“APPLE is firing on all cylinders,” beamed Steve Jobs, its boss, the other day, as he announced another stunning quarter: revenues up by 70% on the same period a year ago; profits up by 530%. As for coolness, Apple remains off the charts. The iPod, its portable music-player, seems unstoppable. Such is its “halo effect” that Apple's computers and laptops are winning market share (admittedly, from a small base of 2.4%). And, two decades after launching the personal-computer revolution, it is Mr Jobs who continues to push it furthest. On April 29th, Apple released Tiger, its latest operating system. The cognoscenti queued for several blocks around Apple's flagship store in San Francisco to get it.
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All of this draws attention, yet again, to the greatest mystery about Mr Jobs: why, amid all this success, is he so prickly? As members of the “cult of Mac” lined up outside Apple's 105 stores, inside his staff removed all books from John Wiley & Sons from the shelves because the publisher is daring to release a biography of Mr Jobs. Never mind that the book—“iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”, by Jeffrey Young and William Simon—is, by all accounts, hugely positive about Apple's boss, and hardly pathbreaking. To Mr Jobs, all that seems to matter is that it is unauthorised.
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This is a pattern. Apple is suing several of its most ardent devotees for running what are, in effect, fan websites specialising in Apple gossip. A Harvard freshman who runs the website Think Secret stands accused of seducing Apple employees into breaking their confidentiality agreements and divulging interesting titbits. People behind several other Apple sites are charged with peddling “trade secrets”. There are also many accounts of Mr Jobs shouting at employees, journalists and occasional civilians caught in the crossfire.
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All of which seems decidedly odd. Bill Gates, the boss of Microsoft and Mr Jobs's nemesis by any ordinary measure of business success—he is the one with the operating-system monopoly, after all—would kill to get Apple's enthusiastic product reviews. Microsoft has been pouring sums that Apple can only dream of into developing the latest version, called Longhorn, of its own operating system, Windows. The keystone of this was supposed to be a new approach to storing and finding data, to replace today's metaphors of “files” and “folders” (which were introduced by Apple, not Microsoft, in the 1980s). The effort failed, and Longhorn will not only be late—it is not expected for another 18 months or so—but will fall far short of its original ambition. Instead, it is once again Apple that seems to have cracked the problem, with Spotlight, a new feature in Tiger that allows users to locate anything on their computers, and “smart folders” that appear to build themselves.
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Mr Gates takes time to talk to journalists and puts up with their abuse; the press usually agrees that he is geeky and bullying. Mr Jobs is as media-friendly as an apparatchik in Communist China; the press considers him cool. But, goes one theory, this may be deliberate: Mr Jobs, a marketing genius, intuitively understands how to build suspense out of dark paradox. Well, who could accuse Mr Gates of that?
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SOURCE: EIU/ INFO-e