Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
October 9, 2011
Many folks asked this past week how I’ve felt about Steve Jobs’s death, and wondered why I haven’t written about it.
When I first heard the news, I thought of a graph Jonathan Franzen drew in “How to Be Alone,” about how Franzen’s ailing father made no concessions to Parkinson’s and then, when that effort finally became unbearable, declined very rapidly, almost willfully:
The public never saw Steve Jobs suffer, but I wonder if he made the same journey, holding on to everything he loved until his resignation, and then, in the space of only a few weeks, letting go. Unlike the serial entrepreneurs now in vogue, he was someone who for his entire life made sense in only one place, at Apple.
Many, many folks have already talked about what he left behind. Over the past few days I’ve noticed that all of us, from sandwich-makers to software developers, seem to be trying a little harder to make it beautiful. On Friday night, when it was just about to get dark, the folks at Redfin opened some beers and found ourselves talking about whether we were living up to our craft. Nobody mentioned Steve.
But something about the beatification of Steve Jobs in the media and blogs has, for me, been almost unbearable. He is already in danger of becoming a Twitter hashtag, a dorm-wall poster, an online fashion accessory. I hesitated to write a post about his death because I couldn’t imagine you wanted to read another one.
Many eulogies celebrate Steve in terms of his “products” — those mass-produced little gadgets that we love for letting us check email in front of our friends – and lose sight of his grass-strained spirit. What always moved me about Steve was the calligraphy and the LSD, the passage to India and his firing from Apple, his struggles at NeXT and his return from the wilderness.
The insistence on Steve’s perfection, on the vast difference between him as a producer and us as consumers, seems inhuman and even lonely to me. I wish we could take a moment in eulogizing Steve to grieve for him as one frail human to another, and feel in his passing the miracle of every human life; so many other people, geniuses on a smaller scale, are struggling his struggle. It hurts me that we have so much love to give to Steve and not to them.
I also wish we could find in him a more useful story to tell ourselves than one of utter perfection; yes, it is striking that every CEO has an unspoken relationship with Steve Jobs as the ideal leader, but for every CEO I know, that relationship is a fraught one: none of us is comfortable proceeding from the assumption that we’re perfect.
This is why my heroes have always been people who overcame their flaws: blacks and whites lined up on either side of the tracks for Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral procession only a few years after he ordered government snoops to follow Martin Luther King into public restrooms; Robert Kennedy changed. Ezra Pound composed the rag-and-bone poetry of the Pisan Cantos from an open-air cage while awaiting trial for treason.
And this is why Steve Jobs is one of my heroes. He was never perfect, especially when he left Apple the first time, but what I like about him is that he never, until the very end, stopped trying to be.
August 24, 2011
I have sometimes been a critic of Steve Jobs: for outsourcing manufacturing, overlooking charities, diverting idealists, sidestepping the web or simply demanding the best.
But long before that, Steve Jobs was a critic of me. I hear him whenever I do something mediocre or make a business decision that has no soul. I hear him whenever I wonder if my life’s work has really been worthwhile.
He made all of us believe we could be artists. He convinced us that ideas and craftsmanship are important. He said building a company is better than selling one. We wanted to be a part of something, and he wanted it to stand apart. He insisted that labor must be love, and that love comes before money.
I still remember exactly where I was, standing in a Dolores Street apartment with a cereal bowl in my hand, when he came on TV to say a competitor had no poetry. It made me think poetry had a place in business and that in turn made me think I had a place in business, too.
But beyond sharing his ideals, I have had to come to the disconcerting, depressing realization that I have very little in common with Steve Jobs. No one can hope to have his design instinct, vision and charisma. I long ago had to give up on growing up to be like him.
And now I even have to stop wondering what Steve Jobs will come up with next, as he has left his public life as CEO of Apple.
But his voice hasn’t left me. It says yes when the world says no. It says to make things as I want them to be. It says keep trying. And that is what, at last, I have to say to him: keep trying, Steve, keep trying.
February 1, 2011
Have you seen the articles on TechCrunch about the workers in the Chinese iPhone plant maimed in the line of duty without receiving medical care? The overwhelming response in the comments has been a kind of fatalism you rarely see in Silicon Valley: observers all agree that we as consumers are powerless, that Apple itself is powerless, with no choice in how its phones are manufactured.
Why not just say “Stop buying all electronics and go back to the stone age!” asks Nitin Alabur, in the most popular comment on one post. It’s such a farce to blame just Apple for all this!
The idea that Apple won’t listen or can’t change is the real farce. In this age in which every corporation carefully monitors the faintest tweets about its brand, companies worry obsessively about how buying their products makes consumers feel.
