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Posts Tagged ‘Steve Jobs’

Facebook IPO Fallout–The Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

In our April 14th post “If Facebook Were a Country…” we hinted at the “irrational exuberance” that was being generated by the Facebook IPO.  Since early April, MahaTweeter (The Marketing Id’s Twitter handle) had been trying to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”  In any event, before we get to our Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People (with apologies to Dr. Stephen R. Covey, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®) involved in the Facebook IPO, we present a timeline (keeping in character with Facebook’s new look) of MahaTweeter tweets to make our larger point.

A couple of days after Facebook acquired Instagram for an ungodly sum, MahaTweeter fired a couple of warning shots, the first of which included a sarcastic reference to its “insta-acquisition”:

 April 11, 2012 – Instawham: #social #media startup earns billion dollar valuation despite phantom cash flows from non-paying subscriber base of millions! #in

April 12, 2012 – Déjà vu all over again–financiers investing in fantasy business models that promise a #socmed utilization they cannot fully comprehend! #in

MahaTweeter followed up with a quote from our Aril 14th post to highlight Facebook’s ridiculously low revenue per subscriber and net income per subscriber numbers:

April 16, 2012 – #Social #media by numbers: FB generated $4.39 in revenue per active sub and $1.18 in net income per active sub in 2011. http://wp.me/p1zesw-8h

In late April, MahaTweeter wondered about the efficacy of advertising-based social media models in this tweet:

April 28, 2012 – The success of advertising-based #social #media models depends on how effectively those impressions transcend brand to generate demand! #in

By Mayday, seeing no discernible drop in Facebook fever, MahaTweeter warned:

May 3, 2012 – #IPO: It’s no #GOOG–without a plan to monetize its active subscriber base of photo-swapping millennials– #FB is all sizzle and no steak! #in

As FB’s IPO date drew near, some alarm bells finally started to ring.  MahaTweeter read what Francis Gaskins, President of IPODesktop.com, had to say and tweeted accordingly:

May 7, 2012 – #Social #media bubble stress test on May 18th – meanwhile IPO expert warns of getting egg all over your #Facebook http://yhoo.it/J8jgm0 #in

The following day, MahaTweeter was tickled by the hoodie roadshow and remembered how even his hippie idol, Steve Jobs, had to clean up for Apple’s IPO back in December 1980.  It resulted in a Bob Dylan and Dire Straits laced “MahaTweet” that would have hopefully made Jobs proud:

May 8, 2012 – The Times They Are A-Changin’–“don’t-judge-a-Facebook-by-its-cover” #WallStreet raises Money for Nothing during the #hoodie roadshow? #in

During IPO week, MahaTweeter fired daily warning shots as recounted below – even referencing a cautionary Wall Street Journal report on IPO eve:

May 15, 2012 – Caveat Emptor–unless #B2C #social #media demonstrates sustainable, long-term monetization model, we are headed for Internet #Bubble 2.0! #in

May 16, 2012 – Planets aligned for the big #IPO–Jupiter will spawn instant millionaires–but can #social #media reconcile with notion of capital gains? #in

May 17, 2012 – #FB #IPO: public investors rush in where private ones have fled–http://on.wsj.com/JklbRY –we Face growing pains, as they Book early gains! #in

Finally, MahaTweeter put out this deferential (to the markets) tweet on the morning of the FB IPO:

May 18, 2012 – #FB #IPO: When Social Met Capital–markets will now validate whether a billion non-paying subscribers warrant its $100 billion valuation? #in

After the disastrous debut of the Facebook IPO, MahaTweeter expressed relief in a rare Saturday tweet that at least there would be no social media bubble:

 May 19, 2012 – All that glitters is not Google – #FB #IPO indicates dot com bubble redux unlikely; #social #media must learn to walk before it can run! #in

But then Monday after the IPO, we were disheartened to learn that the company that had made its name by encouraging people to share all sorts of information had actually withheld pertinent financial information relating to its future growth from the investing public!  Even before the call for congressional inquiries had begun, MahaTweeter had one last blast on the subject:

May 22, 2012 – More egg over your Facebook–during hoodie roadshow, rev est. cut while IPO price raised–no wonder #FB is tanking! http://yhoo.it/KIzl4W#in

And so, here we are on Memorial Day weekend doing a post-mortem examination of the highly-anticipated, yet badly-botched Facebook IPO.  Our intent is to present readers with what we referred to earlier as the “Seven Doggone-Its of Highly Effective People,” who were involved in some material way with this fiasco:

