No. 12: STEVE JOBS'S GREATEST HEIST: DR EDWIN LAND & POLAROID
Polaroid, and it's mercurial master showman Dr Edwin Land, probably did more to inspire Steve Jobs and his products than any other person.
Jobs cited a lot of inspirations publicly — The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Eastern philosophy — but his likely intentional omission of Dr Land is perhaps most revealing.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas"
So let's unpack this heist in a little more detail across three important parts of the product lifecycle — it's quite uncanny. There's one glaring difference to end on.
- RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT
Both men favored far more development than research. Especially when it came to consumers.
Jobs famously stated that the iPhone was made without the help of any market research. Land, too, claimed that true innovation "must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it."
For Jobs and Land, designing and developing new products was a Platonic pursuit.
Although there were undoubtedly thousands of bumps in the road, annoying product twists and turns, they viewed the process with an almost religious zeal.
Land was so obsessed with perfection, that he was willing to gamble the company on numerous occasions — just like Jobs. And when cautioned by Wall Street about how he "had little regard for the bottom line" because he spent $2B developing a camera, he simply replied "the bottom line is in heaven".
Maybe this explains the millimeter precision with which they created objects like the iPod and SX-70.
Maybe to be that good, you have to be that crazy.
- AESTHETIC + FUNCTION
Both were systems thinkers of the first order.
They weren't just designing a single product, they saw each iteration as contribution to a corporate image and a company that was bigger than any one product. Indeed, Jobs once said that his greatest invention wasn't an Apple product — it was actually Apple Inc.
Certainly the products were beautiful, but they always embodied the brand and pointed to an experience that the end user should and could expect right out of the back. No fucking instructions!
Apple products under Jobs were all about "legendary easy of use" in a package that was so desirable you'd want to "lick" them.
Polaroid under Land was similar, but more focused on the speed and convenience of its cameras — and the technological superiority it enjoyed in the market as the world's first true "instant" camera. (This, of course, wasn't 100% true, but just like Jobs, Land understood that perception was more important than reality, and that normal people don't check citations).
Finally, and crucially, both obsessed over "end to end" control within their product ecosystems.
- SHOWMANSHIP + ADVERTISING
The superlatives. The insistence on "revolution" and "like never before" without ever having to say those things.
The clean, heroic product shots with clever copy that give off the impression of effortless achievement and relaxed elegance.
Both understood that you didn't have to do all too much with your advertising if you had a great product to talk about. You just needed to celebrate it, not hard sell it.
And they respected your intelligence — they didn't bash you over the head with details or speeds and feeds. The choice was simple...buy it...or don't.
Then there was the product presentation itself — you only have one chance at a first impression.
I mean...same exact Saarinen table and stage lighting.
Jobs even held the products in the same way, to show off their most acute "tasty" angles.
THE BIG DIFFERENCE
Success is temporal.
But, in the eye's of most historians, Jobs succeeded with Apple but Land failed with Polaroid
Why?
This is a wide open debate, with many pointing to the demise of film photography that Land failed to foresee.
But we have a hot take. It can probably be boiled down to the fact that Land was technical and Jobs was not — the former a doctor, the latter a dropout.
You see, for all his arrogance and ass-holicness, Job always had to be a team player — he simply could not build these things on his own, because he really had no technical know-how.
But Land, for the most part, could. Hence the whole "Doctor" prefix. So he set about gearing the organization around him, tooling it so that he alone called the shots. As time went on, and the fundamental market dynamics of his fundamentally "analog" business collapsed around him, he was too deeply involved in the details to see around the next corner — that preternatural Jobs trait which has built the greatest consumer company the world has ever known.
