty-third birthday of Martin Cooper.

Hurrah! Martin who?

Well, he led the R&D team at Motorola in the late 1960s and early 1970s that developed the mobile phone. The inspiration for the idea, Cooper has said, came from watching Captain Kirk communicate on Star Trek. “Beam me up, Scotty.”

Not so well-known, nor so well-off, I guess, as Steve Jobs.

But what a world-changing achievement!

Steve Jobs. Saint?

Working this week in Manila with a wonderful group of young Filipino leader/managers, I’ve been asked several times why I have not written about Steve Jobs since his death one month ago.

I think the truth is that I have been wrestling internally with a couple of issues.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that, particularly since his return second time around to the company he founded, Apple’s story has been one of continuous and spectacular success. And he has written and spoken inspiringly.

So what’s the problem?

Well, for one thing it’s clear that the great successes of the company were all built on the innovations of others – from the laptop to the iPad. And all the other blockbusters in between. Picking up other people’s inventions and improving them for the customer is good, but really doesn’t make Jobs comparable with, say, Thomas Edison, who was the founding father of so many of the world-changing innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And then there’s the man who has been described as “Jobs the Tyrant”. Years ago I was told that it was not a good idea for an Apple staffer to get into an elevator with Steve. Apparently there was a good chance that you might emerge unemployed. I guess that story is more emblematic than literally true.

And yet, since then I have continuously heard and read about the tantrums and tirades, the disrespectful ways that colleagues could be treated.

No doubt the upside to all this was a sense within the organisation of what people call “creative tension” - tension which can drive performance. At least in the short run.

Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, said recently: “In the end, you have to judge him on the outcome.” Right now, the Apple juggernaut rolls on, apparently unstoppable.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be now that he is gone. Will enhancing the innovations of others be sufficient? And how will the climate change in Apple now that he no longer visits the building?

Maybe in future I should include Apple in Brand Renovation masterclasses that I give. For, in my mind, the company is a superb “renovator”, rather than being a real innovator.

By the way, are you coming along on Tuesday in Manila?

Manila Masterclass with Roger Neill, 8 November 2011

From living room to den to phone to…

In an interview in Rolling Stone in 1994, Steve Jobs spoke joyfully and perceptively about the shift of focus from the living room, the “set-top box”, where convergence had been headed up to that point, to the “den”.

“I love it,” he said. “I think the den is far more interesting than the living room… I’m very excited about having the internet in my den.”

And so it came about.

But now, as my friend, Jackie Bradley, points out, it’s no longer the den – it’s the phone through which it all converges. And my business partner, Alison Duffy, is a total convert. Jobs got that one right too.

Not for me. I like it in the den. And I can’t bear the idea that I’m connected to everything, everywhere I go, every minute of the day, no matter what I’m doing. I still want a life of my own, with broad expanses of thinking and being time.

Or is that just not going to be possible?

And where to next? Better ask Steve.