  1. TAS (Total Active Subscribers) is not equal to TAM (Total Addressable Market)!  Infinity times zero is still zero–even in the new math!  A billion non-paying subscribers can be active for several hours a day on their Facebook pages, yet not move the needle on company revenue.  Typically, TAM is what businesses count on for revenue-generating opportunities, and investors are beginning to understand that TAS is not the same as TAM.  Unfortunately, the highly effective analysts who rave over the social media juggernaut seemed to have missed this distinction.
  2. The Facebook Like has more social value than business value!  It’s pretty apparent that Facebook’s legacy subscriber base (i.e., students from U.S. schools, colleges and universities), which indulges in the use of “likes” in its collective vocabulary, transferred that same sentiment pretty liberally through the use of Facebook’s infamous “Like” button.  From a business perspective, if there is no easy way to monetize that Like, it offers very little redeeming value.  Again, investors seemed to have figured out that the Facebook “Like” thus far has not been all that it is cracked up to be.  So when will the highly effective social media quants come up with a measure already?
  3. Facebook not only made “friend” a verb but also devalued its meaning!  According to HubSpot, an inbound marketing company, the average Facebook user has 130 friends.  In the age of social media that might seem low, but The Marketing Id believes that is a high number of friends for the average Joe to have.  Since its birth in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has gradually blurred the distinction between friend and acquaintance.  In fact, in the rush to appear popular (i.e., well-connected), Facebook subscribers are quite likely friending strangers.  From a business standpoint, a non-celebrity subscriber is unlikely to influence the purchase decisions of such a “questionable” network of friends.  The highly effective people that derived Facebook’s lofty valuation seemed to have based at least a part of it on an over-valued “friend” factor.
  4. Facebook squandered a “mobile in the hand opportunity for two PCs in the bush!” Facebook had admitted in its S-1 filing that it does “not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.”  This confession seemed to have not garnered a lot of attention prior to the IPO but gained some currency after the fact.  This “revenue immobility” situation could be attributed to the fact that Facebook’s legacy subscriber base is likely more mobile than its newer and smaller desktop subscriber base from the business world – a possibility that seems to have eluded Facebook’s highly effective management until recently.
  5. Facebook’s “too much, too little, too late” platform strategy?  The Facebook platform had been largely static (i.e., computer-based as opposed to mobile device-based) for five years until Instagram, which was hastily acquired (so it seemed) by Facebook’s highly effective management about five weeks before the IPO.  Most social media pundits believed at the time that Facebook paid too much – $1 billion – to jumpstart its mobile strategy ahead of the IPO.  Then on May 24th Facebook Camera was launched and Forbes suggested that “Facebook purchased Instagram to remove the competition.”  It is unclear how Facebook Camera monetizes mobile, so even if the platform is great and may not be too late, it still remains a too little strategy from a business standpoint.  Again, Facebook’s highly effective management needs to reconcile Instagram with Facebook Camera for a skeptical investing public?
  6. Facebook’s IPO roadshow violated its own mission statement!  A company that wants to “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” stumbled right out of the starting gate.  It appears that during the Facebook roadshow, its lead investment bank, Morgan Stanley cut its second-quarter and full-year forecasts for Facebook and “shared” this vital information with only a handful of clients.  It reminded The Marketing Id of that classical Orwellian line from Animal Farm – “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” This is a doggone it at the heart of the social media experiment, which needs to be addressed by the Chief Highly Effective Officer himself!
  7. NASDAQ’s embarrassing ~$100 million glitch over a $100 billion IPO!  In the grand scheme of things, NASDAQ’s 20-minute black hole at the start of trading amounted to only 0.1% of Facebook’s market value at launch.  The stars might have been aligned to spawn insta-millionaires as MahaTweeter had tweeted, but according to the Wall Street Journal, “The market-making arms of UBS AG (UBS) and Citigroup Inc. (C) suffered combined losses of about $50 million on trades made during last Friday’s glitch-plagued listing of Facebook Inc.”  Any wonder that FINRA is investigating how the highly effective NASDAQ went dark on FB trades for 20 minutes – an eternity in today’s high-frequency trading environment!

So after a tumultuous week (ending May 25th) as a publicly traded company, FB stock closed 16% below its IPO price.  Notwithstanding the seven doggone-its of the various highly effective people that we have outlined above, it might be still too early to judge whether FB shares had been priced appropriately for the IPO.  Nonetheless, the fallout from the Facebook IPO has significantly reduced the risks of a bubble in social media stocks for the foreseeable future.  Unfortunately, the foreseeable future always comes sooner than later in Internet time; so doggone it, we all need to be vigilant!  Happy Memorial Day!

