There is a point in the life of all companies where they go from being truth machines to lie machines. The honesty necessary to succeed when times are difficult, either as a start-up or as a firm fighting off disaster, becomes a tendency to distortion when the cash is flowing freely and the profits seemingly endless.
Apple may not quite be there yet. But the firm regarded as the benchmark for elegant, popular technology is fast becoming one of the bad guys, a byword for the moral failings of global capitalism. While its profits soar, minor blips, like the recent news that the latest iPhone has a dodgy antenna, can be smoothed over. Last week, all it took was a presentation by its revered CEO Steve Jobs, and consumers were reassured. Apple looked like it cared and so the share price can spin ever upwards.
Yet Apple’s real problems are far bigger. The company has always whipsawed between a Californian counter-culture and the demands of the capitalist crucible that is Silicon Valley. One minute it wants to defeat Microsoft, the next to channel Mahatma Gandhi. For years, its emotional wanderings were a nice distraction and a useful marketing gimmick. You could buy Apple and not only get an elegant, well-functioning product, but feel good about it too.
The company reflected the contradictions of its founder, Steve Jobs. When he was 19 years old, a couple of years before founding Apple, Jobs, having dropped out of university, travelled with a friend to India, searching for enlightenment. He found India to be dirty and enlightenment elusive. As he put it later: ‘It was one of the first times that I started to realise that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba [a then fashionable guru] put together.’
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