Wise Startup Blog

For those of you who love Apple, you are great admirers of Steve Jobs and are well aware of his work. For some, however, Apple is an often-sneered at company for its “elitist” practices. Either way, at the end of the day, if you’re listening to music on the go, you have an iPod. Love him, hate him, either way you’ve succumbed to the Apple marketing monster.

Apple’s advertising makes you covet their products and the products, well, they speak for themselves. They are some of the most attractive (while sometimes faulty) devices on the planet and people wait in lines for days at a time just to get a hand on their latest iPhone.

Apple has been able to turn itself from a less than 1% market share personal-PC maker into the behemoth it is. iTunes is the #1 music store, they sell 10s of millions of iPods every year, and their PC market share is increasing every quarter. All of this, is from one man, and the team surrounding him: Steve Jobs.

So how does Steve do it? After MobileMe, their revamped offering of .Mac services which allows you to sync contacts and calendars across your iPhone, PC, and Mac, fluttered upon release a month ago, the company has been struggling to put the pieces back together.

Steve Jobs just wrote an internal memo to his team, and possibly shows us some insight as to how the whole show is orchestrated. In the memo, Steve using a couple of different tactics I want to discuss a little more:

Apple is a Team
WholeFoods famously pledged that the top executive would not make more than 14x times their lowest level employee. We can argue whether they really do that or not, regardless, Steve Jobs is a member of the Apple team. He is writing this email as if he were sitting right next to you in your cubicle highlighting the mistakes the company made and also congratulating them on their achievements. For most corporations, the CEO sits on a golden thrown, protected by Golden Parachutes, and Steve’s humility is one of the things that employees and customers admire so much.

State the Mistakes, Offer Solutions
In the memo, Steve’s first words are, “…MobileMe was not our finest hour,” quickly getting to the point and showing the team exactly what they did wrong. And with each mistake Apple made, he offers solutions, and from those solutions he closes with a hooray! closing that keeps the team motivated, still proud, and wanting to correct their mistakes and learn from them.

Act Quickly, and Learn From Mistakes
MobileMe was launched a little over a month ago, yet, the company has already been restructured in an effort to correct the mistakes made. Typically, companies wait a couple of months, “for things to pan out,” before any major changes are made. Not at Apple, Steve Jobs quickly promoted Eddy Cue, who is now charged with preventing this same problem from happening again.

Apple is a great company, but they do make mistakes. From these mistakes, however, they learn many valuable lessons that will help them in future endeavors. For your own company, you should be very careful to learn from the mistakes you’re making now. While you’re young, it’s easy to make mistakes, but as your company and your team grow, learning how to fix these mistakes can get harder and harder. Below is the memo from Steve Jobs on the MobileMe memo.

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour. There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe. Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve

Let us know what you think about the memo in the comments.