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Six Counts That Make For a Successful CEO

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

When President Reagan passed away in 2004, it was pretty clear that he had earned a lot of bipartisan affection through the years.  It had me wondering back then, “What made this man tick?”  Upon further analysis, I had determined that we inherently use six counts to get a measure of our President.  These six qualities, which I metaphorically referred to as the “six C’s of separation,” are: Character, Charisma, Confidence, Chemistry, Communicability[1], and Camera-friendliness.  I had postulated back then that these “C” notes determined whether a President can make “music to our ears” and these “C” strokes determined whether a President can paint a compelling vision of the future for us to see.  President Reagan with his perennial vision of “a shining city on a hill” had clearly scored well on all six counts across a broad spectrum of the American public.

That was then and with an allusion to politics; this is now and with a renewed reference to the business world.  The Marketing Id has surmised that the fundamental concepts ingrained in the original six-count calculus holds true in the business domain as well.  While a social enterprise might be setup in compliance with The Marketing Id’s E=MC5 theory of connectivity so that it can support Mobility, Cloud-based Communications, Cyber-security, Collaboration & Content; it nevertheless requires to be led by a CEO, who closely conforms to the six C’s of separation so that the company can be a standout success.  This qualitative differentiation assumes of course that, all things being equal, most successful CEOs perform at the top of their game when the typical quantitative factors relating to their respective companies, industries and overall market conditions are assessed.

So having made that distinction, let’s consider each of these six C’s of separation within the context of the business world.  In the corporate domain, the Character trait does not necessarily imply a moral character as much as it does the need for strong business ethics, which have become an absolute requirement in the wake of the corporate scandals of the last decade and the financial shenanigans that have plagued Wall Street in the past few years. An ethically-challenged person is not going to be a successful CEO and could, in fact, terminally harm the company or damage its reputation for an extended period of time.  The Marketing Id would like to believe that character counts more in business than it does in politics.

In a 2006 research study conducted jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Yale University, “Does CEO charisma matter?” its authors concluded that from an objective point of view (i.e., a company’s financial performance) Charisma was not a mitigating factor when it came to CEO performance.  Nonetheless, they observed:

“Our evidence suggests that CEOs who are perceived to be more charismatic appear to be perceived as more effective. In this subjective sense, CEOs matter. However, the lack of corroborating evidence from objectively-assessed CEO performance suggests that the search for charismatic CEOs may be based more on implicit theory or halo effects than on solid evidence that charisma really does make CEOs more effective.”

From a marketing standpoint, however, perception is reality and charismatic CEOs who perform well are regarded as far more successful than their equally well-performing but non-charismatic counterparts.  The Marketing Id’s recent tribute to Steve Jobs – one of the most charismatic CEOs since the dawn of the information age – is a case in point.

Confidence is such an obviously desirable trait in most executives in the business realm that The Marketing Id simply references the famous 1984 deodorant commercial tagline, “Never let them see you sweat,” as the guiding mantra for any person who wears the CEO mantle.  This is not to suggest that the lack of visible perspiration is a standard for confidence, but CEOs need to project that image of cool without being cocky, especially in public settings.  The Marketing Id had recently blogged about The Social Enterprise and made reference to Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) – here is a CEO who exuded so much confidence that it was palpable to the audience during his opening keynote address at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference.  Confidence is a CEO quality that permeates through to customers, employees, investors, partners, shareholders, vendors, et al.  A confident CEO can make a company appear far more appealing than it might actually be.

Chemistry is something that is desired in and key to the success of every one-on-one relationship.  Not surprisingly, it is an equally important element in a one-to-many relationship, and chemistry makes those thrive as well.  In politics if a leader has chemistry, people are usually more forgiving of the leader’s other shortcomings.  The Marketing Id would argue that President Clinton’s post-impeachment rehabilitation had as much to do with his personal chemistry as it had to do with his obvious charisma.  In the business world, there are many successful CEOs who have charisma, but not many of them possess a commensurate chemistry.  For CEOs, chemistry is key in the boardroom, a “must have” with each member of the executive management team, and a tremendous value-add if CEO chemistry can filter down into the employee ranks.  While a CEO doesn’t need to be universally liked, chemistry will go a long way in keeping the “extended family” happy – which, in turn, ensures widespread commitment to the company’s long term success.  As an example, The Marketing Id would posit that it is hard to find an unhappy employee at a Starbucks.  Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, probably has great chemistry or great karma or possibly both, because Starbucks has been a wonderful American success story for well over a decade now.

