Claire Cain Miller has a good piece on how Larry Page is changing Google and on his management style:

The changes began just a week after Mr. Page started the new job. He streamlined Google’s notoriously labyrinthine structure, and sent the e-mail on meetings. He began requiring senior executives to show up at headquarters for an informal face-to-face meeting at least once a week to plow through decisions, an idea he borrowed from Mr. Bloomberg.

Salar Kamangar, senior vice president of YouTube, said Mr. Page forced him and another executive to settle a dispute in person that they had been waging over e-mail. “He called us into the office that day, very principal-style, and made sure we resolved the difference before we left the room,” Mr. Kamangar said.

Although Mr. Page is more attentive to detail than Mr. Schmidt — becoming deeply involved in initiatives as small as giving Gmail’s home page a bigger sign-in box — he is also pushing employees to think big. “He tried to get all of us to step back a little bit and just make sure that the long-term things weren’t getting drowned out by the incremental,” said Alan Eustace, senior vice president for search.

Smart. I bet we see a much better Google in five years than we’ve seen.

HP doesn’t know what to do with WebOS:

HP CEO Meg Whitman just told a room full of Palm and HP employees that the company doesn’t yet know what to do with webOS. “It’s really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,” she told those gathered with her on the HP campus, adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks. This comes as a bit of a surprise, as reports recently swirled that the computer-maker has been in discussions to sell off the troubled mobile platform to the highest bidder. “If HP decides [to keep webOS], we’re going to do it in a very significant way over a multi-year period,” she said, adding that “it’s a very expensive proposition, but HP can make that bet.”

John Gruber points out that this is really, really dumb, because the people behind WebOS are jumping ship, and you lose more every day you dither. The talent that came with the Palm acquisition is more important than the technology itself.

Sad. HP could have done something really terrific with WebOS, but there’s little chance of that now.

Horace Dediu:

Just like David’s sling, these technologies are not powerful in and of themselves, but rather, the way they are used makes them unpredictably sinister. The context of using capacitive touch on a handheld device rather than on a table-top makes it disruptive. Coupling it with high-speed mobile networks and powerful but efficient microprocessors made it into a force.

That is now ancient history. The consequences and repercussions are still being felt and weighed, but the smart money should be focusing on the next shift. From the time frame in the diagram above, it’s clear that the cycle time between “Revolutionary User Interfaces” is shrinking. It’s been five years since multi-touch. Is the next “RUI” already here? Is Siri the next RUI?

On the last episode of the Critical Path, Horace argues that it is, but also that Apple shouldn’t merely think of it as a sustaining technology—that is, a new technological advantage that will strengthen their current lead, rather than provide the next disruption in the industry.

I suggest you listen to the episode, if only because it’s a very powerful way of analyzing industries.

There’s little doubt that Apple has the most well managed supply chain in the world:

That mentality—spend exorbitantly wherever necessary, and reap the benefits from greater volume in the long run—is institutionalized throughout Apple’s supply chain, and begins at the design stage. Ive and his engineers sometimes spend months living out of hotel rooms in order to be close to suppliers and manufacturers, helping to tweak the industrial processes that translate prototypes into mass-produced devices. For new designs such as the MacBook’s unibody shell, cut from a single piece of aluminum, Apple’s designers work with suppliers to create new tooling equipment. The decision to focus on a few product lines, and to do little in the way of customization, is a huge advantage. “They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” says Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner (IT) who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the last four years.

What allows them to even do that is they are so focused around a few products and such a tightly unified company. If Apple was structured into basically autonomous divisions that made decisions based on what’s best for them, their operations strategy would be impossible. Apple is reaping the benefits of a focused company.

To end his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson printed an extended excerpt of what Jobs said during their interviews. This section, if you haven’t read it already, is worth the price of the book alone. I don’t want to quote too much from it (yet), because some of it is very insightful both into how Jobs operated Apple and his own personal motivations and ruining it for you all just isn’t kosher, but I did want to talk about something he said at the beginning. Jobs said,

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.

When I first read that, I didn’t think too much of it, because that’s something we’ve heard all along from Jobs, and the idea that profit is a means, not an ends, is pure Drucker. But half way into the next paragraph, I stopped and went back and re-read it.

What struck me were the last two sentences. What Jobs is saying is that not only does focusing on the product make for better products, but it completely changes the corporate, business and organizational decisions you make, too. If you are focused on maximizing profit (in the short or long-term), you end up making choices that inhibit great products and great success at best, and destroy your ability to succeed at worst.

Your goals and priorities define who you are and what decisions you make. If your overriding priority is maximizing profit, that means what the company does—the products it creates, the change in society that results, the experience customers have—is all a means to making money. And if that’s the case, sacrificing your product’s integrity to squeeze out a bit more profit is a decision you’ll make every time. If, for a new product, you have to choose between a really great design that will just delight customers but that’s much harder and more expensive to make, and a merely good design that’s cheaper to produce and less of a challenge, you won’t blink. You choose the easier one; for you, it’s the pragmatic choice. It’s good enough for customers, and it’s much easier (and cheaper) for you to produce, which means less investment in development and higher margins.

