Jobs' Google Job Gibberish:  A Bullet Dodged

It has recently com out -- http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-and-sergey-wanted-steve-jobs-to-be-googles-first-ceo-2010-10 -- that Google's founders tried to hire Steve Jobs as CEO before settling on Eric Schmidt.  I've had occasion to deal with both Steve and Eric in my 30+ years in the industry, and I have to say that Google probably got lucky when they failed.

Let me first be clear that Jobs and Schmidt are two of the men I most admire, among all the CEO's and computer industry leaders I have known, men of talent, integrity and ethics.  But their strengths and talents could hardly be more different, nor their paths to success more distinct, at least among leaders whose ethics actually constrain their behavior.

Steve Jobs is a visionary and a perfectionist.  One of the things I admire most about him is his apparent devotion to a notion of success that goes beyond simple economics.  He has been remarkably consistent, over the years, in his pursuit of the "insanely great" -- his drive to build the best products anyone can imagine.  Had he been willing to compromise these principles even a bit -- for example by licensing Mac OS to other vendors -- he might have long since been richer than Bill Gates, but I doubt he has any regrets.

But the passion, vision, and perfectionism of Steve Jobs as CEO define a certain kind of company.  At Apple, there is no doubt that Steve rules.  The company is full of brilliant engineers and designers who are Steve's kindred spirits, if not his sycophants.  But inevitably there is less room for diverse opinions and approaches, and I have known several talented designers who have left Apple for the simplest of reasons:  they disagreed wtih Steve's choices, and knew they couldn't win.  When you've spent your entire adult life as a CEO, you get used to having things your way.

Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, has had a more conventional, if no less brilliant, career, climbing through the ranks of organizations such as Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Sun Microsystems before ultimately being tapped for the top job at Google.  Of necessity, he is more familiar with making and brokering compromises, and with the value of a diversity of tactics and philosophies within a large organization.  I doubt that he had any trouble stepping into the role of CEO of a company where the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, remained an active presence with at least the potential to undermine him at any moment.

Companies are indeed heavily shaped by their leaders.  Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison make no secret of their willingness to make a virtue of barely-constrained ruthlessness, and this philosophy permeates the companies they built.  Mitch Kapor's gentle Buddhism -- embodied in the very name of the company he founded, Lotus -- ultimately required him to hire another CEO who would toughen his company for the battles of the marketplace.  Steve Jobs built a company that thrives on innovation and good design, but only within the parameters defined by his vision.  It's extraordinary that he managed to grow so large a company around so coherent a philosophy.

Google's success under Eric Schmidt, by contrast, has reflected more of a "let a thousand flowers bloom" philosophy.   Google employees are strongly encouraged to explore new ideas, to the extent of famously allocating 20% of their time to such pursuits.  Such openness led to a proliferation of highly diverse products, most of them successful, but inevitably made the overall Google portfolio less coherent, less perfectly designed for usability, and less integrated than what Apple has built.

For example, the recently discontinued Google Wave -- perhaps Google's highest profile failure -- would never have gotten off the ground at Apple.  The idea was too vague; Jobs' relentless focus on simplicity and usability would have balked at Wave's revolutionary incrementalism, its determination to change the world drastically one step at a time, without a clear end point.  

But if Jobs might have saved Google the failure of Wave -- which I'd call an admirable experiment, rather than a debacle -- he would, I believe, have saved it several of its successes as well.  Steve likes to control all aspects of the user experience, which has led to successes like the iPhone, but also the more dubious expansion of iTunes into a virtual application platform across operating systems.  I'm not sure that Steve would have had an easy time separating the technical brilliance of Google's speech recognition, mapping algorithms, or advertising management from the user interface details of voice applications, mapping interfaces, or advertising presentation on a variety of platforms.  

For that matter, had Steve been with Google at the beginning, would he have been able to tolerate the diverse interfaces to the search engine that resulted from the plurality of browsers and operating systems that used it?  He probably would have started something like the Google Chrome project -- hardly a failure, but not one of Google's great successes -- much earlier, and it would probably be a prettier and more usable browser today.  But would he have simultaneously focused on ensuring a good search experience for users of Internet Explorer, or would he have opened the doors much sooner for a competitor like Bing?

Most telling of all is the example of Google Android.  Android reflects many decisions that Steve Jobs would hate.  Building Android on Linux in itself would have been a hard sell to him; OS X is built on BSD Unix in large part because it is easier to keep some parts of it proprietary.  But Linux is key to the decision -- also likely anathema to Jobs -- to license the operating system widely, to multiple vendors.  One of the biggest complaints about Android today is its inconsistency from device to device.  That's the kind of thing that drives Steve crazy, the very reason he has been so consistent in his refusal to license Mac OS or the more recent iOS to other hardware vendors

A Jobs-led Google might have produced products that were more beautiful and more consistent than those offered by today's Google.  But this would have come at the cost of openness to the inconsistencies and glitches that are the inevitable result of true diversity.  Android might be a tad lovelier, but it would probably be single-vendor.  Gmail might be more usable, and navigating Google Maps might be more intuitive and seamless, but perhaps only if you use Google Chrome to run them -- which might even be your only option.   

For my part, I'm very happy with the way things turned out.  Apple under Steve Jobs continues to show just how insanely great our digital world can be, while Google under Eric Schmidt shows how a company can be insanely prosperous by enabling diverse, heterogeneous product development in a highly interoperable manner.  It's fun to imagine alternate realities, but sometimes we should thank our lucky stars for the world we're in.