What is the secret to Apple's success? After introducing the iPad 2 in March, Steve Jobs offered one answer:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing — and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.

Steve Jobs' resignation as CEO of Apple leaves the company without its founder and lead visionary, but still in very capable hands. As I've written, Tim Cook is better suited than anyone in the tech industry to run Apple and lead the company into the future.

The talents of Jony Ive, Phil Schiller and Ron Johnson (or Johnson's successor) will ensure that Apple's design, marketing and retail needs are well-met. The software teams have great talent and a clear road map, and Jobs' attention to detail and passion for perfection permeate Apple's culture from top to bottom.

Without Jobs, Apple's only missing piece is the role he unofficially filled for years: chief advocate for media, humanities and liberal arts. If that sounds trivial, remember this: At several key points in its history, Jobs' skill in this role saved and transformed the company.

Jobs famously isn't a trained programmer, engineer or MBA, or even a wunderkind dropout steeped in any of those fields like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. (The New York Times even did a discussion panel earlier this year titled, "Career Counselor: Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?," contrasting the two founders' engineering vs. liberal arts approach to education — something of a false dilemma, even for Gates and Jobs, but a revealing one all the same.)

Instead, Jobs dropped out from Reed College after a semester, lingering only to crash on friends' dorm room floors and audit classes in topics like calligraphy that he found interesting in themselves, as he recounts in his 2005 Stanford commencement address:

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

In the short term, this choice and this focus helped kick off desktop publishing, computational-graphic and architectural design, and a hundred other businesses and developments tied to personal computing. It helped make the Mac the computer of choice in education, the arts, academia and among literary and creative professionals — or consumers who wanted to feel like one. But it's also even a level higher than that.

The first Mac did more than just make Xerox's file-and-folders desktop metaphor popular; it transformed it from the WYSIWYG of office printers and copiers to a genuine graphic user interface, where richly visual creative activity could actually be made and experienced on the computer itself. As Wired contributing editor Steven Johnson writes, it "made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in."

The creative side of that equation played out most spectacularly at Pixar, Jobs' other great business success story. At NeXT, Jobs was able to learn about and experiment with the future of computing, focusing on networks and developing the software that would become iOS and OS X. But because of Pixar, Jobs returned to Apple with a hit company and better knowledge than anyone in the tech industry of how the creative industry worked, and even more importantly, how it didn't:

One of the things I learned at Pixar is that the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other. In Silicon Valley and most technology companies, I swear most people still think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting around on an old couch, drinking beer and thinking up jokes. That's how television is made, they think. That's how movies are made. And I've seen at Pixar that that couldn't be further from the truth. The folks on the creative side work as hard as any technology folks I've ever seen in my life; they're just as disciplined; the process is just as difficult and disciplined as an engineering process is. The contrapositive is true, too. People in Hollywood and the content industries think technology is something that you just write a check for and buy. They don't understand the creative element of technology.... They don't understand that this stuff is created by people working extraordinarily hard, and with passion, just like the creative talent that they have. These are like ships passing in the night. One of the greatest achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got them working side by side.

Jobs' ability to bring these two cultures together and translate between them contributed directly to Apple's transformation from a computer company to a media company. It helped Apple position the PC as a digital hub, storing, syncing and connecting post-PC digital devices like cameras, camcorders and MP3 players.

As much as the iPod, it allowed the company to succeed where everyone else had (and largely has) failed, as the iTunes store turned Apple into a digital media retailer. Finally, Apple's strength in media and software sales is largely what turned post-PC from a device category into an industry.

That's a much bigger deal than admittedly charming stories about weekend calls from Jobs complaining about the wrong yellow gradient in an iOS icon.

So where does Apple's post-PC, liberal-arts–and–technology spaceship go without Jobs at the helm?

Let me tell you what I hope is true.

Continue reading ...

I hope that as chairman of Apple's board, Steve Jobs continues to serve as Apple's chief advocate for the humanities and liberal arts. I hope he continues to speak the philosophy that what ultimately matters in technology is that a device is ultimately a vessel for human ideas and values and a tool for personal expression. I hope he steps back from the day-to-day business of the company to make that and that alone, apart from caring for his health, his sole responsibility at the company.

I hope by formulating and repeating the mantra that Apple is a company built on the synthesis of technology and the liberal arts, that Jobs has been preparing both Apple and its customer base for this transition for some time, arranging the company so that this can be his role for the foreseeable future.

I hope that this foreseeable future extends beyond the horizon, and that Steve Jobs can stay with Apple and if not with Apple, with his family and loved ones, for a long, long time.

Now let me tell you what worries me about Apple's future, even if all of this is true.