Communicability, as the word has been used here, is not the way the word is traditionally used in the lexicon.  The Marketing Id has used it as a combination of two simple words that indicate an ability to communicate.  As in politics, so too in the business world, public relations and marketing communications professionals can string the right words together into the right message to the right audience at the right time and tailored for the right medium!  It cannot get more right than that; however, they still need to be delivered by the CEO.  Herein lies the rub, some CEOs just lack the necessary skills to communicate in a compelling manner.  Again, The Marketing Id’s favorite CEO for communicability was Steve Jobs – he always made his audience hang on to the end of every presentation for that “one more thing.”

The final C that separates a CEO from his peers is one that is difficult for most CEOs to master – Camera-friendliness.  A CEO may love the camera but the camera might not reciprocate that feeling.  In the rare instances that there is a positive two-way interaction, the sparks can fly.  The key is not how good a CEO looks on camera but how well a CEO emotes in front of it – it’s all about how genuine the person is and how real the passion comes across to the intended viewers.  Camera-friendliness is a literal case of the medium is the message.  Many of the previously mentioned CEOs have been pretty remarkable in front of the camera and consequently a tremendous asset to their respective companies.

The Marketing Id would like to conclude this dissertation by pointing out that President Reagan was known as “The Great Communicator.”  What made him earn that title was he possessed every one of the six C’s in good measure.  CEOs can emulate his performance in the business world by similarly honing their skills on those critical six C’s of separation! Happy Holidays, folks!

[1] Ability to communicate

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Top 10 Holiday Tips for Startups & B2Bs in Social Media & Marketing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

  1. The Steve Jobs rule “stay hungry, stay foolish” was directed at college grads but it also applies to startups; although for startups to evolve–thinking outside the box has to be coupled with performing inside the box.  Engineering and sales can get you only so far.
  2. In the startup realm, an entrepreneur knocks on or knocks down doors, while an opportunist answers or gets out the way–and thus, the opportunist always succeeds with the business plan.  The opportunist is the one who is market-driven.
  3. Word-of-mouth is a metaphorical social media phenomenon that works to make certain products and events go viral in the B2C world, but viruses are still viewed with skepticism in the B2B domain, so B2Bs need to “put their money where those word-of-mouths are coming from” as it were.
  4. For B2Bs, “jillions of active users” is a social media mirage–only a tiny fraction is your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and inbound marketing targets TAM, so some of them might actually start to follow you.
  5. B2Bs that comply with The Marketing Id’s theory of connectivity, E=MC4, where an Enterprise that has Mobility, Cloud-based Communications, Collaboration & Content are setup to succeed with their marketing and business plan.
  6. The Marketing Id’s Master Card theory of relationships applies to B2Bs–likes from friends might build the brand, but E=MC4 compliant B2Bs must seek pertinent, probing and persistent comments from followers–words are priceless!
  7. When a B2B has established awareness with followers, the most efficient way to introduce them into your funnel and keep them fruitfully engaged is through the use of a marketing automation platform to manage those subsequent and ongoing relationships.
  8. The Marketing Id firmly believes that a penny saved on marketing is a pound lost in sales; and, a pound lost in sales is a ton lost in engineering. So once you are out of startup mode, switch to our rule “stay smart, stay sated.”
  9. When the going gets tough, B2Bs must recall the Peter Drucker rule “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two-and only two-basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
  10. Nonetheless, social media marketing can become a costly (i.e. wasteful) exercise, if it is done in an ad-hoc fashion and not as part of the annual marketing plan.  This is especially true with the way some B2Bs are pursuing social media – without a proper budget and without an integrated strategy – they are bound to be disappointed!  So B2Bs make sure as you go about finalizing your 2012 Marketing Plan that social media is baked in there as well!

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Marketing & Management Lessons from “Steve Jobs” Biography–“This was a man!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

After reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, “Steve Jobs,” The Marketing Id has come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs was the real “iMan” after all.  Maybe not the original “I-man”–that title probably still belongs to Don Imus of morning talk radio/TV.  In any case, I[1] thought it would be useful to try and glean a few marketing and management lessons from Mr. Isaacson’s refreshingly candid book.

