“You know, I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple. I can’t say any more than that it’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple. But nobody there will listen to me.” - Steve Jobs, Fortune (Sept. 1995)

One school of thought is adamant about Steve’s thinking and actions being unable to offer any valuable lessons for others. That only worked for Steve, they solemnly tell us. They reach this mistaken conclusion by overlooking the scientific basis of Steve’s thinking and actions.

Partly to blame is a media insistent on ignoring facts that don’t fit the ‘lonely and misunderstood genius’ model they enjoy using to describe Steve.

Other sources of information are often lacking the key historical details that put a completely different spin on the events. They prefer to lazily repeat bromides like ‘open beats closed.’

The fact is that Steve’s methods worked quite consistently, but you’d hardly know it from most sources. Getting the details right and being able to discount those without credibility, no matter how loud they are, takes meticulous work.

That meticulous work is rarely done by the media or researchers. Instead, they take the easier path and write Steve’s actions off as magical.

Steve wasn’t really opaque — “I’ve got a plan that could rescue Apple” isn’t really open to interpretation. He clearly said it was a plan.

“It’s the perfect product and the perfect strategy for Apple” is not a magical wishing well. It’s a product strategy.

So, lets address the claims about him being a one-of-a-kind genius head on.

No matter how many times variations of ‘Apple does everything wrong, yet magically succeeds’ get repeated, it doesn’t become reality. There’s a massive difference between being unable to see an example, and simply refusing to follow it.

If you keep observing explosions as people walk across a field, at some point it’s got to become obvious that it’s a minefield.

Take the example of the many different digital music stores that tried to beat iTunes and failed explosively.

OK, so anyone can see that it’s dangerous to walk there and one wrong step could be fatal. But, what about that guy walking happily around the field? At first, you can dismiss him as lucky. But, once he’s been out there for years, walking back and forth, something is going on. Nobody is that lucky:

Year after year, iTunes smashed sales and profit records. Again and again, competitors appeared and swore up and down that consumers really wanted subscription models and songs with variable pricing. Meanwhile, a decade on, they are long gone and iTunes is still following a highly successful model where consumers own their songs and they all cost the same price.

The answer isn’t a mystery — since that field-walker is avoiding those land-mines, he must know where to walk safely. But how does he know?

Rather than recognizing the scientific methods he successfully applied, we commonly encounter a magical explanation for Steve’s ability to avoid land-mines — he was a ‘visionary’.

The pitfall with accepting this magical explanation is that this paints a picture of his products as inevitably being successful, and him as merely being the first to create them. It’s reversing cause and effect to describe conceiving of a great product plan, and implementing it, as predicting the future. He did not predict the inevitable outcome of forces beyond his control, he created a specific outcome that he had envisioned. He saw what could be done with technology and then he made it happen:

“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, “Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.” And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, “We can’t build that!” And it gets a lot worse.… Sure enough, when we took it to the engineers, they said, “Oh.” And they came up with 38 reasons. And I said, “No, no, we’re doing this.” And they said, “Well, why?” And I said, “Because I’m the CEO and I think it can be done.” And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit⁠1.”

Simple minds often decide it’s all a magic trick. Frustrated, they even make up stories about how it’s all somehow just an illusion and that guy isn’t really walking on the field at all. Ultimately, when that guy personally gives us a guided tour of the mine-field, freely and safely, the reality cannot be denied:

Steve called out the reality of how easily a music service could fail when competing against illegal file-sharing services. These illegal services offered a vast selection of music, “Better than any record store on the planet”. “Illegal downloads allow the ability to burn the files to any number of CDs, and copy them to an unlimited number of MP3 players and computers.”

He laid out the safe path to competing successfully against file-sharing services — any song, one flat price. People want an easy way to buy high quality music, and they really prefer not to steal. However, they don’t want to be penalized with limitations that illegal downloads don’t have. They want to own music, not rent it. If you transfer songs to consumers quickly and reliably, offer a better catalog with a better experience that doesn’t penalize doing the right thing, then people will happily pay.

At some point you stop labeling and start adding up the facts. Land-mines are metal — fact. He is waving a wand in front of him that’s beeping — fact. He is stepping safely and carefully — fact. He’s using a metal detector to find the land-mines — fact. Facts…Bingo!

People had been buying music on records, tapes and CD’s for decades. When libraries were introduced, the common claim had been that nobody would buy books anymore, and history had disproven that. “In essence, we would make a deal with people. If they would pay a fair price, we would give them a better product and they would stop being pirates.”

“If we go back and raise prices now — we will be violating that implicit deal. And they would never buy anything from iTunes again.” Steve said. “Users would say, ‘I knew it all along that the music companies were gonna screw me, and now they’re screwing me.’”

Steve believed that, ‘music was good for the soul,’ and fans clearly wanted to download and own the songs they enjoyed in an affordable and easy way, and he created that way.

Microsoft was just one of many that disregarded Steve’s insights completely and ran blindly into that mine-field. They produced a device/store combo that was the epitome of the music companies’ every desire. They arrogantly expected to bulldoze consumer’s usage rights and crush the iPod and iTunes in one fell swoop. That arrogance birthed the Zune and it was an explosive failure.

The Zune Marketplace was a consumer’s nightmare. You had to have an active subscription to play songs you had downloaded to your Zune and thought you owned. Music labels created a chaotic mess because their every whim dictated allowable consumer actions. Some tracks forbid sending to others through Wifi, randomly negating the Zune’s touted sharing features. To force consumers into buying CD’s, some albums would reserve the popular tracks and not allow downloading them. Consumers couldn’t burn CDs from any downloaded music. Just as Steve had warned, users were saying, “I knew it all along that the music companies were gonna screw me, and now they’re screwing me.”

While the basic structure of Zune’s business was wrong for reasons he’d already articulated, Steve also shared his understanding of the basic human flaws that were killing the Zune:

Commenting on the Zune’s claims to be all about building communities — “I’ve seen demonstrations on the internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s gotten up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.”

That guy walking in the mine-field is safe because he’s got a metal detector. He respects the information that it provides, and acts accordingly. Mystery solved.