Apple's next CEO

Steve Jobs goes on medical leave, and the pundits unleash their advice. InformationWeek's Paul McDougall's MLK Day column was entitled, "Steve Jobs Should Be Apple's Last Rock Star CEO."

But, healthy or not, Jobs' work at Apple is done. He's not the guy to take the company to the next level, and here's why.

On the consumer side, Jobs' not-invented-here phobia limits the ecosystem around Apple's products and puts a chokehold on growth. The Mac was relegated to niche status in the PC market because Jobs' insistence on complete control over the hardware and software environment made the platform pricey and lacking in applications compared with Windows PCs. Despite its head start, the same thing could happen to the iPad unless Apple loosens the reins on developers and embraces the notion that not all third-party hardware and software is crap until Apple says it isn't.

Now, granted, this article appeared in a publication dedicated to IT professionals, but even so, do all of these writers have such gigantic blind spots?

Anybody who has looked at Apple's stock performance since 2000 can see that Apple's niche status hasn't hurt its stock price one bit as far as Wall Street is concerned. (I don't happen to think that Wall Street is an exceptionally wonderful yardstick for whether a company is successful or not, but this is McDougall's world and Wall Street's judgment matters there.) And although I don't have any links handy, it has been noted again and again that Apple's products command a greater profit margin than most if not all of its competitors.

McDougall's whole mindset is that market share trumps everything else. If you buy into that mindset, his argument has some merit, but if you think becoming the next Microsoft is not the end-all, be-all of corporate fates, McDougall's advice is totally irrelevant.

McDougall is also curiously ignorant about certain facets of IT:

Jobs' Shoeless Joe approach (if you build it, and it's beautiful, the customers will come) isn't enough in the enterprise market, where big accounts have to be wined and dined, products must be sold as "solutions," channels must be cultivated and nurtured, and everything has to work securely and reliably with everything else, including that 30-year-old accounting application that was written in COBOL. Steve is, well, just too cool to be bothered with all that (and I mean that without sarcasm).

"Coolness"? That's McDougall's explanation for why Apple doesn't compete in the enterprise market? What kind of sophistry is that?

McDougall knows, or bloody well should, that competing in the enterprise market is expensive. HP, IBM, Oracle -- these companies spend untold hundreds of millions of dollars annually to foster those cozy relationships with customers, to fill in the niches of their existing product lines so they're one-stop shops, to support their software and hardware products for definite, often long, life cycles. Inertia is a huge competitor, too: if you've invested in Oracle, you're going to think long and hard before you let a competitor in the door, because there are huge costs associated with switching to a new vendor. Jobs' alleged coolness is not the reason Apple is not in enterprise, and if McDougall were clearheaded -- or simply honest -- he would acknowledge that.

McDougall's advice being so misguided, it's not surprising his candidates for CEO don't inspire my confidence:

Former HP CEO Mark Hurd comes to mind. He's an ops and logistics expert with big time IT experience, and the betting here is that his ability to coexist with the volatile Larry Ellison at Oracle, where Hurd is currently a co-president, will expire sooner than a quart of milk bought from a gas station.

Speaking of Ellison's road kill, Scott McNealy has been unemployed since Oracle closed out its acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year. At Sun, McNealy ran a company where, like Apple, the hardware, software, and chips were all developed in-house and sold as an integrated system. But under McNealy Sun was also one of the first enterprise players to fully embrace open source as a means to battle competitors that were richer and enjoyed better economies of scale. That's the kind of flexibility Apple needs right now, and McNealy is even cool enough to work there.

Hmm ... the guy HP canned for impropriety, and the guy who ran Sun Microsystems into the ground while trying, unsuccessfully, to compete with HP, IBM, and its eventual buyer, Oracle. Be still, my beating heart.

Oh, and I must note McDougall's deep sense of compassion:

... it's not out of the question that Jobs, just 55, is at this moment facing his mortality.

So let's dispense with sentimentality for now and take a hard look at what Apple needs to do without Steve Jobs.

Yes, by all means, the first thing to do after noting that a man might be dying is to "dispense with sentimentality."

They pay McDougall to write this drivel?