Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy Page #6

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positioned its products

as expensive,

but oh-so-elegantly designed.

There are people who say,

when you compare the Apple product

with the functional equivalent...

..You see that it's more style

over substance.

No, no, no!

Evan, you couldn't be more wrong.

I wouldn't wish to be rude to you

but it's astonishing to think

that, in the 21st-century,

people still think

there's a distinction

between style and substance,

that the two are not the same.

The better it looks, the more you

want to use it, the more function

you get out of it anyway!

Around the turn-of-the-century,

technology was changing rapidly.

Consumers were rushing to buy

new digital devices

like cameras and music players,

and Jobs saw how Apple could weave

itself deeper into people's lives,

IF it could exploit the trend.

We are living in a new digital

lifestyle with an explosion

of digital devices,

and we believe that the Mac can

become the digital hub of our new

emerging digital lifestyle.

We think this is going to be huge.

Jobs' insight was the beginning

of Apple as we know it today.

Computers were becoming powerful

enough to store and play video,

music and other media.

Apple began working secretly on

a digital device of its own.

It would revolutionise the company

and our increasingly digital world.

The iPod came about because somewhat

of a convergence of technologies.

We learned that we could marry

a really small hard drive -

small in size, large in capacity -

with some small electronics

and build a really good

music player.

Just as with the mouse in the 1980s,

Jobs and Apple did not invent

the MP3 player,

but they did redefine it

for consumers.

The iPod could hold 1,000 songs,

but its real innovation

lay in Jonathan Ive's design.

There were lots of MP3 players

around before the iPod

but they all looked as ugly as car

batteries and it was only Apple

who had the sense to make the

iPod into a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.

The colour of the first iPod

was no accident.

Choosing white for the iPod

wasn't just a Johnny decision,

it was a Johnny and Steve decision.

They really looked into the idea

of the colour white.

It was something, which carried on

a certain spirit and purity.

They went to many, many iterations

of white and had to look at special

materials, special polymers,

to produce and convey and maintain

the certain whiteness of the iPod.

Carefully chosen colours,

white or otherwise,

had a distinctive

presence in the advertising.

And with this product,

unlike some in the past,

Apple was not going to

overestimate demand.

Indeed, quite the reverse.

When we were planning the launch

of the iPod across Europe,

an important thing we had to

manage with the iPod

was to make sure

we kind of undersupplied the demand

so that we'd only roll it out

almost in response to cities crying

out for those iPods to be available

and that's how we kept

that kind of cachet for the iPod

in its early years.

And we'd use extensive data research

to understand

what the kind of relative strength of

doing that in Rome versus Madrid

would be.

Unlike most other MP3 players,

which worked with either

Macs or PCs,

the iPod needed Apple software

running on an Apple computer.

For Steve Jobs, this closed system

seemed to be a virtuous circle.

When they sell iPods

at the beginning,

it locks you into the system,

and iPods have an immediate impact

on Apple Mac sales within the

profitability of the corporation

as a whole.

Ultimately, Jobs realised that Apple

could make even more money

by creating an iPod for Windows.

Steve knew that, for him

to take Apple to another place,

he had to break out of

the Mac ghetto,

which is his gated community

of loyal fans

who love the product.

Music became his way of reaching

that larger audience.

..is the new iPod.

Apple was on a roll.

The iPod quickly became

the number one digital music

player in America and beyond.

You suddenly saw them everywhere,

and its success set

the company on a new course.

There was no vision of

there's going to be an iPod,

then an iPhone, then an iPad.

However, there was a vision that

we're going to be more consumer,

more of a consumer electronics

company.

This is our store, and the store

is divided into four parts.

The first quarter of the store

has our home section...

Apple was on its way to becoming

a global phenomenon.

Wanting to build a consumer

electronics company,

the next step was to go into

consumer electronics stores,

Apple style,

with shops designed to match

the products in them.

What's interesting about Apple's

move into retail

is it wasn't so much Apple

opening up a shop,

but rather Apple opening up

its experience

and allowing people to buy

Apple products in the kind of style,

in the kind of environment, that

actually really suited that brand.

Every facet of the way the stores

look was influenced by Steve Jobs.

He even held the American patent

for the design of the glass stairs.

The fact that Steve Jobs was

a sort of hippy control freak was

an extraordinary collision,

but it's worked absolutely

brilliantly for Apple,

which is you've got this

impression of hippy chic and relaxed

and everything else,

whereas actually this organisation

is one of the most controlled

organisations in the world.

Apple boasts some of the world's

most profitable retail space,

but the shops are about far more

than selling products.

An Apple Store is a temple

to a belief system.

They conform to the structure

of a religion.

They have the objects of veneration,

the phone, the tablet,

they have a powerful priesthood.

They have a congregation of people

who belong and who believe in Apple,

but ultimately they have the Messiah,

the religious leader,

the late Steve Jobs.

Apple's ethos, defined by that

Think Different slogan,

turned out to be a remarkably

valuable business philosophy.

It had helped the company reinvent

computing and retailing,

and next it would take Apple to yet

another revolutionary endeavour.

Steve Jobs was one of those people

who recognised that, in the digital

age, content would be key.

The iPod was designed to be a way

to synchronise your music

from your computer to get it into

your pocket.

It was after the success of the iPod

that Apple said there's

a market for us to sell music,

but that was not the original plan.

While Jobs needed music

for the iPod,

the music industry

had a problem of its own.

The rise of file-sharing websites

like Napster was threatening the way

the industry made money.

So you went from a world in which you

had to go buy stuff in a store

to a world in which you had this

cloud of music

that was, in effect,

an unlimited source of free music,

which was a very threatening idea

to the music industry.

Faced with this crisis, the record

industry had tried to close

Napster down

and sue people

who downloaded music for free.

They were alarmed by Apple's iPod.

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