Palm Pre’s infinite geekiness shows why Apple still needs Steve Jobs

Just as the biggest story of the football offseason has been centered around whether a certain retired star will unretire, the questions most often asked in the consumer technology space so far in 2009 have also been centered around a star who’s spent the entire year away from the game: when, if ever, will Steve Jobs return to Apple? And if so, does Apple even still need him? At this point, unless we’re being bamboozled by everyone from Steve Wozniak to Apple’s board of directors, all signs point to Jobs returning to Apple by the end of the month. But the company hasn’t exactly fallen apart in his absence. It hasn’t run out of money and asked the government for a bailout. It hasn’t discontinued the iPhone and replaced it with an Apple-branded line of surfboards. Despite the lack of a major new product launch so far in his absence, Apple has done okay without Steve Jobs. But nonetheless Apple still needs him back, perhaps more so now than ever. And the reason can be summed up in two words, though not for the reason you might think: Palm Pre.

That Apple has survived, even prospered, in Steve’s absence shouldn’t come as a surprise. Though he’s not at Apple on a daily basis, he’s reportedly been included in all of Apple’s major decisions. And even if he were completely out of the loop, what makes Steve’s current absence different from his last one is that this time the company is still being run by his people. People that have been hand-selected and groomed by Steve over the past twelve years. People who, if not necessarily seeing the world as he does, nonetheless understand that Steve wants things done in a certain way. People who, over a stretch as short as six months, are going to run the company (at least from a business aspect) in largely the same manner without Steve looking over their shoulder as they would if he were.

Contrast that with the last time Steve Jobs departed from Apple, back in 1985. Steve was unceremoniously tossed out of the company by people who thought he was either an idiot or a lunatic or both. Those same folks promptly drove Apple straight into a ditch, and then spent the next twelve years limping along through that ditch, wondering where it all went wrong. By the time Steve finally came back to the company in 1997, Apple’s products had barely advanced in any meaningful way since he’d left, and the only reason Apple was still around was that its sole competitor had spent those same twelve years somehow not being able to catch up despite Apple spending the whole time spinning its wheels. So it’s no surprise that Steve’s current departure from Apple has been more successful than his first one, and you have to imagine that even if Steve were to stay away for twelve years this time, the company would do far better in the hands of his proteges than it did when it was in the hands of his clueless ideological opposites.

But if you want to know how Steve’s proteges at Apple are performing in his absence, it might be helpful to take a look at Steve’s most notable protege no longer at Apple. The Palm Pre, a desperate attempt on the part of an almost-gone company to get back into the game (or at least out of the ditch) with one swing, is largely the work of Jon Rubinstein. After retiring from Apple he ended up becoming chairman at Palm, giving us the chance to see one of Steve’s former right hand men now running his own show. Not surprisingly, Palm has thus far followed the same path that Steve Jobs laid out when he returned to a dying Apple: let go of everything that isn’t working, salvage the rest for parts, and then double down and bet the company on one notable new product launch that has to succeed. For Steve, it was the iMac. And after that succeeded, it was iLife, MacOS X, the iPod, the iPhone. For Palm it’s the Pre. So at least we know Rubinstein was paying attention all those years.

Look closer at the Pre, though, and you’ll understand the difference between the two men and their line of thinking. Steve focused on choice of computer colors (which was a radical idea back then), easy access to the internet (which in those days was a pain for most people), and lack of cable clutter (which is still a pain to this day). He went hard after the mainstream, focusing on features that the average user would see as a turn-on. More intricate details, like overhauling the aging Mac operating system and developing core Mac software applications, while being worked on at the time behind the scenes, would come later. But first Steve wanted to remind the world that Apple still existed, and that it could still come up ideas that had never occurred to anyone else in the industry, even if it was something as superficial as blue and pink computers that didn’t require a minitower sitting on the desk.

Rubinstein’s first swing out of the gate has been decidedly different. While a smartphone is the most logical new product for Palm to pursue when you weigh its historical strengths with what the market currently wants, the specifics of the Pre are what gives away his philosophies. Nevermind that the mainstream success of the iPhone has already proven that the average user doesn’t care about a physical keyboard; the Pre has the added bulk of a slide-out keyboard with thirty-five different keys on it. Nevermind that the average user doesn’t even know what “multitasking” means, and even those few who are familiar with the concept tend to understand that a device with such limited hardware power shouldn’t allow wide open multitasking among third-party apps; the Pre does so anyway, favoring theoretical power over practical usability. The features that Jon Rubinstein has chosen to focus on tell us exactly how he views the world: the iPhone would be a great product if only it were a lot geekier. And breaking new ground isn’t nearly as important as steering the technology market away from its recent flirtation with what the consumer actually wants, in favor or returning the market to its original geek ideals. Which is a shame, because anyone who’s ever heard Rubinstein speak knows that he’s a brilliant computer engineer.

By all accounts the Pre isn’t a confusing inconsistent mess like you’d get from Blackberry. It isn’t a buggy incompetent joke like you’d expect from Microsoft. Instead it’s a fully competent product – yet it’ll still fail to find any traction among mainstream users whatsoever. And its only apparent sin is that instead of trying to give the mainstream what it wants, the Pre tries to give geeks what they want, either in the hopes that the other ninety-nine percent of the population can be retrained as geeks, or in total ignorance of the fact that the other ninety-nine percent of the population even exists.

The Pre demonstrates, once and for all, that technical competence alone is not enough. Rubinstein had all those years of direct tutelage under Steve Jobs, and yet it didn’t prevent him from eventually branching out on his own and launching a product aimed at no one but fellow geeks. That tells us that Rubinstein wanted to create geek-only products like the Pre the whole time he was at Apple, and Steve was the only thing that kept him on track and motivated him to create mainstream-oriented products instead. One has to assume that the geeks who are still at Apple, and ostensibly running the show in his absence, are no different. It merely serves to further the notion that Steve is alone in the universe as the only person who can command the geeks under him to make products that are not only technically competent but also geared toward what regular users want from such a product, the latter of which goes against every instinct in a geek’s mind and body.

If Steve were to never return to Apple, the fear is not that the company would eventually become incompetent. No, the real fear is that Steve’s proteges would eventually turn it into one big episode of “geeks gone wild” by cranking out products that are only suitable for the geekiest one percent of the population and seen as mere necessary evils by the rest of us. That’s exactly what goes on at every other technology company on the planet, and now we appear to know that Steve’s continued presence is the only thing that’s preventing the same thing from happening at Apple. After all, we’ve just learned that no matter how many years a geek might spend under Steve’s command, he’s going to revert to his geek-only instincts the moment he’s no longer under Steve’s thumb. And for that reason alone, for the other ninety-nine percent of us, Steve’s return to Apple can’t come fast enough.