But if you, as management, are willing to sacrifice the product for profit, that changes your organization. Everyone knows what’s prioritized, so they’ll make the same decisions, too. Why should your design team pour every ounce of themselves into building the best product they can, if that isn’t what management wants? Why should someone who isn’t even directly involved with the product sit around and think about how they could be better, and make sure they tell their idea to the right person? Why should anyone in the company put their absolute best effort into everything they do, when “excellence” is defined by management as a 5 percent decrease in cost of goods sold, rather than the new idea that makes it obvious to everyone they have to stop all work on a new project and start over, because this new idea is just so clearly right? Why would anyone take personal responsibility and say that what someone else is doing is shit and it needs to be done this way?

No one will, because what kind of company you have is defined at the top. You might have the finest people in the industry, but if the culture doesn’t demand excellence, you won’t get it. And worse, as Jobs argues, this becomes self-reinforcing: instead of hiring people whose obsession is creating the best product they possibly can, you’ll start hiring people who are good at increasing sales of an existing product, decreasing costs and improving efficiency—people whose motivations are running a business or furthering their career, instead of building things. Then that feedback loop will keep on going; other people who are there to build things will either give up and submit to the new culture or leave, and you’ll hire even more similarly-minded people, until that’s all there is, and you’re left with a company that can’t do anything meaningful.

Jobs said that one of his primary tasks was to make sure that only “A” people were hired, and when he finds someone that isn’t up to that standard in the company, they are fired. That sounds cruel, but it’s necessary, because if you don’t pursue that rule without mercy, that feedback loop is difficult to reverse.

The only way to even do that, though, is to have the right values. Your most deeply-held motivation must be to make the best product you can possibly make, because you care about it. Because you want the best product. When that’s what has your heart—you think about it all day, and you find your mind wandering to it when you’re watching a movie or falling asleep—then you’ll only hire people who are talented and have that same excited look in their eye when they get to explain some new project they’re working on. You’ll make the tough decision to enter a new business that could cannibalize your existing business, because you just know it’s going to be something great. You’ll demand everyone’s best work and won’t accept half-assed effort, because dammit, we can do better. And even better, your employees will pour themselves into their work, will be their own worst critic, because that’s how things are done there. Inter-division politics and bullshit conflicts will drop away when everyone’s focused on creating the best damned thing they possibly can.

It isn’t a magic balm that, when applied to a company, will suddenly make it super-creative and effective. The primary reason for that, of course, is it’s so rare; management can make a thousand mission statements and speeches telling everyone how everything they do is about the product, but in most cases, that’s corporate bullshit talk, and everyone can see through it in a second. You have to really believe it. But even when you really do believe it, it’s a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creating that kind of company. You have to have smart strategy and execute, too, not just feel fuzzy feelings about your products.

But your motivation is the beginning of a great, and lasting, company. Without it, your company will never be truly transformative. With it, you can change the world. You have to look at your company as a tool for making something truly meaningful and sublime and beautiful. Business is a paintbrush for making the most inspiring art we’ve ever seen.

Apple is organized around functions, rather than divisions:

The result is a command-and-control structure where ideas are shared at the top — if not below. Jobs often contrasts Apple’s approach with its competitors’. Sony (SNE), he has said, had too many divisions to create the iPod. Apple instead has functions. “It’s not synergy that makes it work” is how one observer paraphrases Jobs’ explanation of Apple’s approach. “It’s that we’re a unified team.”
…
Specialization is the norm at Apple, and as a result, Apple employees aren’t exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. Jennifer Bailey, the executive who runs Apple’s online store, for example, has no authority over the photographs on the site. Photographic images are handled companywide by Apple’s graphic arts department. Apple’s powerful retail chief, Ron Johnson, doesn’t control the inventory in his stores. Tim Cook, whose background is in supply-chain management, handles inventory across the company. (Johnson has plenty left to do, including site selection, in-store service, and store layout.)

This doesn’t just mean that the best person is handling a specific task (like the photos in Apple’s online store)—it also means that the company is interwoven and has no choice but to work together. Rather than have engineering lay out the specifications for a new product, hand it off to the design department so they can create a design that meets them, and then hand it off to marketing, Apple instead integrates design, engineering and marketing from the beginning of the process.

There’s a lot to learn from Apple’s corporate and business strategies, but I think there is even more to learn from how the company’s organized. Apple is defining how companies must be organized and managed to succeed in this century.

HP is keeping their PC division after all:

HP today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company.

“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

All I can think of is a certain It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode: there’s so many twists, I can’t keep up.

I’m sure their Personal Systems Group employees are inspired to do their best work for HP now. What a mess.

Jobs was intimately involved with designing Apple’s stores:

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”

Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that what Peter Bohlin and Apple are doing is one of the more exciting things in architecture today. Just look at the entrance to Apple’s new Shanghai store: it’s beautiful.