As the CEO of Redfin, I have sat in meetings with the entire executive team worrying about whether policy decisions — the decision to skirt a low-priced area for example — would tarnish our reputation for social responsibility among a handful of consumers.
And Apple worries more than most. You pay more for an Apple product because of how it makes you feel when you buy it: as if you’re striking a blow for creativity over corporatism, even fascism. That feeling is Steve Jobs’s greatest achievement. It probably accounts for a third of Apple’s market value.
So when we try to convince ourselves that Apple doesn’t care what we think of Foxconn, we’re hoping to be more powerless than we are. At no point in history have consumers been so carefully analyzed, courted and catered to, yet we act like no one would ever listen to us. If Egyptians were this way, Hosni Mubarak would be looking forward to another thirty years in power.
Retailers are far more sensitive to criticism than Mubarak. Consumer concerns over Wal-Mart’s labor and purchasing practices have, for example, had a greater impact on our immediate world than any election: Wal-Mart is now the world’s largest seller of organic foods, and it just began pressuring its suppliers to offer low-fat, low-salt alternatives to unhealthy snacks.
Why would Wal-Mart do this if all consumers cared about was low prices? The company certainly didn’t start that way. It changed because it realized how miserable shopping at Wal-Mart makes people feel, regardless of the money they are saving. Imagine if you felt that way when you fiddled with your phone.
The first reaction would come from Steve Jobs, who would ask Foxconn to open a clinic for its 450,000 workers to get on-site care. With billions of dollars on the line, Foxconn would listen to Jobs more carefully than to Obama or any other American.
We know Foxconn would listen because Apple’s power over its suppliers is legendary. No other firm can refuse to pay suppliers for prototypes, but Apple does: the iPhone business, Apple argues, is so lucrative that suppliers shouldn’t worry about prototype costs when competing to be an Apple manufacturer.
And Apple has iPhone manufacturers other than Foxconn, insisting as a matter of policy on multiple suppliers for all of its products. In the past, the company hasn’t been timid about using its choices to create more leverage. Just ask its acting CEO, Tim Cook:
Cook’s relation with the supply chain is best described by an anecdote reported by CNN, related to the period when Cook joined Apple in 1998 to straighten the operational morass that Apple was in. In a meeting convened to tackle a problem in China, he had said: “This is really bad, someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes in the meeting he chided Sabih Khan, the then operations executive, saying “Why are you still here?” Khan responded by immediately booking a ticket to China, sans a change of clothes.
There is a group of Apple folks in Cupertino right now, meeting to discuss whether the Foxconn publicity will blow over or blow up: into a Facebook cause, a Twitter trend, a consumer revolt. If it does, Mr. Khan will soon find himself walking off a flight to China, in yesterday’s clothes. If it doesn’t, we only have ourselves to blame.
July 19, 2010
Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin needs to make every day: between going for something innovative or making incremental improvements to satisfy customer requests.
Steve Jobs is at such a far end of that spectrum that he can hardly bear to hear customer complaints for even a minute. Redfin’s engineers get caught somewhere in the middle: we try to make beautiful software, but we also spend a lot of time manually adjusting the location of listings based on users’ requests.
Business schools talk about innovation and customer focus as if the two were one and the same virtue. But mostly they’re opposites. Customer focus is a painstaking process of listening to customers and solving their problems one by one. Innovation is mostly the art of not-listening, so you can hear the creative voice inside yourself.
I’ve never met an innovative person whom I could really describe as customer-driven. The most innovative maniac I’ve ever worked with was happiest when he jabbed the air with a finger and said “F*** the customer!” — which he did all the time. He solved problems primarily for himself, and his products decisions were mostly made in terms of what was cool, not useful.
The fact that many people are now arguing that an iPhone doesn’t really have to function as a phone is the ultimate triumph of coolness over utility. But examples are everywhere: do any Redfin old-timers remember how the map used to swoop around before landing on a location? Or have you ever noticed that dandelions pop up in the background as you complete each field of Picnik’s registration form?
Both the swoop and the dandelions take time to code, and often slow the user experience. Both come from folks who believed in their products as works of art, an end, rather than as just a means to an end. It’s obvious in watching Steve Jobs talk about the iPhone that he believes it belongs in a museum as much as your left hand.
If Steve Jobs worked at Nordstrom or Zappos he couldn’t take that position. Just imagine Jobs being confronted with the canonical examples of customer service: someone ordering a pizza from Zappos’s call center or returning snow tires to Nordstrom’s clothing stores. It wouldn’t be pretty. If you turn that around, and try to think of a company driven by customer-service that is also innovative, you can’t.
