Haunted Empire review – great title, shame about the contents

Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs is a terrific book title.

Pity the book doesn’t live up to it. Or, indeed, provide us with any clear indication of whether the company best known for its iPhones and iPads (let’s call it an “empire” for convenience) is indeed haunted. I’d really like to know whether rank and file employees at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters constantly look over their shoulder, troubled by the question of whether “Steve would” (or wouldn’t) “have done that”.

Reading the author’s note that leads the book, you expect the answer to be a shoo-in. Yukari Iwatani Kane is a former Wall Street Journal reporter (an imprimatur that demands precision in facts), who covered Apple from about 2011 for that paper. She’s quick to point out that “although I had access to the company’s media events and some of its executives during my reporting for the newspaper, Apple chose not to grant any further access apart from one shareholders’ meeting.” Presumably, that’s “further access” sought because she was writing a book. Reality check: Apple doesn’t give special access to anyone, unless they’re writing Steve Jobs’s biography. And that chance has gone.

But fear not, says Kane: “Even so, I was able to draw from more than two hundreds interviews with nearly two hundred sources who have firsthand knowledge of Apple’s world in the United States, Europe and Asia. They include Apple executives and employees - past and present...”

At this, the reader perks up: surely we’re going to hear about whether the empire that Steve Jobs built is, you know, haunted?

Certainly that “200 interviews” figure sounds impressive. In 2011 I wrote “Digital Wars” (published 2012, second edition - updated to February 2014 - imminent) contrasting how Apple, Microsoft and Google’s management and development style had helped or hindered their progress in search, digital music, smartphones, tablets and (in the new edition) China. I haven’t tried to count up how many interviews I carried out over the years leading up to it. It might be 200. It might be less. I’d never try to do a headcount, though. Doing so seems distinctly strange, to be honest; it’s as though the writer is nudging us to put our faith into the sheer number. Never mind the quality, feel the width.

Can you keep a secret?

Apple is - let’s be clear - a difficult company to report on. Far more so than any other, it has a cult of secrecy, not only about when and what new or updated products it will launch, but also about its workings and internal interactions; you don’t get documentaries taking you around Jonathan Ive’s design labs. Apple cultivates mystique, and prefers to let its devices do the talking. That’s also why there’s a ready market for books which try to lift the lid on what does go on there. For which, I’d definitely recommend a short but highly worthwhile ebook, “Design Crazy” by Max Chafkin, which is entirely made up of interviews with former Apple staff and observers (perhaps as many as 200 - I didn’t count) and explaining how the company designs products, the fights that has sometimes caused, and how they are resolved. It will tell you far more about Apple as it was and is than Kane’s book. Also helpful is “Jony Ive” by Leander Kahney - though I found it a little too admiring where Chafkin’s is astringent.

The problem is this: Steve Jobs was a compelling figure. There was nobody quite like him in technology because he had had the success (with Apple in its early days) and the failure (with NeXT, his next startup), and returned to make Apple a success again, pulling it back by its shirttails as it teetered on the cliff of bankruptcy (from which it was only 90 days away in 1996 when he rejoined). He could spin plausible lines, and near-enough lies, and enthuse people into believing him. As a manager, he was by all accounts ruthless, charming and terrifying. His death has highlighted how none of the Apple executives quite has his ability to hold a stage and spin a story.

This much is known. Tim Cook, picked by Jobs, often looks ill at ease on stage. He’s regarded as a numbers guy, the man who helped pull Apple out of that nosedive in the late 1990s (he joined in 1998) and since then has grown it to be the only other company besides the gigantic conglomerate Samsung which can turn out more than 50m smartphones for sale in a single three-month period.

I read this book hoping to get a clearer picture of Cook. But as with many areas, the books fails to give that. We are treated to some quite routine biography about his upbringing in Alabama, from which we learn nothing useful save that he thinks you get ahead through hard work (I’m guessing at least 10 interviews were spent on that). He’s tough on other executives and on suppliers. Well, yes.

