Jean-Louis Gassée on 'Apple is doomed'

Well. It looks like Jean-Louis Gassée has an opinion, and I think I like it very much.
 
This is reproduced from Jean-Louis' Monday Note Newsletter.
Apple Is Doomed: The Phony Sony Parallel
by Jean-Louis Gassée
[email protected]

In the weeks preceding the April 24th release of Apple’s quarterly earnings, a number of old canards sent the stock down by about 12%: Carriers are going to kill the iPhone Golden Goose by cutting back “exorbitant” subsidies; iPhone sales are down from the previous quarter in the US; inexorable commoditization will soon bring down Apple’s unsustainably high Gross Margin.

The earnings were announced, another strong quarter recorded, and the stock rebounded 9% in one trading session:

At least one doubter is finally convinced: Henry “The iPhone Is Dead In the Water” Blodget has become an Apple cheerleader, penning a post titled Yes, You Should Be Astonished By Apple. (Based on Henry’s record, should we now worry about the new object of his veneration?)

There has never been a dearth of Apple doomsayers. The game has been going on for more than 30 years, and now we have a new contestant: George Colony, an eminent industry figure, the Founder and CEO of Forrester Research, a global conglomerate of technology and market research companies.

Mr. Colony, an influential iPad fan, maintains a well-written blog titled The Counterintuitive CEO in which he shares his thoughts on events such as the Davos Forum, trends in Web technology and usage, and, in a brief homage, his hope that “Steve’s lessons will bring about a better world”.

We now turn to his April 25th post, Apple = Sony.

There are two problems with the piece: The application of a turgid, 100-year old “typology of organizations” that’s hardly relevant to today’s business scene, and an amazingly wrong-headed view of Sony and its founder, Akio Morita.

Colony offers the banal prediction that others have been making for a very long time, well before Dear Leader’s demise: With Steve Jobs gone, Apple won’t be the same and, sooner or later, it will slide into mediocrity. It happened to Sony after Morita, it’ll happen to Apple.

In an act of Obfuscation Under The Color Of Authority, Colony digs up (nearly literally) sociologist Max Weber to bolster his contention. Weber died in 1920; the 1947 work that Colony refers to, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, is a translation-cum-scholarly commentary and adaptation of work that was published posthumously by Weber’s widow Marianne in 1921 and 1922.

From Weber’s work, Colony extracts the following typology of organizations:

1. Legal/bureaucratic (think IBM or the U.S. government),
2. Traditional (e.g., the Catholic Church)
3. Charismatic (run by special, magical individuals).

This is far too vague; these types are (lazily) descriptive, but they’re fraught with problematic examples, particularly in the third category: Murderous dictatorships and exploitative sects come to mind. What distinguishes these from Apple under Jobs? Moreover, how do these categories help us understand today’s global, time-zone spanning rhizome (lattice) organizations where power and information flow in ways that Weber couldn’t possibly have imagined a hundred years ago?

Having downloaded the book, I understand the respect it engenders: It’s a monumental, very German opus, a mother lode of gems such as the one Colony quotes:

Charisma can only be ‘awakened’ and ‘tested’; it cannot be ‘learned’ or ‘taught.’

True. The same can be said of golf. But it does little to explain the actual power structure of organizations such as Facebook and Google.

Instead of shoehorning today’s high-tech organizations into respectable but outdated idea systems, it would behoove a thought leader of Mr. Colony’s stature to provide genuine 21st century scholarship that sheds light on – and draws actionable conclusions from -- the kind of organization Apple exemplifies. What’s the real structure and culture, what can we learn and apply elsewhere? How did a disheveled, barefoot company become a retail empire run with better-than-military precision, the nonpareil of supply chain management, the most cost effective R&D organization of its kind and size? And, just as important, are some of these marvels coupled too tightly to the Steve Jobs Singularity? That would be interesting -- and would certainly rise above the usual “Charismatic Leader Is Gone” bromides.

Now let’s take a look at the other half of the title’s equivalence: Sony.This is Muzak thinking. It confuses the old and largely disproven brand image with what Sony actually was inside -- even under Morita’s “charismatic” leadership.

I used to be an adoring Sony customer, bowing to Trinitron TVs and Walkman cassette players. But after I got to see inside the kitchen (or kitchens) in 1986, I was perplexed and, over time, horrified.

Contrary to what Colony writes, there was no “post-Morita” decadence at Sony. The company had long been spiritually dead by the time of the founder’s brain hemorrhage. The (too many) limbs kept moving but there had been no central power, no cohesive strategy, no standards, no unifying culture for a very long time.

Sony survived as a set of fiefdoms. Great engineers in many places. (And, to my astonishment, primitive TV manufacturing plants.) During Morita’s long reign, Sony went into all sorts of directions: music, movie-making, games, personal computers, phones, cameras, robots… For reasons of cultural (one assumes), Sony consistently showed an abysmal lack of appreciation for software, leaving the field to Microsoft, Nokia for a while, and then Google and Apple.

Under Akio Morita’s leadership, Sony took advantage of Japan’s lead in high-quality device manufacturing and became the masters of what we used to call the Japanese Food Fight: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. When the world moved to platforms and then to ecosystems, Sony’s device-oriented culture -- and the fiefdoms it fostered -- brought it to its current sorry state.

Today, would you care to guess what Sony’s most profitable business is? Financial Services:

How this leads to an = sign between Apple and Sony evades me.

This isn’t to say that Apple can’t be contaminated by the toxicity of success, or that the spots of mediocrity we can discern here and there (and that were present when Steve was around) won’t metastasize into full blown “bozo cancer”. But for those interested in company cultures, the more interesting set of questions starts with how Apple will “Think Different” from now on. Jobs was adamant: His successors had to think for themselves, they were told to find their own true paths as opposed to aping his.

From a distance, it appears that Tim Cook isn’t at all trying to be Jobs 2.0. But to call his approach “legal/bureaucratic” (in the Weber sense), as Colony does, is facile and misplaced.

If we insist on charisma as a must for leading Apple, one ought to remember that there’s more than one type of charisma. There’s the magnetic leader whose personality exudes an energy that flows through the organization. And then there’s the “channeling” leader, the person who facilitates and directs the organization’s energy.

Is the magnetic personality the only valid leader for Apple?

--[email protected]