Except for Amazon. How does the company that came up with the S3 or the Kindle also deliver groceries on time? I don’t know. But now that I’ve worked at Redfin for a few years, I feel sure that Amazon will be a great brand 50 years from now precisely because it has somehow struck a balance between the chutzpah of innovation and the humility of customer service. It works a lot better than being humble all the time or just being cocky.
June 24, 2010
More than a few of you have written us to complain that the Redfin app for iPhone and iPod crashes on new versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 4. The new operating system comes standard with the new iPhone 4, but you can also download it through iTunes to an iPhone 3 or iPhone 3GS; the main features are multi-tasking, a unified inbox, and folders for organizing apps.
The problem with Redfin arises when you search for an area like Capitol Hill, then try to zoom in or pan the map. At that point, the Redfin app crashes. Before iOS 4 came out, we tested the Redfin app against a simulator without finding this problem. Once iOS 4 was available to download to an iPhone, we found the bug straight away. Last night we sent off a new version of the Redfin app to Apple for approval.
The updated Redfin app isn’t available via iTunes yet, but it shouldn’t be too long now; most updates sail right through. We’ll let you know when we hear from Apple. For now, thanks to everyone who has emailed us, and keep your fingers crossed that the fix is in!
November 17, 2009
The Ravens just beat the Browns 16 – 0, but those of you without a Tivo may have noticed something else about the Monday Night Football telecast: a new Apple iPhone ad featuring Redfin’s very own iPhone app. On seeing it, Redfin’s Scott Nagel, hardly one given to over-the-top displays of emotion, got high fives all around from his football-crazed children.
We knew the ad was coming, but Sasha put the fear of Apple in us and for once we kept a secret. To Conan Reidy and all the other people who say I can’t keep clam because of a few minor middle-school indiscretions, this is but one of many examples of really, really juicy stuff I’ve kept to myself…
Many thanks to the folks at Apple for hooking us up, and to Redfin’s iPhone team for building such a sweet app.
August 31, 2009
At long last, Redfin has an iPhone application. And it is gorgeous and fast and free and freakishly powerful. Apple took ten days to approve it for the app store:
Download it now for free!
Why is a Redfin app such a big deal when there are already three or four real estate apps for iPhone on the market? Well, because this one has all the data from the MLS, as well as for-sale-by-owner and bank-owned homes not yet listed in the MLS. It shows all the photos, and all the amenities too, as well as how long the property has been on market and what it last sold for. And the whole search experience is driven by Google Maps.
But that isn’t the really sweet part. The sweet part is the photo upload, which allows customers on tour to take pictures and notes that automatically upload to their account on Redfin.com, so all that stuff is waiting on their computer when they get back to their desk. We automatically associate each note or pic with the right house on the site.
And data goes both ways, with the website sending to the iPhone app a list of homes you’ve bookmarked as favorites, and which ones you want to tour via Redfin too — so you can easily get directions from place to place.
Here’s a quick tour of some of the main features…
Quickly zoom high above the city then drill down into a cluster of listings:
Click the List button to flash to the listing photos:
When you’re touring a house you like, take your own photos:
Take the photo and add a nice little caption:
The iPhone app lets you see all the homes you’ve annotated or photographed:
When you get done with your tour and return to the website, Redfin alerts you that your photos and notes are online:
On the website, you can click on My Redfin to see all your photos and notes:
The photos and notes also show up alongside the listing on our website.
We focused on tours for a reason. Redfin’s iPhone app isn’t just a search application, it’s one component of a larger home-buying service, where the other components are the website and — most important by far– the team of agents serving clients. And they all have to work together. If you’re touring with Redfin and don’t have your own iPhone, your Redfin agent will often be able to take pictures for you using her own iPhone.
We want to take the same coordinated approach to improve the process of pricing an offer, finding a lender and getting through escrow. We call this strategy Freakish Depth, because our goal is to take users beyond the initial home search to fundamentally improve every step of the home-buying process.
You may well ask what took you so long? Well, we re-built almost the whole search experience to work on the iPhone, so it would run fast and look good on that little thing. We clustered search results, to make it easier to move around the map and zoom in for more detail. We let you run sophisticated searches. The standard for any Redfin experience is that it can’t just be a nice little distraction, it has to be a full-blown addiction, one you can count on and come back to again and again. We hope we cleared that bar.
All told, three person years of R&D went into the app, so hats off to Sasha, Navtej, Jim (who just got married Saturday!), Jen, Jane, Brent, Llewellyn, Thomas, Jamie, Jason, Dan, Chris and the many others who built Redfin for iPhone. And a big thanks to the Urbanspoon guys and Tyler Stone at Apple for giving us encouragement and advice along the way.