Before I begin, it might be worth reliving my own brief encounter with Steve Jobs from a long time ago.  It was either in late 1988 or early 1989 at the launch of his NeXT computer in New York City.  This was before Steve Jobs became really famous for his meticulous launch events that would later evolve, upon his return to Apple in 1997, into spectacular shows.  Nonetheless, the then 33-year old Steve put on a pretty decent show for the NeXT launch in NYC and curiously had a workstation setup on either side of the stage.  In keeping true to Murphy’s Law, the workstation on the right side of the stage unexpectedly froze in the middle of the demo!  Before most in the audience could realize it, Steve Jobs calmly continued to talk as he glided over to the left side of the stage and seamlessly picked up on the demo as if there had been no problem.  After the presentation, as Steve Jobs was exiting stage left, I rushed into the aisle and was one of the many adoring fans, who got to shake his hand as I muttered to him, “That was awesome!”  Steve stared directly into my eyes and replied very matter-of-factly, “Then why don’t you go out and get one.”  It struck me at that time – always a salesman!  Yet, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I could not afford its $6500 price tag.  Isaacson brings out this perennial salesman trait as a standout in Steve Jobs’ personality throughout his book, noting that he concluded every launch event with the salesman clincher phrase “and one more thing.” But Steve, as Isaacson notes towards the end of the book, was wary of salesmen, especially when they landed up becoming CEOs–his self-induced experience at Apple with the hiring of salesman John Sculley from Pepsi had left a deep scar which never healed!

Steve Jobs’ life could well be summed up in a famous claim attributed to Julius Caesar, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Because, in reading Isaacson’s book, one gets the impression that Steve Jobs in his relatively short life seemed to be in a rush to “change the world.” By mastering the art of marrying creativity and engineering, he adapted cutting-edge technologies to simplify life for mankind.  In doing so, as Isaacson points out, Steve Jobs transformed (conquered, if you will) six major industries:

  1. Personal computers
  2. Animated movies
  3. Music
  4. Phones
  5. Tablet computing
  6. Digital publishing

While the impact of these transformations were significantly greater in the B2C world of movies, music and phones; he also created enormous trend-setting influences in the B2B domain of computers and digital publishing.

In keeping with the Julius Caesar metaphors, I am reminded of another great quote from Shakespeare’s play on the life of the Roman emperor, in which Mark Antony grieves after Caesar has been slain, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”  In reading Isaacson’s book, I got the impression that the reverse of this quote was true in the case of Steve Jobs – some of the “evil” personality traits that Steve displayed during his short life will soon be forgotten, but the tremendous good that his professional endeavors bestowed upon the world will live on forever.

Isaacson made much about Steve Jobs and his “Reality Distortion Field (RDF).”  Every time I came across this nebulous concept in the book, I couldn’t help think that by definition “reality distortion” is an oxymoron.  RDF is a mind-bending exercise that is typically associated with people who experiment with hallucinogens and/or practice intensive meditative techniques.  Steve indulged in both of these activities and this probably convinced him that he had the will power to make subordinates and colleagues achieve the impossible.  But as the old saying goes, “it takes two to tango,” and Steve couldn’t have been a leader of the RDF cult, if he did not have willing followers. The bottom line is Steve used RDF for the public good – he led them to create insanely good products and did not get them to just drink the Kool-Aid.  In any event, this is not a management style that I would recommend because it is not one that can be taught–some chosen few are born with it and Steve Jobs was one of them.

From a marketing standpoint, if there is a single most appealing characteristic of Steve Jobs that stands out in Isaacson’s book, it is the one that gave him an ability to so seamlessly intersect art and engineering in a superior fashion, which can be seen in every product from the first Macintosh to the last iPad.  Steve’s mind naturally converged its logical left brain and creative right brain activities and thus enabled him to gracefully connect the complex with the simple.  More importantly, he imbued his “think different”  philosophy into every product using the KISS – Keep it Small & Simple – standard that required every user experience to be as intuitive and simple as possible, even when it meant integrating very sophisticated hardware and software to make it happen.

The flip side of Steve’s KISS was an insistence on providing a tightly-controlled, end-to-end user experience, which required him to manage a very vertically-integrated company.  In the age of the internet and open systems, this was a rather contrarian approach.  But, as Isaacson points out with several instances in the book, Steve did display some very contradictory traits–both, on the personal side and in his professional behavior.  Nonetheless, these contradictions did not prevent him from achieving what he set out to do.  Again, this is a characteristic that cannot be acquired and probably not a management style that ordinary people would be able to pull off.  But Steve did!

