TheSteveJobsemailthatoutlinedApplesstrategyayearbeforehisdeathQuartz
PRIMARY SOURCE
Jobs said 2011 would be "the Year of the Cloud." (AP/dapd/Marcio Jose Sanche)
In 2010, a year before his death, Steve Jobs outlined Apples strategy in an email to the
companys 100 most senior employees. He heralded the Post PC era, vowed Holy War
with Google, promised to further lock customers into our ecosystem, and warned that
Apple was in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long.
The email was an agenda for Apples annual top 100 meeting later that year. It was
released this week as part of Apples lawsuit against Samsung over smartphone patents.
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TheSteveJobsemailthatoutlinedApplesstrategyayearbeforehisdeathQuartz
released this week as part of Apples lawsuit against Samsung over smartphone patents.
Here is the entire email:
From: Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>
Date: October 24, 2010 6:12:41 PM PDT
To: ET <et@group.apple.com>
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TheSteveJobsemailthatoutlinedApplesstrategyayearbeforehisdeathQuartz
it out yet
tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem
2015: new campus
2. State of the Company
Rosner
2011 Strategy: ship iPad 2 with amazing hardware and software before our
competitors even catch up with our current model
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TheSteveJobsemailthatoutlinedApplesstrategyayearbeforehisdeathQuartz
Strategy: catch up to Android where we are behind (noti cations, tethering, speech,
) and leapfrog them (Siri, )
Timeline of iOS releases from rst until Telluride, including Verizon
Jasper tent poles
Durango tent poles (without MobileMe)
Telluride tent poles (with catch up and leapfrog notations on each one)
DEMOS:
Jasper: AirPlay to AppleTV video from iPad, photos from iPhone, ??
Durango: ?? (without MobileMe features)
Telluride: Siri, ?
6. MobileMe Cue, SJ, Roger Rosner
Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud
storage)
Android
deeply integrates Google cloud services
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deeply integrates Google
cloud services
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Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great must have accessory for
iOS devices
sales so far, projections for this holiday season
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TheSteveJobsemailthatoutlinedApplesstrategyayearbeforehisdeathQuartz
Read this next: Why Apples dream for television keeps falling apart
ORGANIZATION
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In this series, Perfect Company, we are examining pockets of excellence in the corporate
world. No single company is perfect, but together they show what the corporate ideal could
look like.
The practice
The headquarters of Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is a bright and airy space
in San Franciscos South of Market district. Hawthorne, as its called after the small alley
it sits on, is decidedly industrial with its concrete oors and exposed beams. Like many
of its neighboring tech companies, there are ping pong tables, free snacks, and company
swag. But somethings missing here. Where are all the employees?
With a staff of 450 spread over 45 countries, Automattic is often regarded as one of the
largest and most successful examples of a fully distributed workforce. I used to be very
con icted, says CEO Matt Mullenweg. All I hear from my friends in San Francisco is
how hard it is to hire. Should I not tell them this secret? I decided its a great idea and
everyone should do it. Ill keep shouting from the rooftop because everyone should do
it.
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For Mullenweg, it was only natural the companys employees would work remotely given
its roots in WordPress, an open-source blog publishing network with collaborators all
over the world. (WordPress VIP, however, is a commercial product that powers many
news organizations websites, including Quartz.) Weve never worked any other way, he
says. While the company does pay for employees coworking spaces, overall its saving on
real estate and relocation costs, though it declined to say how much. The company
insists that ultimately cost wasnt a deciding factor.
To make the distributed model work, Automattic, which was founded in 2005, relies on
technology to keep employees in sync. Even if team members are in the same location,
the company encourages meetings to take place online in the spirit of transparency.
The worst possible thing when youre working from home is that you feel youre not in
the loop, says Toni Schneider, who served as CEO from 2006 to 2014. We want
everyone else who is remote to feel completely equal. (Like many WordPress employees,
Schneider likes to mix work with travel, as he did during a cross-country road trip with
his family in the summer of 2008.)
Automattic is a place with few hard and fast rules. In addition to letting staff work where
and when they want, it has an open-vacation policy and urges employees to use your
best judgment when it comes to expenses, according to Ingrid Miller, who works in
human resources. The company is broken up into about 70 teams varying in size from
two to about a dozen people. Mullenweg describes the setup as a collection of small
startups working in harmony with each other. Teams are empowered to try new tools if
they believe it can help them work more ef ciently.