I also found it puzzling that so much of the book - about the first 90 pages of a 338-pager - were about the with-Jobs Apple, even including those 1990s escapades. Isn’t this well-known? Perhaps not, but while it offered a couple of little nuggets, it noticeably lacked insight into the design process, or indeed any process inside the company.

What happened to the narrative?

Once Jobs dies, though, things fall apart. Not Apple - the book. (In passing, could I say that I really detest the use of the word “passing” for “death”? It just sounds mimsy, as though the writer is worried about upsetting an audience of maiden aunts. People die. It’s death. It’s natural.) There’s no clear narrative structure; no portrait is painted. Kane jumps about all over the shop. Jobs dies, and we go to China, where Apple’s “supply chain” which assembles iDevices mostly lies. Then we’re at Buckingham Palace and learning a little more about Jonathan Ive, the head of design, a linchpin in the company. Then we’re pondering whether Siri, Apple’s voice-driven “assistant”, is a flop or a flier, and if so (either way) whose responsibility that was.

Here’s the problem with the latter chapter, which is quite typical of many: the acquisition of the Siri technology happened while Jobs was alive. Did he OK that acquisition? He certainly used it before he died, though the phone using it hadn’t been released. So... are Siri’s limitations down to Jobs? Or not? Those 200 interviews provide no answer - though there is the tantalising nugget that the team behind Siri has an entire backstory worked out for it, which can in theory be teased out by asking the right questions.

With Siri sort-of done, we jump - for no apparent reason - to Apple’s patent battle with Samsung, which spilled over into courtrooms. Here, I feel Kane shows a lack of insight into the subtle complications of patents (they’re not all born equal; and Apple can’t sue Google over features in the Android software, but can sue companies which sell physical things that embody Android software). Again she doesn’t answer how strongly Apple’s executives post-Jobs feel about the whole patent thing. My impression, having talked to them since Jobs’s death, is that they’re just as determined to pursue the cases. People outside Apple may view that as quixotic, but inside they clearly don’t. You wouldn’t discover that from the book, though.

Disrupt this

At this, my teeth began to grind. So six years on, Christensen had been vindicated in his prediction (quoted in the chapter) that “the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat [the iPhone]”? Nonsense. Android phones weren’t on sale when the iPhone arrived. Apple and Android, have swept away all the mobile OSs that existed then, and many of the companies that sold them: Nokia has dwindled, BlackBerry is on life support, Palm is gone, Windows Mobile is dead, and no mobile OS introduced since 2009 has had any significant impact on the market. There’s iOS, and there’s Android, which looks and feels a lot like iOS, because the Android engineers in 2007 who were building a BlackBerry-alike watched Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone and realised they needed to change course damn fast, and - to their vast credit - did.

And “market share”? The trouble with that metric is that it overlooks two things: who’s earning the profits (and so who can afford to stay in the market), and whether the company whose market share is being eroded might perhaps be doing better, year-on-year, than before because the overall market is expanding. I’ve written at length on why “market share” is a crude, often misleading metric. Apple is selling more phones annually, and gaining in overall mobile market share - but it’s losing smartphone market share because the smartphone market is growing. Apple has however got a giant chunk of mobile profits, so it can keep expanding while companies like HTC, Sony, LG and Motorola nurse losses and struggle. The same holds in tablets: Apple truly doesn’t care if a zillion $50 tablets are sold. It just won’t compete for the wafer-thin profits (if any) at that price. It’ll stick with selling fewer tablets for more profit to people who want a premium device. If that’s a company in trouble - well, we’d all like that problem. But if you don’t understand that Apple doesn’t care about market share in that way, you don’t understand Apple at all.

From Christensen we’re off to China, again for no discernible reason - it tells us nothing about how Apple’s executives and staff think about how their roles might have changed since Jobs’s death - and then to a dull recap of the Apple-Samsung trial of summer 2012 (lawyers’ court arguments don’t make good reading; they’re just posturing) and then to the launch of the iPhone 5 in September 2012.

