Steve Jobs - Is his real product excellence?

There is quite a bit of coverage of Steve Jobs in the papers this morning.  His resignation from Apple due to ill health is big news for lots of reasons and I certainly wish him well.  It probably doesn't say much for my humanity that I found myself reading what should have been a human interest story looking for clues to what it is about him that makes him so successful.  In my defence, I am not the only person who finds this interesting and a lot of the coverage has been along the same lines.

I am typing this on one example of his Steve Job's products and nobody in the world can be unaware of Apple's products.  There are three types of people on the planet.  Those who have Apple products, those who want to have Apple products and those who don't want to have Apple products.  You may not have met many of the last category.

For a long time I have thought that the key was simply the quality of the products.  Sweat enough on getting that right and everything else falls into place.  This fits in well enough with my experience working in product development.  I have been well aware over the years that when you present the world with an indifferent product the reaction is generally indifference.  It doesn't matter much if it meets the brief you are given, is on time, on budget and the guys in marketing have a great 'story'.

So when I started my own company - which my wife works on full time and which I plan to give up my full time job to work on as soon as I can - I naturally gave the emphasis to making the products great.

I don't want to undermine myself with negativity, but realistically it isn't doing as well as Apple yet.

But one article mentioned something about Apple that is rarely talked about.  It doesn't just produce good products.  It is also a spectacularly well run company.  It has grown without acquiring debt for example.  In fact it has done the opposite, it has built up piles of cash.  I have never studied business, but I don't think this is the way you are supposed to do it according to the text books.  Its R&D activities deliver on time.  Not many companies succeed in that.  And it runs a profitable retail operation almost as a sideline.

I really don't think any of this is down to luck.  And it flies in the face of a lot of what is both conventional wisdom and apparently common sense.   After all if Apple really has got a unique talent base in say product design, shouldn't they be concentrating on that key skill?  By contracting out all the other less valuable activities wouldn't they be more profitable?  It certainly makes logical sense.  And yet somehow Apple are the ones with all the money in the bank.

Maybe the answer is that it makes more sense to simply be excellent at whatever it is you happen to be doing, whether it is the glamorous end of things like presenting to trade shows or mundane activities like stock control and sourcing raw materials.