We hope you check it out, that you leave a comment or review letting the world know what you think. Any feature suggestions — or thoughts on whether the uploaded photos should remain private, even after the sale — just leave a comment below.
July 26, 2009
For years, it has been fashionable for business-people to approach any problem — choking baby, lonely Friday, cold soup, global warming — by asking Jeff Jarvis’s question: “What would Google do?” But the most admired technology company in the world isn’t Google. It’s Apple. And when it comes to the most admired technology executive, Steve Jobs is firmly enshrined as the Valley’s Jesus with Eric Schmidt as a capable but boring prophet. When a major American industry collapses, no one imagines Eric Schmidt as the savior; all eyes turn to Steve Jobs.
So why isn’t Steve Jobs our savior? Why isn’t anyone asking “What would Apple do?” Perhaps it’s because the answer to that question flies in the face of everything we’ve learned to hold sacred over the last five years. Compare for a moment the basic tenets of Apple’s success with the way most people think about building a startup today…
Make Hardware and Software
Apple’s insistence on controlling both the hardware and the operating system was once seen as a liability in its battle against the PC: Apple was proprietary and precious and Windows was open and huge. But even though Apple’s products are now seen as more elegant and reliable because all the components work together, few have followed suit.
In fact, you can count such products on one hand: Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Wii, Flip Mino, arguably the Tivo, now perhaps the CrunchPad. All commercial successes. Why aren’t there more? Mostly because it never occurs to folks to build hardware and software. Entrepreneurs today are largely building media sites, not fundamentally new technologies, using low-cost platforms built years ago by other people. This is a lot cheaper, and so money is easier to get for these ideas: there’s more venture capital than ever before, but most VCs would rather invest $1M in 20 startups rather than the $20M one startup would need to build and market a consumer device.
But the problem is deeper than that. Even my generation’s Steve Jobs, Marc Andreessen, who has the stature and the capital to invent an entirely new device, never seems to have given it a thought. This is probably because most computer science programs never bother to teach computer scientists how to build devices; at Berkeley in the ’90′s, you could always identify the computer science students by the pizza boxes filled with computer parts that they lugged around everywhere.
Now the people who understand hardware aren’t in the same classes as those who write software; increasingly the two aren’t even in the same country. Steve Jobs may be technology’s last Renaissance man.
Be Secretive
Apple sets up multiple security checks within its buildings, hoods prototypes under development and provides its own employees with misinformation. Amazon can be the same way: a former Jeff Bezos lieutenant complimented Redfin by saying our openness made him rethink Bezos’s advice never to write your competitors’ business plan. (Since I admire Bezos, this in turn made me wonder if our “well-why-not?” approach to blogging has been naïve.)
The truth is that these days, most entrepreneurs can’t keep a secret and many aren’t even interested in trying; entrepreneurs are by nature impresarios and exhibitionists first, and inventors second. It seems like Apple’s preference for secrecy is just as instinctive. Sure, its secrecy is calculated to give product launches the most pop, but Apple’s stealthiness is so complete on topics so far beyond new products — did you know that you can only photograph Steve Jobs from one side? — that the behavior must be reflexive.
I often wonder whether Apple gains more in mystique from its secrecy than it loses by being insular? I wonder how they work out their ideas with customers when they can’t talk about their ideas to anyone? Apple might be the only company in the world smart enough to get away with that.
Give Nothing Away
Steve Jobs clearly hasn’t read Chris Anderson’s Web 2.0 Bible, Free. I’m not even sure Jobs would agree with Michael Arrington’s argument that free services have the most potential to change the world. Jobs hates free.
Even with digital services like MobileMe, Apple has never given anything away. First of all, because Apple can’t afford to. Anderson talks about the falling cost of servers and storage as driving the economics of free, but Jobs understands what’s really expensive about making something beautiful isn’t the tools but the artists who use them: beautiful will always be a time-consuming proposition involving costly, talented people.
And Jobs probably understands too that consumers value what they pay for. Now, a whole generation of software entrepreneurs is learning the discipline of charging for software because of the iPhone’s App Store. As you would expect, the iPhone applications that people buy are deleted less often, reviewed more carefully, and used more often than the ones you can download for free. But most startups will make money by giving their apps away and developing a business based on the free application.
No Wine Until it’s Time
Redfin lately has been trying to move faster, guided by Reid Hoffman’s principle that if a debut product is perfect, it should have shipped six months earlier. We talk to other entrepreneurs, who mainly rely on their users to find their bugs, and wonder if we shouldn’t be the same way. We’re still scarred by the last major re-design of our website, which took place three years ago, driving several people to tears and one of our best people out of design at the company entirely.