Busted flush?

By this time, Kane has pretty much decided that because Apple’s current lineup doesn’t contain Steve Jobs, that it’s a busted flush. Unveiling the iPhone 5 in 2012, Cook is wooden on stage. Schiller’s touting of its larger screen (compared to previous iPhones) was - apparently - a jab at Samsung’s Galaxy Note. I missed that reference myself, though I was watching the same presentation. And “[Schiller’s] remark signalled Apple’s increasing vulnerability”. Huh? The iPhone 5 sold more than any previous iPhone. Vulnerability to what?

I found the bizarre attribution of meaning to events which didn’t seem to have meaning more and more intrusive. I also found it incongruous to have an American journalist from the WSJ offering her own interpretations; I thought it was an article of faith in that trade to get someone else to express your opinions - just choose carefully so they’re the ones you wanted to express anyway. But hardly any experts are quoted in the whole book; a pity, as they could have provided a narrative framework.

More to the point, didn’t any of Kane’s 200 interviewees or her time on the WSJ team reporting on Apple uncover anything about the tension inside the company about the iPhone 5? It simultaneously changed the screen size and dumped the 30-pin connector it had used since 2003, replacing it with a thinner 8-pin one that was incompatible with hundreds of millions of third-party boom boxes. For third-party developers, it meant rewriting their apps just to fit the iPhone 5 screen, which was longer but not wider. For makers of music players, it meant redesigns and inventory headaches. Would Steve Jobs have done that? Post-Jobs Apple did, with the same lack of compunction with which Jobs used to hand out mandates. Does that mean it’s haunted by the spirit of Jobs (would he had done it)? Or not?

After the skirmish with the iPhone 5 comes the disaster of the Apple Maps launch. But here again, there’s none of the background of the vicious manoeuvring between Apple and Google that led to Apple kicking Google off the iPhone 5 for both video and maps. A giant failing of this book is its focus only on Apple. You simply can’t write about its position without also writing about Google and Microsoft and their ambitions, at the very least. Their strategies are so interlocked, with each feinting while also trying to move to places the other wants to reach, that any examination of them in isolation is a map without landmarks. Nor is there any insight into what people thought inside Apple about the maps debacle. Would it have “never happened with Steve”? Or was it because of his Google-hatin’ ways? (Neither, actually. Jobs would have done what Cook did: OK’d it, apologised for the mess, and fired and torn strips off people internally. Jobs did just that on other failures.)

Interpret this

Kane also falls prey to simplistic interpretation, thinking that because Google offered a maps app for the iPhone, that it would be a hit. That overlooks the power of defaults. (Google Maps is now hardly used on the iPhone compared to Apple Maps.) You have to understand how people use technology to give your readers context.

The book lumbers on, through a riot in China (I had no idea what the point of the chapter was), to a chapter on the talkative foreman of the Samsung-Apple trial post-verdict and how Apple’s win wasn’t much of a win at all, to one called “Critical Mass” which isn’t really about anything specific, to “Holy Grail” which is actually about Apple’s taxes (yet again omits the unholy row going on in other countries over lots of US companies’ taxes) and then diverts into the antitrust decision over Apple’s attempts to get book publishers to go with its pricing model for ebooks on the iPad.

What’s the inclusion of the latter subject trying to show? Kane’s overarching thesis is that without Steve Jobs, Apple is doomed to a downward spiral as innovation and staff leak out. (No information is offered on the latter, not even from the job site Glassdoor.com, but hey ho.) The ebooks decision though largely grew from Jobs’s intrusions into the negotiations - one of his draft emails was a crucial piece of prosecution evidence.

So should we conclude that post-Jobs, Apple won’t make stupid antitrust-breaching decisions? Or is it that his acts hang over the company like a pall - in which case, wouldn’t staff welcome moving on to new ground? Kane seems to want it both ways. Everything Jobs did was wonderful, except the stuff that left Apple screwed when it tried to do anything else. This, though, rests on the concept of the Immaculate Jobs, which anyone who’s covered Apple for any time will tell you is bunk. Tons of mistakes happened under his watch; and he could be as shortsighted as anyone, the two biggest examples being that he didn’t want third-party apps on the iPhone, and he didn’t want the iPod to work on Windows. If he’d prevailed, he would have sunk the company.