Apple's unique success with the iTunes store shows that "technology married with the liberal arts" is not just an issue of making devices that look pretty and are easy to use. User-centered design is a huge component of what Apple does and why it and other companies have been successful in the consumer market. But it's also a question of being able to translate between technology, media and creative industries. This ability is what delivers key partnerships; this ability is what allows technology companies to build platforms.

It's unfair to say that Tim Cook isn't a proven big-picture technology visionary like Steve Jobs, because nobody is. Jobs' only peer in the industry, Bill Gates, is semi-retired, too. And I doubt he's available (or would be welcome) to run Apple.

It's also unfair to say that Cook "isn't a product guy." He ran the Mac division for six years, steering it through product transitions that would have stopped other companies in their tracks, delivering better design and engineering at lower costs, and nearly quadrupling the division's sales and share during a crummy economy, at precisely the time when the iPad is cannibalizing laptop sales and the PC itself is supposed to be dead or dying.

As I've written before, someday people are going to reverentially study the success of the Mac during Tim Cook's tenure. It's a miracle.

Oh, and while iOS software now has a separate senior VP (Scott Forstall), iPod, iPhone and iPad hardware fall under the domain of Mac hardware senior VP Bob Mansfield, who reports directly to Tim Cook, not Steve Jobs. (He's always reported to Tim Cook.)

It's entirely fair, however, to say that Tim Cook is not a media guy. He's not a humanities–and–liberal-arts guy. He's an engineer and a businessman, and extraordinarily talented at both. But while he can easily coordinate design, engineering, business and product development, he doesn't have a proven track record translating between technology and the creative industries.

In fact, now that Jobs has stepped down, nobody in Apple's top-level executive team does. That is, at least not anyone with nearly the same force and visibility Jobs was able to bring to bear.

What's more, if you drill down to the VP level, there's nobody whose titular responsibilities include media partnerships. (By contrast, there are separate VPs for iPhone and iPad marketing, and a VP specifically for educational sales, aka the "real" liberal arts.)

Apple certainly has a directly responsible individual, or DRI in company parlance, for its different media partnerships, as it does for everything else in the company. But the visible face of its media efforts and strongest voice in intercompany negotiations has always been Steve Jobs.

This is an awkward place for a technology company with deep roots in media to find itself.

Arguably, Apple's been slipping for some time on this front, as Jobs and the company's focus have been elsewhere:

It took years for Apple to ship an updated version of Final Cut Pro, its flagship product for video professionals. When it finally did, plenty of fans who'd had ample time to entrench themselves in the old UI declared their hatred for the new version.

Apple took an unusually long time to acknowledge the potential of e-books on the iPhone and iPad. When the company finally launched iBooks, it had to engage in arguably shady, allegedly illegal tactics to nix Amazon's first-mover advantage.

Apple still hasn't been able to crack IPTV or computing in the living room. Luckily for the company,nobody else (besides Netflix) really has either. Setting aside long-standing rumors of future Apple-made TVs, Google and Microsoft are right now probably closer than Apple to figuring this space out.

By asking for a 30 percent toll on in-app sales — a millage that makes sense in principle and mostly works for software apps and some services, but is generally ruinous for low-margin media sales — Apple alienated media publishers and retailers and set them to work recreating their products for the open web. The media action isn't in the apps any more, and Apple's lost some ground and more chances at future revenue.

Plus, you know, the social thing.

For about five years, even as Apple was recharging the Mac, taking smartphones by storm and making the first tablet consumers wanted to buy, its strategies for media, education and the creative industries — its ticket back to relevance after 1997 — have largely stagnated.

Sure, Apple had a strong store, best-selling media players and plenty of other opportunities for growth. But it was also bumping up against the limitations of Steve Jobs.

Jobs has a passion for software, consumer electronics and music. He has experience running a major movie studio. But he doesn't watch television or use social media. He generally doesn't play video games or read blogs or plow through e-books. (If he does, he isn't passionate or vocal about it. Maybe he secretly loves Halo. I don't know.)

For those of who are passionate about these things, Jobs and, by extension, Apple have literally had no idea what we want, why we would want it or how to deliver it to us.

Music was enough to beat the Zune or the Blackberry. It's not enough to beat Xbox, Facebook, Google or Amazon. With hardware competitors like HP falling away, that's Apple's next arena. If it can't innovate alone, it will have to choose its partners well.

Without a Steve Jobs to drive innovation in those markets, and without someone who's better than Steve Jobs at anticipating and reacting to the new media markets still emerging, Apple's going to find that battle very tough to win.

Apple needs more than just an advocate for media, creativity and the liberal arts now; it needs a champion. We all do.

——

Follow us for disruptive tech and media news: Tim Carmody and Epicenter on Twitter; Tim Carmody on Google+.

See Also:- Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple