Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere

Enlarge

Photographs by Phillip Toledano

Enlarge

Photographs by Phillip Toledano

---

Related Content

related link

iCensus

On Wednesday, May 26, 2010, just after 2:30 p.m., the unthinkable happened: Apple became the largest company in the tech universe, and, after ExxonMobil, the second largest in the nation. For months, its market capitalization had hovered just under that of Microsoft -- the giant that buried Apple and then saved it from almost certain demise with a $150 million investment in 1997. Now Microsoft gets in line with Google, Amazon, HTC, Nokia, and HP as companies that Apple seems bent on sidelining. The one-time underdog from Cupertino is the biggest music company in the world and soon may rule the market for e-books as well. What's next? Farming? Toothbrushes? Fixing the airline industry?

Right now, it seems as if Apple could do all that and more. The company's surge over the past few years has resembled a space-shuttle launch -- a series of rapid, tightly choreographed explosions that leave everyone dumbfounded and smiling. The whole thing has happened so quickly, and seemed so natural, that there has been little opportunity to understand what we have been witnessing.

The company, its leader, and its products have become cultural lingua franca. Dell wants to be the Apple for business; Zipcar the Apple for car sharing. Industries such as health care and clean energy search for their own Steve Jobs, while comedian Bill Maher says the government would be better run if the Apple CEO were head of state. (The Justice Department and FTC, which are both investigating Apple's tactics, might disagree.) A Minnesota Vikings fan dubs his team the "iTunes of quarterbacks," serially sampling one track from a player's career, as with Brett Favre, rather than buying the whole album as the Colts have done with Peyton Manning.

This shorthand is useful but tends to encourage a shallow notion of what it takes to emulate Apple. And Apple doesn't delineate the key factors of its success. Those principles are more closely guarded than its product pipeline. Jobs did not comment for this article. On-the-record comments from the CEO occur in only the most orchestrated environments (at MacWorld, say, or in newsweekly magazine stories timed to new product announcements), or in late-night email messages that defy explication. When it comes to the special sauce that makes his company the paragon of U.S. and global business, the CEO is silent.

How does one become the "Apple of [insert industry here]"? After speaking with former employees, current partners, and others who have watched Apple for many years, it's clear that the answers center around discipline, focus, long-term thinking, and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else's business. It's an approach that's difficult to discern and tougher to imitate. But everyone wants to give it a try. Here, then, is our report on the Apple playbook. Short of something falling into your hands in a Bay Area bar, this may be as close to the truth about Apple as you're going to get.

{1} Go Into Your Cave

If Steve Jobs were an architect, he'd work at the futuristic glass-and-steel San Francisco offices of international architecture and design firm Eight Inc. The walls are bathed in white, and the vibe is akin to working behind the Genius Bar. Here, on the second floor, look to the back wall. There you'll discover a frosted-glass door emblazoned with a white Apple logo. Behind it is Eight's Apple team -- a small group that has worked with the company since the late 1990s to conceive the look and feel of its "branded consumer experiences," which include its trade shows, high-impact product announcements, and 287 retail stores. The door is locked.

What goes on behind the locked door? "We really can't say too much," says Wilhelm Oehl, a principal designer, when I visit him one cloudy spring afternoon. He describes his work with Apple in only the vaguest, most anodyne terms -- to "redefine elegance," to keep an "integrity of design" that "makes the product the hero." Finally, Oehl mumbles, "We try to capture something that feels like magic."

These frosted-glass doors, and similar ones all around the world protecting other caves of Apple thinkers, are emblematic of Apple's fanaticism for secrecy. But those doors are more than mere paranoia. Apple sets its own agenda and tunes out the tech wags -- competitors, industry observers, analysts, bloggers, and journalists like myself -- who constantly spew torrents of advice, huzzahs, and brickbats in its direction. Behind its doors, Apple can ignore us all.

Jobs has never cared much about what the tech industry has to say. Back in the early 1980s, when he was leading the team building the Mac, Jobs would often give his engineers guidance on what the computer should look like. "Once, he saw a Cuisinart at Macy's that he thought looked incredibly great," says Andy Hertzfeld, one of the engineers on the original Mac team and the author of Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. "And he had the designers change the Mac to look like that." Another time, he wanted it to look like a Porsche.