By this stage of the book (page 307) I was reading through whatever the visual equivalent of gritted teeth is. “The Red Chair” details, excruciatingly, Tim Cook’s hey-he’s-not-as-cool-as-Steve-Jobs appearance at the All Things D conference in May 2013. Kane clearly thinks he did poorly by not leaping to his feet and announcing a new iThing, or giving the crowd some ole Southern charm like a Bill Clinton of technology. Cook basically didn’t have a lot to tell people, because Apple wasn’t going to release a new product category in 2013. Cook did offer a head fake by talking about how “wearables” are “interesting” (perhaps thus driving Samsung to hurriedly release its critically panned Galaxy Gear “smartwatch”).

Roiling in the deep

She then heads to the June 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, where apparently “Apple was revealing its true nature: the endless self-congratulation, the perpetual breeziness so obviously straining to respond to roiling doubts.” Apple hardly has a monopoly on self-congratulatory breeziness in Silicon Valley - have you read a blogpost from Yahoo, Google or pretty much any startup recently? - but from where I sat in the media pen of the same audience, I didn’t feel a fog of roiling doubts overhead. Apple is a bit like the weather: it doesn’t work by other peoples’ timetables. It just does stuff when it’s ready. Having written about all three of Apple, Microsoft and Google since the 1990s, I know that each has its own rhythms for releasing stuff. In Google’s case, it’s pretty much no rhythm; stuff just bursts out when someone hits a button. Microsoft moves in a lockstep. And Apple fiddles with it until it’s done.

But for someone with a thesis and a book deadline, that’s not enough. One could play “what if?” - what if Apple had launched a wearable something or a new set-top box last April? Would that have exorcised the ghost that Kane seems sure haunts the corridors of 1 Infinite Loop? I suspect not. After all, any new Apple product launch is met by derision - the iPod was too pricey and had too little storage, the iPhone was an overpriced gewgaw from a company new to mobile, the iPad was just a big iPod Touch. No doubt the next iThing will attract much the same derision from plenty of outlets, but the real test - how it gets used, and by how many people, and whether it’s profitable enough to continue with - won’t be known for some time. But someone who needs a quick hit saying that Apple’s well has run dry will find plenty of material.

Kane manages this with the book’s epilogue, which mentions the iPhone 5S with its fingerprint sensor in a single line. Apparently a new feature that loads of people use and which enhances their security (most phone users don’t use passcodes) and which comes from a company (Authentec) bought after Steve Jobs died, well, that’s not interesting. But the lower-priced iPhone 5C and its failure to mimic hot cakes sales-wise in its first month? Now you’ve got something doomy to write about! (Sales of the 5C have picked up since the new year, following price cuts. You’d almost think Apple had some sort of strategy there rather than doing this stuff randomly.) The “gold iPhone” is compared unfavourably to blue-sky research from Google on understanding death, which was enthusiastically hyped up by tech bloggers.

Only one of those two things, though, is on sale now; the other might never happen. Google kills a lot of projects, in case people had forgotten. Do you prefer your innovation in the palm of your hand, or in an uncertain future?

Ultimately, I was unsatisfied by this book. Still, as I say, it’s a great title. I’d still like to know whether staff at Apple rue the day, and wish ol’ Steve was still there - or if they just shrug and say “yeah, got stuff to do right now” and move on. Trouble is, this book won’t tell you. Perhaps someone else will one day.

Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs by Yukari Iwatani Kane: £16 from the Guardian bookshop

Design Crazy by Max Chafkin: £0.99 (iBooks; Amazon Kindle)

Jony Ive by Leander Kahney: £11.99 from the Guardian bookshop (also on iBooks; Amazon; Amazon Kindle)