In a recent interview with Edge Magazine, Electronic Arts founder and current Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins gave his opinions on Apple’s App Store and the company’s post-Steve Jobs future. In the process, Hawkins managed to cram several tired Apple-related doom-and-gloom memes into only a few hundred words. Let’s do a checklist and see how many we can find.
Apple is “closed,” and closed is bad: Yep, right in Hawkins’s opening remarks.
“I think it would be an incredibly positive thing for the industry if Apple decided to support all of the web standards, because then Apple could be the best about everything. Right now they make a conscious choice. They want you to be in the App Store rather than the browser, so they cripple the browser.”
Odd, my iPad doesn’t feel particularly “crippled” when I use it to browse the web. Neither does my iPhone. Hmm, what could Hawkins possibly mean?
Apple is a big meany boo-boo head for not supporting Flash Player in iOS: Ah, there it is.
“Flash can actually make a really good game, and with HTML5 you can’t do that. But give HTML5 another few years to mature, and that could solve the problem. Or Apple could be more generous about deciding to support more de facto standards like Flash, or at least let it run its course.”
Look at the statistics for mobile video and try to convince me Flash hasn’t already run its course. As for games, I’ll take a native app that doesn’t slow my iPhone to a standstill and chew through 2/3 of my battery in an hour over a Flash-based in-browser game any day. The idea that Apple’s ditched Flash because it wants to control the iOS experience is correct, but not for the reasons Hawkins and others have provided. In an interview with Adobe’s CEO a couple months ago, Walt Mossberg pointed out that he hasn’t used one smartphone that provided him with a positive experience with Flash Player, and Mossberg has pretty much used them all. Apple’s “generosity” only goes so far, and anyone who expects the company to sacrifice positive user experience to placate third-party vendors is fooling themselves.
But that’s far too logical of an argument, and logic has no place here, because…
Steve Jobs is a tyrant, and Apple is a dictatorship: Variations on this constitute the bulk of the Edge interview’s excerpt. Hawkins is certainly in a position to know about Steve Jobs’s personality traits — he used to work directly with Jobs — but where this crosses into meme territory is Hawkins’s insistence that Apple as a company is directly tied to the whims of a tyrannical dictator. It’s the same story we’ve heard thousands of times before: Apple is the Chocolate Factory, Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka, and every other soul in Cupertino is a faceless Oompa Loompa without any input into the direction of either the company’s products or its overall future. Sure, that’s exactly how a business consisting of thousands of individuals becomes the most successful tech company in history. Right. Speaking of which…
Apple’s growth is unsustainable: This is the kind of thing that people used to thinking about Apple as a scrappy underdog like to repeat like a mantra. Hawkins isn’t any different.
“If you look at any institution in history — look at the Roman Empire — anything in history, and what it looks like when it’s peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it’s not peaking? The CEO is still alive, let’s start there. They invented this tablet thing that’s going to be really big. They’ve done really well by reinventing the phone. They breathed new life into the Mac. They’ve got this super-high marketing. All these things are about as good as they ever can be — how much better can it really get?”
I’m no history major, but even I know that the Roman Empire was already in a centuries-long decline before the Visigoths trashed the place. And if Apple is peaking as Hawkins says, I’d love to see which numbers actually support that theory. Virtually every quarterly financial statement from Apple over the past year has had the word “record” somewhere in the first paragraph. Apple takes in the majority of profits from the smartphone industry while having a relatively small slice of overall market share. It’s the same story with PCs; Apple dominates profits in the $1000 and up category. The iPad dominates the tablet market to an even greater extent than the iPod ruled the mp3 player market.
Apple’s overall worth as a US-based company is second only to Exxon, and Apple’s even closing in on them. Exxon, the company responsible for pumping liquid gold out of the ground and transmuting into the life’s blood of modern society. And as a widespread meme from last week points out, Apple’s cash reserves recently bypassed those of the US Treasury.
You might look at all this success and conclude that Apple has nowhere to go from here but down. But the only way to do that is to completely ignore the past four years of financial data. If Apple was truly peaking, the influx of dollars would be slowing down, and its profit graph would be either plateauing or declining. The thing is, that’s not happening at all. Not even close. But what about the future? Get ready for another meme.
Without Steve Jobs, Apple is doomed: How many times have we heard this one? I’ve lost count. But here we go again:
“The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to — everything does. Everything revolves so much around Steve, and no matter how good his lieutenants are, they’re not Steve. None of us is going to live forever, though I hope he lives for a really long time.”
Steve Jobs got the ball rolling on this, yes. But even while he’s been on extended medical leave, Apple’s momentum hasn’t slowed. Like Hawkins, I hope Steve Jobs will be around for a long time, but Apple will not wither on the tree without him. Apple as a company is nothing like Microsoft, where all the forward-looking vision and drive to succeed went out the door with Bill Gates. Steve Jobs has surrounded himself with fellow visionaries, and that’s the real key to Apple’s business success. The idea that one man and only his ideas has made Apple what it is today might make for a compelling David Fincher film someday, but it doesn’t jibe with reality.
The only way I see Apple facing the kind of decline Hawkins talks about, even without Steve Jobs at the helm, is for someone to start deliberately mis-managing Apple and its assets. How else is a company sitting on a $76 billion pile of cash supposed to decline? Don’t answer that.
EA founder rehashes ‘Apple will falter without Steve Jobs’ and other memes originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.