Jeff Yang explains how Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan:
CES is the home of the mainstream, the chorus, the echo chamber; by not attending, Apple maintains its identity as the maverick, the soloist, the think-different visionary — even though its massive success has now made it the world’s eighth-largest consumer technology company by revenue.
That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs’s management philosophy. As he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” (Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker’s promotion to the top spot: “You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.”)
Other companies fail to do things because they’ve overlooked potential openings or are cutting corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious, measured statement. It’s why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not including industry-standard components — for instance, the iMac’s lack of a floppy drive — just aren’t getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they’re missing as much as by what they contain.
To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa — whom he designated as the official “spiritual advisor” for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple’s CEO in 1986, and who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.
Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.
While Jobs has never invoked the term in public — one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible — ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs’ single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan’s technology titans — most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.
Jobs has long been fascinated with Sony and its co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, who gave the new company its mission statement:
“Sony will be the company that is most known for transforming the global image of Japanese goods as being of poor quality.” It defined Sony by what it would not do — make bad products — making it something of an omission statement, if you will.
By way of example, Deutschman tells the story of how Sony entered the color TV marketplace, noting that in the Sixties, when color TV was going from 3% to 25% of the market, Sony was one of the few electronics companies that didn’t sell a color model. “People were telling Ibuka, ‘You have to come in to this market, everyone will take your market share,’” says Deutschman. “And Ibuka refused, saying, ‘No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods. We will only do breakthrough technology.’”
As a result, the company found itself in a precarious financial situation, losing out to its primary rivals — until it came upon the aperture-grille technology that Sony unveiled in 1966 as the core of the Trinitron TV. A full 25% brighter than its rivals, Trinitron became the best-selling color TV for the next quarter century.
“At the time, Sony was committed to not releasing a crappy product just because the market was there; they waited until they had a truly revolutionary innovation, combined it with great design and then profited from it for long, long time,” says Deutschman. “For decades, Sony was a perfect place for engineers to fully use their creativity, because it was focused on bringing real meaning and benefit to society by making great products. Sadly, in the last couple of decades, Sony has lost its way.”
When I was in Japan a few years ago, I visited Tokyo’s high-tech district, Akihabara, to see the hot new things coming out of that famously gadget-obsessed country — and the hot new things on display were all Apple products:
Meanwhile, as Douglas Krone, CEO of Dynamism and Gizmine — sister companies that sell otherwise-unavailable Japanese gadgets to American early adopters — notes, the home of Sony has become the land of Apple.
“I was at a party last night in central Tokyo that happened to have a bunch of twentysomething guests,” he says. “Every time I saw something glowing, it was an iPhone. It was a chilling display of dominance — five years ago, you would have seen 99.9 percent Japanese handsets and 0.1 percent Nokias and MotoRAZRs. Softbank’s flagship stores look almost comical now, with rows and rows of iPhones broken only by the occasional row of iPads, in a space that used to have a wide array of handsets.”
