By Kim Tae-gyu
Returning to Apple 12 years after an infamous departure in 1985, the late Steve Jobs started the famous “Think Different” commercial campaign on Sept. 28, 1997, to get greater public attention.
Nineteen years later, questions arise as to whether the Palo Alto, California-based tech giant still “thinks different” with its legendary leader gone five years ago due to pancreatic cancer.
Many experts reply in the negative because Apple has failed to produce any notable innovations of late.
“In the 1997 ad campaign, Jobs praised the misfits, the troublemakers and the rebels because they change the world and push the human race forward by thinking differently,” said a professor at a Seoul university.
“Jobs lived up to his words since he was responsible for putting 1,000 songs in every pocket with the iPod and the Internet with the iPhone. Without Jobs, however, Apple could not achieve such feats. More problematic is that the firm is not likely to make any big achievements in the near future.”
He said that Apple makes money thanks to the legacy left by Jobs without creating something new as a future cash cow.
Chung Chang-won, an analyst at Nomura Securities, said that Apple is now too big to maintain the maverick disregard for the mainstream as it has become mainstream itself.
“Apple seems to be fond of rules and respects the status quo, the two features Jobs emphasized as non-innovators in the 1997 ad campaign. The iPhone 7 would be an example,” he said.
“The iPhone 7 is by and large just an upgrade from previous versions. Of course, Apple cannot show great products every year but I have not seen any great products over the past few years.”
Observers noted that in the past Samsung Electronics followed Apple but now the order is reversed as demonstrated by the iPhone 7 whose new feature is water and dust resistance, which was adopted by Samsung in 2014 for the Galaxy S5.
In other words, Samsung has taken the driving seat in technological advances, something with which Jobs would not be happy.
“I am using both the Galaxy phone and the iPhone. I don’t know why the latter is so good compared to the former and why some are still craze about the iPhone,” Chung said.
A senior executive at a local start-up concurred.
“If Jobs had been alive and in charge for the past five years, I think that Apple would have launched an all-new automobile, the iCar, or an innovative house, the iHome, while pushed ahead in promising areas such as artificial intelligence (AI),” he said.
“But we have yet to see the iCar or the iHome and Google is a runaway leader in AI.”
Some watchers say that Apple’s incumbent CEO Tim Cook, who is dubbed as a mirror image of Jobs, is not the right person to spearhead innovation in one of the world’s most valuable corporations.
Put otherwise, they say that Jobs vowed to make a dent in the universe but Cook is a corporate leader who prefers to make a dent in income statements.
Jobs trusted Cook and entrusted the management of Apple to him. However, he once expressed reservations about his successor to his biographer Walter Isaacson, saying “But Tim’s not a product person, per se.”
Jobs did not elaborate or at least Isaacson did not write more, but Jobs seems to mean that a product person is an innovation champion who moves forward with new products. By contrast, he appears to see Cook as an operations champion.
One sure thing is that Cook reversed the philosophies of Jobs on a few points.
Jobs mocked a big phone, a small tablet and a stylus. He disdained a large-screen phone because people cannot get their hands around it and mocked a small tablet, saying the iPad’s 10-inch is the minimum suitable size. He also claimed god gave us 10 styluses ― fingers ― so that we don’t have to invent a new one, which we would easily misplace.
Cook and Apple’s top decision makers ignored the three epic rants of Jobs and debuted big iPhones, the iPad mini and a stylus called the Apple Pencil soon after Jobs died.