Steve Jobs: meeting the Henry Ford of the digital generation

The first time I met Steve Jobs he hastily ended the interview.

In 2000 I was conducting a joint interview in Paris with a French newspaper, and French retailers were increasingly concerned that Apple itself was muscling in on their market. As I recall, the lime green Macbook was only available directly from Apple.

The manner of our questioning was more European sceptic than American fanboy, but it was the question about the French resellers that sparked “le exit” amongst a cloud of flustered PR executives.

I concluded the article for The Observer: “Jobs’s latest venture with Pixar is called Monsters Inc… but no, he’s not in it”. It is rather interesting, in retrospect to look back at that article from 11 years ago:

Firstly I happened to get that first interview at a time he was trying to push a product that ended up a rare failure – the Cube, that had a pop-up toaster CD eject system.

See! Even a genius makes the odd mistake.

Second, that was an account less of a sales conference, but more of a semi-religious cult gathering.

“The Mac-heads do not complain. They appear to support Apple as anyone else might follow Arsenal. So fervent is their passion that they will boast about the fact that Apple Macs have a higher profit margin than Windows-based PCs, where other consumers might complain of being ripped off.

“But this loyalty can be excessive, and on entering the Apple expo one is engulfed in a funky business hell. People zoom past on shiny aluminium micro-scooters or on rollerblades. Grown men wear tight black T-shirts emblazoned with ‘MacUser’ where others might sport the name of a designer. There were repeated attempts to get iBooks autographed by Jobs.

“Long term, Apple needs to broaden its appeal, and persuade people to transfer from conventional Windows/Intel PCs,” is what I wrote 11 years ago.

And of course, no one could have predicted just how spectacularly Jobs achieved that. At the time I first met that Mac’s were far from ubiquitous. They were a niche for creatives, and education. Apple had been forced into that niche by sticking to its proprietary strategy, whereas Microsoft, with its inferior Windows software, cleaned up by licensing it for use across every other computer. So Apple’s success is often pinned on the aesthetics of its products. Very important, but the usability of the software, even the operating system, is just as important.

Then there is the iPod, or should that be iTunes? I was one of the first people in Europe to be shown the iPod. I almost said “it’ll never catch on”. But I think I caveated that spectacular misjudgement by saying it would need video. As important was iTunes. Jobs came from nowhere to clean-up in online music, as the record labels dithered. As the late great Mancunian creative Tony Wilson would tell music execs: “It took Steve Jobs to shake up your famously Luddite industry”.

I met a much calmer Jobs four years ago, when he came to London to launch a digital rights-free iTunes service alongside EMI’s Eric Nicoli and Damon Albarn. “DRM hasn’t gotten rid of thieves. The key thing is you have to compete with piracy,” he told me.

Jobs basically got EMI to take the digital locks off the bulk of their online music. So the then 10 per cent of music sold online was not limited compared to the 90 per cent burned from people’s CDs. Mr Jobs calling the shots not just in software but with music moguls too.

And who could have predicted that sales of music devices would then begin to drive up sales of more expensive hardware? And all the time new products, from phones to tablet computers, all maintaining Apple’s fat margins at a time when Sony, lost its margins.

How much of this was down to the man himself? Well Jobs’s appearances in front of crowds are theatrical: he is like an actor, or a magician. In private, there is an extremely hard edge.

Making money out of creativity needs a certain bloody-mindedness. The last time he left, Apple flirted with bankruptcy.

This time he leaves a company that is a world leader and money-printing machine in all aspects of our increasingly digital lives. But as, with the help of Google, these functions and products become commoditised, standard-issue, and surely cheaper, where does Apple go then?