Steve Jobs

life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.
     
    By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.”
    iCloud
    In 2001 Jobs had a vision: Your personal computer would serve as a “digital hub” for a variety of lifestyle devices, such as music players, video recorders, phones, and tablets. This played to Apple’s strength of creating end-to-end products that were simple to use. The companywas thus transformed from a high-end niche computer company to the most valuable technology company in the world.
    By 2008 Jobs had developed a vision for the next wave of the digital era. In the future, he believed, your desktop computer would no longer serve as the hub for your content. Instead the hub would move to “the cloud.” In other words, your content would be stored on remote servers managed by a company you trusted, and it would be available for you to use on any device, anywhere. It would take him three years to get it right.
    He began with a false step. In the summer of 2008 he launched a product called MobileMe, an expensive ($99 per year) subscription service that allowed you to store your address book, documents, pictures, videos, email, and calendar remotely in the cloud and to sync them with any device. In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the
Wall Street Journal.
    Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. “You should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As
Fortune
’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”
    By 2010 it was clear that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others were aiming to be the company that could best store all of your content and data in the cloud and sync it on your various devices. So Jobs redoubled his efforts. As he explained it to me that fall:
We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud—streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data. Apple was the first to have the insight about your computer becoming a digital hub. So we wrote all of these apps—iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes—and tied in our devices, like the iPod and iPhone and iPad, and it’s worked brilliantly. But over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud. So it’s the same digital hub strategy, but the hub’s in a different place. It means you will always have access to your content and you won’t have to sync.
It’s important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma,” where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don’t want to be left behind. I’m going to take MobileMe and make it free, and we’re going to make syncing content simple. We are building a server farm in North Carolina. We can provide all the syncing you need, and that way we can lock in the customer.
     
    Jobs discussed this vision at his Monday morning meetings, and gradually it was refined to a new strategy. “I sent emails to groups of people at 2 a.m. and batted things around,” he recalled. “We think about this a lot because it’s not a job, it’s our life.” Although some board members, including Al Gore, questioned the idea of making MobileMe free, they supported