Steve was not only opposed to a horizontally-fragmented, decentralized company structure, but also adopted a very collaborative management style to boot–it involved all functional departments at all stages of the concept-to-launch cycle.  This operating style enabled him to tinker, change and even scrap late-stage designs and start over, if the perfectionist in him was not satisfied with the way a product/service was turning out.  Steve defied conventional product marketing methods and, in fact, did not believe in traditional market research.  Again, this methodology had a better chance of succeeding in the “build it and they will come” naiveté of the B2C world, but would be more difficult to pull off in the stricter demands of the B2B world.  It probably explains why Steve was wildly successful in the B2C industries and to a lesser degree in the B2B sectors.

If there is one big disappointment that I had with Isaacson’s book, especially because it was rushed to print barely three weeks after Steve Jobs’ passing, is that it did not contain an epilogue to cover the tragic event.  It would have been befitting for Isaacson to have mentioned Steve’s sister, Mona Simpson’s stirring eulogy at his funeral where she revealed that Steve’s final words were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”  It would have been the perfect ending to a remarkable life.  But since Isaacson failed to do so, I will keep with my analogies from “Julius Caesar” and end my own review with this parting quote from Shakespeare,

“…and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’”

[1] The Marketing Id wanted to go with “we” here but, in remaining true to the subject matter, first person singular seems apt

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A Salute to Steve Jobs – the Best Marketer in the World!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

The World's Best Marketer

We the beneficiaries of over three decades of technological innovation from that incredible marketing machine, known as Steve Jobs, are quite saddened by his decision to step down as the CEO of Apple.  It seems like he was forced to live up to the lines from a 1973 Badfinger song “Apple Of My Eye”:

You’re the apple of my heart
But now, the time has come to part

It was only a few blogs ago The Marketing Id wrote about “the revolution in mobile broadband communications brought about by the iPhone, iPad and video streaming…”  Well, to the millions and millions of happy Apple aficionados worldwide, Steve Jobs has been consistently at the forefront of what is turning out to be a rather ubiquitous cloud-based, communications and collaboration phenomenon.

So it might be worthwhile trying to figure out just why Steve Jobs has been so successful in this new converged paradigm of computers, communications and collaboration that makes available any type of content to anyone, anywhere, anytime on any device.  The uncharitable might say his success was, in large part, due to another C – control, which he undoubtedly cherished.  But control is ineffective, if you cannot command respect, which he definitely earned from customers, competitors, employees, partners, vendors, stockholders, investors and what have you.

Aside from this dominant personality trait, recent developments in the afore-mentioned converged space have convinced The Marketing Id that Steve Jobs has always been ahead of the “marketing and innovation” curve–Peter Drucker’s famous “two-and only two-basic functions of the business enterprise.”  Only in the past couple of weeks we learned about Google’s $12.5 billion offer to buy Motorola Mobility and HP’s $10.3 billion offer to buy Autonomy.  When one looks beyond the hefty price tags, it is simply one of the world’s leading software companies buying a hardware company and one of the world’s leading hardware companies buying a software company.  As a consequence of these actions, The Marketing Id had tweeted the following on August 15th:

“When Harry (hardware co.) met Sally (software co.) combos will energize the #Cloud/SaaS/Mobility/Communications/Collaboration paradigm.”

But, guess what?  Steve Jobs’ Apple had Harry and Sally as fraternal twins from the day the company started in his garage in 1976!  Yes, Steve Jobs wanted to control, both the hardware and software aspects of his product from day one.  Ask any Apple user about why they love their Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads – it’s that one stop shop of integrated quality and satisfaction that just can’t be beat!  Steve Jobs was championing convergence long before it became cool!

After Steve Jobs announced that he had resigned as CEO, The Marketing Id tweeted:

“Steve Jobs, the world’s best marketer, took his last bite as CEO of that iconic ‘American pie’–it sure feels like the day the music died!”

The Marketing Id would encourage readers, who can spare 15 minutes, to check out Steve’s inspiring commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc – it tells you a lot about what made Steve tick?

Finally, the magnificent overall imprint that Steve Jobs leaves behind reminded The Marketing Id of more apt lyrics from Stevie Wonder’s immortal song “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” also from 1973.  An older, wiser and more compassionate Steve Jobs might just be signing its words as he exits the “One Infinite Loop” of his beloved Apple campus:

You are the apple of my eye
Forever you’ll stay in my heart

As will you, in ours, Steve – for you have given all of us a wonderful ride just by thinking different.  More importantly, you brought product and marketing together like nobody else has and for that you will be sorely missed!

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