Photo by Kashmir Global
To hear the former Apple fanboyz tell it on scores of geek forums these days and in the tech press and Silicon Valley-influenced media, Apple is dying. It is more doomed than you think; it isn't dying it's dead; it is dead or dying; it is crashing.
And that's not surprising, given that the company was run by an obsessive meglomaniac of the typical hacker type with the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" title, infamous from open source software projects. Now he's dead, so it's hard for the institution not to die because he never delegated or promoted seconds or created due process. Geeks are not good at making institutions -- and constantly undermine them even when they work for them by sullen negligence, nihilism and outright hacking.
Oh, except when they do make institutions like Microsoft which continue to thrive despite the Apple fanboyz hate, and whose founder Bill Gate even contributes to charity. He's no less of a tyrant and meglomaniac than Steve Jobs, but like the similarly cranky and anti-social Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, he has learned something else: how to make due process. How to make products with procedures that ordinary people can grasp and follow and learn to trust.
So what can Apple do to pull out of this death spiral? It could desperately try to invent new versions of its popular i-phone or invent some other kind of i-something that becomes ubiquitous like i-pods and i-pads. How about an i-table or i-wall or i-glasses in competition with Google that will cost less and be less clunky. So that all may be coming.
But here's what Apple really needs to do both to institutionalize and end the culture of quixotic and tyrannical hacker, and become like a real business of the sort the forms the pillars of this country like Ford or Westinghouse or General Electric or IBM or Wendy's.
They need to spend down the Hoard. Steve Jobs squirreled away $137 billion, instead of doing things like paying more dividends to investors or having better customer service with more employees.
So that hoarding needs to end to be able to transform the company in the public's eyes, spur sales, spur growth, and spur opportunities to pull out of the recession. This is more important than inventing new stuff. The source of innovation is no longer yet another sullen, quixotic tyrannical geek and the few hundred thousand fanboyz he stimulates to be the first to buy expensive gadgets reiterated every few months, but the general public of consumers whose normal non-geeky consumer demand in a liberal capitalist society with a free market will drive the creation of products people really need. I mean, make a Google Drive that can have PDF documents that actually rotate, for God's sake, and win the love and admiration of millions.And that i-glasses idea -- seriously. Make it less creepy and clunky, less expensive and douchey, and it could work.
This means re-defining the customer away from this sullen and quixotic and tyrannical geek and hacker base who were all the early adapters of its past products, and turning to real people like me who have boycotted Apple products for over 20 years because of their anti-norm policies and their geeky designs, not to mention general assholery on the Internet.
The first time I sat down at an Apple computer in 1995 and saw that in order to remove my floppy disk from their device's drive, I had to drag the icon of the disk into the icon of the trash can, I realized I was dealing with people who had absolutely no respect -- and even had contempt -- for the ordinary user.
They saw the act of me taking my disk out of the drive to take it somewhere else (as in the old days) as "trash". They saw my content as "trash". They saw the act of retaining my item as "trash". So I treated them as trash for the rest of my life because that's what they deserve. I will never forget my shock and amazement, when a boss taught me how to remove the disc by dragging it into "trash". Anyone who treated the customer and his item as "trash" would not get my business.
Geeks don't get this because putting something in "trash" isn't a dis to them. They will even start arguing that there never was such as function although I distinctly remembered it and documented it. They don't care, and they would only sneer at people who were still fooling with disks. They don't get it.
Mort Zuckerman has tucked an upbeat proposal into a very pessimistic assessment of the weak recovery from the recession that explains what I've also been saying about Apple (great minds think alike): they need to bring their manufacturing jobs home:
What the country clearly needs are policies that will encourage the modernization of America's capital stock, where investment in modern production has plunged to the lowest levels in decades. Policies should also be targeted to nourish high-tech industries, which will in turn inspire the design and manufacture of products in the U.S. where they would be closer to the American market, spurring more hiring. This means preparing a skilled workforce, especially engineers suitable to work in manufacturing, and increasing the number of visas available to foreign graduate students in the hard sciences—who are now forced to leave America and who then work for foreign competitors.
Note that he combines the idea of bringing back the design and manufacture to the US to be closer to the market with the idea that a skilled workface has to be prepared.
People often think that Big IT ships all their gadget-making jobs overseas mainly to China because the labour is cheaper and more docile. But there's another reason: the Asian work ethic, and the Asian family's dedication to education. And Zuckerman is absolutely right to combine the idea of bringing the manufacturing home with the idea of maintaining open doors to skilled immigrant labour, even as education is improved at home for existing citizens. This could work.
We have hard-working Asian immigrants with tiger moms insisting they get good grades in America, and the same kind of people of all racial groups in America, willing to seize opportunities when they are presented by people willing to crack open a $137 billion hoard. It's a question of hiring them and training them on the job.
The people who fall out of the work-force as unemployables and unskilled may not benefit from this policy, but others half in and out, or very young and still amenable to education would likely benefit -- and you don't know until you try. Out-of-work bakers of Twinkies or coal-miners might convert to chip makers if you set it up right.
This is what has to be done, and Apple has to step up to the plate on this historical challenge.
What will happen to those Chinese workers that we leave behind as we bring it all back home -- those Chinese workers that all the liberals were worried about had poor working conditions (including me)?
Well, we'll bring some of them with us -- it would only be fair. But we also need to begin to decouple from China, Inc. which is spying on and hacking us and undermining us at every turn. It's time to get the debt to China reduced, and the dependency on its cheap labour to create cheap products at home that has spawned this debt. Looked at from the larger perspective, all that cheap labour that was supposed to enable growth and innovation for Big IT has turned out to be a terrible bargain for the country at large as we have grown both dependent on the vagaries of overseas production and plunged into debt to China in the end. A good way to stop rewarding the Chinese government for its really bad -- and hostile -- behaviour is to pull our manufacturing out of their country and stop creating jobs and opportunities for them instead of us.
This has to be worked at; $137 billion is a good stash to start working on the problem.
Corporations always have smarmy ads about how they invest in people and invest in the future and they have the consumer's best interests in mind. But if consumers can't buy gadgets because they're out of work, everybody loses. Apple really needs to invest in people and invest in the future. It's own life depends on it, as does our whole country's life.
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