Jobs-san

One name kept coming up in my head while watching Steve Jobs introduce his over-hyped, exquisitely timed iPhone.

Akio Morita.

Morita, the legendary Sony chairman, didn’t do demos.
But he was brilliant at taking parts and turning them into consumer electronics products that people would want. He would stay just slightly ahead of the demand curve, seldom getting ahead of himself. He was also an iconoclast, who insisted on going his own way and sometimes (as in Betamax) paid the price for it.

As much as anyone, Morita transformed Japan from a manufacturer of junk to a quality brand. He forced other companies to follow him, and some of the credit for their success should go to him.

Of course Morita made two key mistakes, which Jobs is also threatening to make:

1. Morita-san was unable to provide for succession, to find another entrepreneur who could take Sony forward. The company remains a laggard.
2. Morita-san became obsessed, late in life, with owning content, rather than concentrating on what he did best, namely delivering it.

As a result of these mistakes, the great Sony Corp. is now worth less than Apple Inc. as the company now wants to be called. In fact, Apple is now worth nearly twice what Sony is worth, $82 billion to $45 billion. This means that Jobs could buy all of Sony, including its movie studios, TV production and music library, and still not risk losing control, or risk Apple becoming a Japanese company.

Wall Street wants him to do that, or something like it. Jobs already holds a big stake in Disney, $4 billion worth, but that’s a personal stake, not a corporate one, which came when he sold Pixar. Wall Street continues to think there is "synergy" in owning all elements of the entertainment pie. There isn’t. Sony proves it.

So Jobs probably won’t make that big mistake of leaving the business he knows best. But he still has no successor. Not a big deal when you’re as young as we are (52) but where is the next Jobs? And do you want to buy a company that doesn’t have one?

Meanwhile all hail the iPhone, which everyone thought would come out last year, but was held as much to force cell companies to go gaga for it (Cingular went the most gaga in the U.S.) as for any other reason. I actually think the AppleTV device could prove more revolutionary — it’s a media computer that works and really does unite the worlds of TV and computing for the first time — but perhaps that is quibbling.