It says a lot about a company if they put so much thought and work into the stores that sell their product.

Publishers are (rightly) running scared because of Amazon:

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.

It’s not surprising (or interesting) that the publishing industry is being disrupted by Amazon. That’s a result of technological change, and if it wasn’t Amazon, it would have been someone else. Agents and publishers depended on exclusivity—to get published, you had to know the right people—and that is no longer the case with the web.

But what is interesting is that Amazon is now an end-to-end provider of books and other written pieces. They make deals with writers directly (or allow them to sell their work on the Amazon store), sell directly to readers, and sell the device customers read on. Amazon is setting up a feedback loop where writers are pressured to sell their books to Amazon because so many people use it, readers are pressured to use it because all they can read on their Kindles are Kindle books, and soon, because Amazon will have exclusive access to certain books.

Long-term, I don’t think that’s going to last. If digital books are going to become the main way that we read, we will need a way to, one, read from a multitude of sources and two, more importantly, ensure that our purchased books will continue to be usable in the future.

Jobs didn’t like looking back:

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

“I shipped all that shit off to Stanford.”

Keep moving forward, keep working, keep building, keep creating.

Connor Tomas O’Brien:

Steve’s legacy can, I think, be summarised in a single sentence: it shows when we take care.

My life, and the lives of countless others, has been shaped by that philosophy.

That is as apt and succinct an explanation I’ve seen of Jobs’s influence. That’s what’s been directing me for years, and something I hope directs everything I do the rest of my life.

Seth Godin:

Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you’re reading this on.

What are we going to do with it?

Jobs’s greatest legacy is that we all should approach life as our canvas for achieving something truly great. It doesn’t have to be on the scale of Jobs’s achievements. All it needs to be is truly meaningful to you.

Leo Apotheker is out, and Meg Whitman is in.

So, after 11 months, HP’s board of directors fired Apotheker. What’s the reason?

A) They didn’t like that he was transitioning HP to enterprise services and out of consumer markets. If that’s the case, then why the hell did they wait until now to fire him? And why did they hire him in the first place?

B) They fired him because of fallout from his transition out of consumer markets.

I’m not sure which is worse. If the former is the case, they made a poorly considered choice when they hired him, and they’re a bunch of clowns. If it’s the latter, they have no idea where they want the company to go nor the courage to stand behind their guy. And they’re a bunch of clowns.

Maybe Meg Whitman will be a better chief executive than Apotheker, maybe not. But I know this: with these people sitting on HP’s board, they’ve got no chance.

Besides HP’s employees, the people who’ve been hurt the most by this are the Palm guys. They got sucked into a tornado of shit. If this isn’t the best example of why startups and companies should be highly skeptical of being acquired, I don’t know what is.

At D8 in 2010, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs whether he wins all inter-company disputes. Jobs replied:

Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can’t. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.

Ben Brooks wonders whether Microsoft should make their own PC:

If Microsoft did do this and they decided that they wanted to make the best possible PC — something that competes directly with, say, MacBook Pros — wouldn’t that be an interesting change?

I don’t even think it is a market that Microsoft would have to be making more than 2-3 models of computers to be in just a laptop, desktop, and tablet. All Microsoft would need to do is make the best stuff a Windows user could buy and then sell it with a healthy profit margin. Doing that, by comparison to all other PC makers, would make all others look pretty bad — both to consumers and investors.

HP exited the PC market because it’s a dying market—not only has it peaked and become a commodities business, but the iPad has shown that most people really don’t need a PC at all for what they do. HP realized that sales are going to decline in the next five to ten years and so there was no reason for them to stay in a business that isn’t profitable now and has no future.

Entering the PC business doesn’t make any more sense for Microsoft than it does for HP to remain in it. Even if we look at it purely as a question of whether it can (1) turn a profit and (2) improve the Windows PC image, they shouldn’t. The only possible path to profitability is selling a higher margin, nicely designed PC to Windows users who appreciate it. That’s possible, but they would be doing so (in the best case) at the expense of Lenovo’s Thinkpad line.

What’s the gain for Microsoft? Not much. A bit larger bottom line, at best, and they would be investing a terribly large amount of money, time and focus into a dying business.

Building a tablet, though, is a different question, and an idea that makes more sense for Microsoft to do. At the moment, Microsoft believes that “post-PC” really means “PC plus touch”—that their original tablet PCs are where we’re going to end up. That certainly isn’t a view point supported by the market, so they have a lot to prove. If they can build a tablet running Windows 8 that does everything we want a post-PC device to do, they certainly stand to benefit from it, because they would make their concept viable.

I don’t think that’s how they’re going to play it, though, because Microsoft is deluded about the future of computing. Whereas Apple sees the post-PC and PC as separate markets, Microsoft wants to believe that the tablet is another PC, and thus they can gain market share by selling them as such. They figure that they already have the vast majority of the market for PCs, so if they just conveniently make new PCs tablets, too, people will buy them just as they’ve bought every other PC they’ve ever owned. And if that’s the plan, there’s no way they’re going to build their own.