A decade-plus of experimentation has led Automattic to its current set of tools:
Slack, a business chat app used for day-to-day communication
P2, a WordPress theme modeled after Twitters stream with in-line
replies for more in-depth discussions
Wikis, eld guides with content that rarely changes
Zoom video conferencing
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But there were many pain points before it arrived at this arrangement. Originally,
Automattic used Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text chat protocol that predates AOL
Instant Messenger, for instant messaging. But with the proliferation of mobile devices,
employees sought an easier way to chat from their phones. Skype was far from a perfect
solution, but it had a mobile app, making it one of the better offerings in 2008. The main
drawback was that conversations were siloed into individual groups, which is terrible
for distributed companies, says Schneider.
There was an awkward transition period where employees were expected to be on both
IRC and Skype. Eventually, the company migrated to Slack en masse, but even that came
with its false starts, as various teams had used and abandoned the chat app before it
nally stuck for good in 2014. Our lifeblood today is Slack and [a WordPress theme] we
created called P2, says Mullenweg.
Slack checked off a number of boxes for Automattic. It had a mobile app, and it allowed
employees to chat in public channels, privately in groups, and directly with colleagues.
Still there were some holdouts, recalls software engineer Kat Hagan, who lives in
Oakland. Some employees worried about trusting a third party with its chat logs. Plus, in
an ideal world, all of Automattics tools would be open source. In this case, convenience
won out.
As with all chat apps, Slacks constant pings can be distracting, and its easy for
conversations to get derailed. To keep important discussions from disappearing into the
ether, the company has a speci c WordPress theme that keeps conversations focused
with threaded conversations. Created during a 2008 company gathering in Oracle,
Arizona, P2 (originally called Prologue) is like the WordPress equivalent of an activity
stream, says Davide Casali, a London-based designer whose team works on WordPress
themes.
For all the thought that went into chat, there are gray areas. There are times when a
discussion in Slack picks up so much chatter that it becomes better suited for P2. We
have an emoji for thata P2, says Casali. That usually prompts a person involved in the
conversation to transcribe and summarize the discussion in a P2 post.
But subtlety can get lost in text transmission. I would probably say the biggest
breakthrough for us was really when [Google] Hangouts started to come along, and really
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breakthrough for us was really
when [Google] Hangouts started to come along, and really
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the idea of group video conferencing all of a sudden became very doable, says
Schneider. In Automattic fashion, some teams later tried Zoom, a video conferencing
chat app that displays participants in a Brady Bunch-like grid, and now were all sort of
hopping on the Zoom train, says Hagan.
Of course, video is not a complete replacement for face-to-face interactions. Some
within the organization, including Mullenweg, have contemplated the role virtual reality
can play in collaboration, but thats a faraway future. For now, its hard to beat the real
thingsitting across from a coworker, able to read his or her body language and facial
ticks in person. This is why Automattic organizes a company-wide meetup once a year in
an exotic locale for a week. Teams are also encouraged to plan their own outings, mixing
work and play, two to three times a year with a budget of about $250 per person per day,
excluding airfare.
While its possible to work remotely, theres a bonding and a familiarity that develops
when youre in person together thats irreplaceable, says Mullenweg.
The takeaways
For a fully distributed company to work, everybody needs to be on the same page.
Automattic believes transparency is a key part of that, and that means making
conversations, documents, meetings, and leadership training sessions open to the entire
company. Furthermore, as Mullenweg wrote in a 2012 blog post, you have to be really
committed to keep the creative center and soul of the organization on the internet, and
not in an of ce.
Employees are drawn to Automattic because of the companys exibility, but that can
also make it tough to maintain a work-life balance, something employees have to gure
out for themselves. For example, Hagan, a night owl who says she works best from 9pm
to 2am, will offset a particularly long workday with a shorter one. Ultimately,
Automattics not the kind of company that feels the need to peer over employees
shoulders. Its less focused on setting rules as much as expectations that employees will
get their work done.
When Automattic grew to 50 people and later to 150 people, Mullenweg had concerns
around how the distributed model would scale. Much thought went into what tools to
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around how the distributed model would scale. Much thought went into what tools to
use and how to use them. Employees, who are in small, agile teams, are encouraged to
experiment with different ways of working. Sometimes these experiments are adopted
companywide (as was the case with Slack), and sometimes, they fail (like one teams
attempt at Holacracy).
If we make it look easy, its because were working incredibly hard at it, says
Mullenweg. At this point, though, he doesnt see an upper bound to it and says he can
imagine Automattic as a company with thousands of remote employees.
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