Watching Timothy D. Cook last week as he introduced the Apple Watch to the world was almost touching, in his channeling of his predecessor. The back-and-forth pacing of the stage, the hand gestures, the cadence of his speech and the script unabashedly filled with superlatives — “We set out to build the best watch in the world” — were all reminiscent of the late Steven P. Jobs.
Of course, Mr. Cook lacks the track record, life story and the showman’s flair of the Apple co-founder. But while leaders all leave the stage sooner or later, corporate values can endure. For decades, Apple has stood out in the business world for three things: taste, trust and utility. These are not words scribbled on a white board or printed in an annual report, but values that have guided Apple’s product and design decisions. The Apple Watch reflects and interprets those values — how well it has done that will be its test of success or failure.
Taste was a touchstone for Mr. Jobs. It was a term he used often. To him, taste was a value and a journey, acquired through curiosity, learning and life experience. Seek out the best that your culture has to offer, he would say, and your work will be enriched with taste, whether you are a software programmer or a sculptor.
Years ago, in his Palo Alto home, Mr. Jobs pointed to the wooden chairs in his living room, made by George Nakashima, a Japanese-American woodworker. Mr. Jobs explained that Nakashima had a cross-cultural blend of experience, studying architecture, traveling on a free-spirited tour of the world, and working in different cultures. Nakashima’s designs were original, Mr. Jobs said, because he had a distinctive sense of taste, shaped by his life experience.
The pursuit of taste was a value Mr. Jobs instilled in the Apple corporate culture, including a “The Best Things” course in the company’s internal training program, the so-called Apple University.
People possess taste, but products are designed and built by teams of such people. Jonathan Ive, who was made senior vice president for industrial design in 1997, shortly after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, is the field marshal of the company’s corps of designers. And under Mr. Cook, Apple has recruited top talent in design and fashion from companies including Burberry, Nike and Yves Saint Laurent.
“Tim Cook has done an excellent job of retaining and recruiting critical people,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.
How well does the Apple Watch do on the taste test? The consensus is that it is a stylish piece of personal technology, given all that’s in it. The critique among outside designers is that Apple has crammed too much in it. The watch, according to a former Apple designer, had its origin with a tiny iPod Nano Touch, introduced in 2010. People attached a strap to the minuscule media player, and wore it on their wrist, listening to music while jogging.
The iPod heritage, however, gave way to a more iPhone-style concept. “And it’s very hard to make big things small,” said the former Apple designer, who asked not to be named because he still has business contacts with the company. “This feels more like it was designed by committee.”
The Apple alumnus also said the relatively short battery life of the watch — company executives said they expected users to recharge daily — suggests the industrial design team has the upper hand over the hardware designers these days. Recharging a watch daily, he said, is a hardware-side compromise. In the past, the hardware group often prevailed in such trade-off decisions. For example, he said, the industrial designers wanted to have wireless headphones on the iPod. But that would have sapped power, requiring more frequent recharges, so that idea was shelved, he observed.
Another former Apple designer, Paul Mercer, agreed that the Apple Watch is chock-full of digital offerings. “They went very wide in terms of the feature set,” he said.
But Mr. Mercer added that the “system experience,” like turning the watch’s crown to zoom in and out on the screen, and to scroll through lists, was innovative and “very fluid.” Mr. Mercer, a software designer, said, “It has the hallmarks of a classic Apple product.”
On the trust front, the Apple Watch should benefit from a trailing wind of good will. People like Apple products, to say the least. Its offerings have a well-earned reputation for feeling intuitive and personalized. Apple products respect the individual. People trust Apple. They often give the company the benefit of the doubt that when there is a slip-up, such the recent incident when some risque celebrity photos were hacked from iCloud, things will be fixed and quickly.
The Apple Watch, among other things, is a powerful health-monitoring device, which will harvest troves of personal data, if users so choose. That raises privacy concerns, and the matter of trust in a different context for Apple. In addressing that worry, Mr. Cook observed that Apple has a different business model from companies whose financial lifeblood is advertising, like Google and Facebook. If the product is free, as they say, you are the product. Not so for Apple. It owes its vast sales and immense corporate wealth to products people can hold in their hands, and that customers pay dearly for.
But health data is particularly private, and how it is used will depend not only on Apple but on outside software developers who make health apps that run on Apple devices. The company’s recently revised guidelines for health apps say developers cannot use the data for marketing purposes and that data cannot be shared with third parties without a user’s consent. But how closely will Apple police outside developers, when more developers making more apps means more reasons for people to buy Apple products?
“I think Apple is certainly aware of the privacy issues with health data,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But whether it really enforces those guidelines to uphold its privacy commitments will be the real test.”
The value of utility, in the Apple context, has meant redefining whole product categories and how people use them. That has been the story of the media player (iPod), smartphone (iPhone) and tablet (iPad).
The utility questions surrounding the Apple Watch come in a few dimensions. Will it feel too much like an iPhone on your wrist? Here, Apple is endangered by its past success. The communications and notification features on the Apple Watch look neat. So now people will be walking around staring at their wrists instead of their smartphones. Is that a big addition to utility?
Then, there is a question of how many people will find utility from the device? Will the health-monitoring features, when combined with other offerings on the Apple Watch, for example, be enough to make large numbers of consumers buy it? Much of that audience, presumably, is already wearing a fitness wristband like Fitbit or Jawbone.
And is Apple limiting the market for the Apple Watch with its strategy? Under the current plan, the Apple Watch works only with iPhones. But about 85 percent of smartphones worldwide run Google’s Android operating system, according to IDC.
There is a precedent here. The iPod took off as a hit product after Apple shifted course and decided to make it sync with computers running Microsoft’s Windows as well as Apple computers. The Apple Watch, said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, will “only be as big in share as iPhone allows it to be. A missed opportunity, I think.”
Mr. Cusumano and Mr. Yoffie are co-authors of a book to be published next spring, “Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs,” based on their study of the three tech industry pioneers and the challenges of their successors. Their conclusion, Mr. Yoffie said, is that the successors were successful as stewards in maintaining and sometimes enlarging the existing businesses. “But they struggled to deliver the same kind of revolutionary change” as their predecessors, Mr. Yoffie said. “Apple Watch appears to fit that model.”
We’ll see. It’s worth remembering that the iPod, iPhone and iPad, in turn, were greeted with initial skepticism. Apple Watch seeks to be the next in that lineage, routing the skeptics and delivering a massive payoff for Apple. How much of the Apple magic remains is uncertain. Like others, Mr. Mercer, the former Apple software designer, has questions about the Apple Watch and its fate. The answers that matter most will begin to come next year, when the Apple Watch goes on sale. “I can’t wait to get mine,” Mr. Mercer said.