Forget about whether
Apple buying Twitter is a boneheaded move. Here’s what it is: It isn’t a Steve Jobs move. This is the first sign of the post-Jobs Apple.
The argument at Apple since Jobs got sick has been that the bench is deep, that it’s not a one-man show, that his acolytes and lackeys would know what to do when the time came.
Jobs' odd and singular point of view has been always to focus on the machine. It’s been the Apple formula almost without deviation: Build a beautiful machine with beautiful software to go with it—each dependent on the other.
In a world where hardware was commoditized, this was highly counter-intuitive. There may not be anyone else in the whole technology business who believes so much in this idea. In a software-driven world, there may not be anyone who believes in this idea at all. Indeed, it was the stubbornness and limited vision of this idea that allowed Microsoft for so long to dominate the PC world—and that, for both better and worse, made Apple what it is.
Probably even the people at Apple who have worked with Jobs for many years, and who have, variously, been oppressed by him, don’t believe in the idea of the machine either. And who can blame them? Everyday the world becomes less and less tethered to any sort of machine—except if you have an Apple-made machine.
(AP Photo)
For the better part of a decade, Microsoft, which pioneered machine-agnostic software, had been running after the next iteration of machinelessness, mostly ineptly trying to find its Internet place, and now vainly trying to somehow compete in the Google-style clouds.
You’d be hard-pressed not to try to compete with Google if you were a technology executive—except if you were Steve Jobs. Jobs, when last seen, still seemed uniquely and crankily to pursue the idea that if you had a sexy box you were a sexy person with enough market share to make it work for you.
But now Twitter. Apple is seriously considering buying Twitter because it has exactly what unique relationship to the Macintosh or iPod or iPhone? Well, precisely none at all. Instead, what this is is a non-Google company’s effort to
compete with Google, or deprive Google of
the chance to buy Twitter, or, even more grandly and desperately, somehow try to join the social networking world. None of which has anything directly to do with the great Apple machine.
But Apple, post-Jobs, likely becomes an ordinary technology company in a big dither about catching up to somebody else, trying to buy whatever somebody else might be trying to buy.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com.