But Apple iterates on every product over and over again, with half a dozen designers or more developing ten different mock-ups for every single feature. An interviewee once told me that an iPhoto print feature was delayed a year so that the binding for the first page of a photo album could be stitched rather than glued, even though every book glues the first page. Basically Jobs reinvented how books are bound so that Apple’s photo albums would meet his standards.
And this attention to seemingly trivial details is true of other Steve Jobs’s endeavors too: as my friend Noam Lovinsky has observed, one reason the scripts for Pixar movies are so flawless is because each frame is already so labored. Pixar has never increased its rate of production, and never failed to make a #1 movie either. Of course it’s easier to update a website than it is a device or a movie, but it seems like Jobs chooses problems whose solution require his level of perfection, not the other way around. It makes me wonder if Silicon Valley’s cult of making mistakes quickly is itself a big mistake.
That question is impossible to answer in the abstract, but every time I think about accelerating the pace of our development, I wonder if Jobs would actually speed it up by slowing it down and making fewer mistakes.
Offline Experiences Matter
Silicon Valley’s latest bloodsport is to predict the demise of Microsoft Office, the best, most widely used software in the world. I tend to agree that for most casual users, Mint will replace Quicken, and Picnik will replace Photoshop. But no one ever attacks Apple for making desktop applications for photo editing or music playing. In fact, what’s remarkable about Apple is how little it has invested in online services; it has no MSN or EC2.
When the company thinks about distribution, it does so in physical dimensions, reimagining retail stores. When it makes a mobile device, it encourages developers to re-code their web experiences to fit within the smaller screen of an iPhone, a move which might have drawn ridicule if it had come from another company. If the desktop is dead, why is one of the best technology companies in the world working to reinvent it?
And if everyone is arguing that Microsoft is wrong to build powerful, native applications, why isn’t Apple wrong about that too?
Anyway, these are the questions I wonder about when trying to decide what kind of company Redfin should look like as it grows up… What lessons do you draw from Apple, and which do you reject?
Photo credit: Joi, Macevangelist on Flickr
April 25, 2009
Forbes this week got its hands on Steve Jobs’s deposition about back-dated stock options and the blogosphere is now citing his testimony as evidence of Jobs’s being undone by his loyalty to his team. In an essay titled “Steve Jobs on the Value of Stock Options,” TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld frames Jobs’s account as a disquisition on why talent should be paid in stock. It now sits at the top of Techmeme.
Erick does a fantastic job as usual picking out the juicy bits of the story and putting them in context. We all agree that options are the best way to pay executives, and it’s hard to imagine what grant Steve Jobs doesn’t deserve given Apple’s performance. But no matter how much we revere Jobs as an innovator, I suspect that the deposition will in time get The Full TechCrunch Treatment of acid-washed skepticism.
What first raised one of my gigantic, hairy eyebrows was Jobs’s claim that his initial motivation was only to get grants for the people he had worked with in the past. But Jobs’s pay would soon also be on the line. It’s common for a manager to “fight for his team” knowing that it sets a precedent for him or her to get an even larger grant.
In the deposition, Jobs presents himself as never suspecting he would be in that position, because he never thought he’d become Apple’s CEO again. No one has commented on this account, even though Jobs had once famously described the hiring of an Apple CEO beside himself as one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
When it came to his own pay as the CEO, Jobs describes the Apple board as a group of “peers” from whom he deserves “recognition.” This seems off-key. Yes the CEO is a board member, but he reports to the larger board as a subordinate not as a peer. For an unrivaled god such as Steve Jobs, thinking of the board as peer may seem like a generous act of collegiality, but it also opens Apple to cronyism. Even Jobs is accountable to someone.
Invoking “recognition” also is surprising to hear from the CEO of any investor-owned company. The board owes a CEO only what is in the best interests of shareholders. So far as Apple shareholders are concerned, Jobs undoubtedly deserves a gigantic grant. But when Jobs talks about recognition rather than compensation, it seems egotistical and almost petulant rather than market-driven.
I still don’t know why Steve Jobs got mixed up in a $20 million compensation dispute when his stake alone would later be worth much more than that. I’m sure pride had something to do with it, and rightly so.
For me this isn’t about Steve Jobs. My whole professional career, I have revered Jobs more than anyone, and still do. The money doesn’t matter to Jobs now, and we all wish him well during his leave. But what happened in this instance was wrong and what Jobs said about it is the same old baloney used to justify high pay and special rules for CEOs everywhere.
Let’s call a spade a spade: iPhones are good. Steve Jobs is a god. But this deposition was bad.
