my thoughts, musings, rants and discoveries . . .

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading much about the future of Apple given the fact that Steve Jobs is sick. And after reading yet another one, today, I’ve finally decided to chime in.

Honestly, and I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr. Jobs as I actually admire the man considerably, is the problem isn’t with Jobs retiring. It’s actually with the lack of tech leaders that posses any vision and charisma to lead such a company, or any company for that matter. That’s really the issue.

Most of what occurs in our industry follows the Intel-ish roadmap. Things get quite predictable after a while. Apple, under Steve Jobs, has been quite a different story. Even when they decided to transition from PPC chips to Intel processors, they implemented them in such a way that was rather unique for the industry. Is all of this to the credit of Jobs? I don’t think so. It was probably some tech weenie who came up with the idea of using EFI and instead of a traditional BIOS. And did Jobs develop a more improved battery and charging system? What about the way their new trackpads allow you to pinch your fingers and do other things to rotate, flip and otherwise manipulate pages?

I’m not trying to take anything away from the man. Not by any means. But the simple reality is I don’t buy for a moment that he’s responsible for all the various innovations.

Over the years, having created and run several startups, I have noticed a couple key truths:

1. There is absolutely no shortage of ideas
2. If you listen hard enough, you’ll find there are some really great ideas that come up every now and then
3. Most Many people seem to be divergent thinkers who are incapable of actually getting real development done
4. Driving innovation is about driving the good ideas and weeding out the effects of divergent thinkers
5. Managing the nay-sayers, divergent thinkers, people who need their backs patted, etc. is more than a full-time job
6. The more effective you are, the more you will be labeled a bully or tyrant

Ever notice how many people want to fill the shoes of a guy like Jobs or Gates? Both have had some great people in their organizations. But recognizing the difference between great talent and great leadership can be difficult and misleading. There simply aren’t many companies that have pushed the envelope or defined a market to draw from. And chances are good that the best candidate for the job of replacing Jobs will fail the interview. He’ll be too egotistical, unrealistic, too aggressive, not a people person, etc.

I can remember a few years back when I first interviewed for the job to drive enterprise marketing for Snap Appliance. I did my round of interviews and heard from the VP of Sales how didn’t know what the enterprise was. Yep. That’s why they were interviewing people for the job. I remember my time with the VP of Engineering who proceeded to tell me how we didn’t have the bandwidth to develop the features. Hmm… I didn’t know they’d been defined yet. And the excuses went on. After all was finished, I had my final interview with the CEO who asked me the million dollar question. Here’s the exchange that took place:

CEO: Why should we hire you?

Me: I’m not exactly sure you should.

CEO: Huh? Why do you say that?

Me: Well, I’ve interviewed with all of your staff and one thing is for certain, they all believe that this job is unnecessary because it can’t be done. You can’t move your products up market.

CEO: Well, what do you think you can do to change that?

Me: First of all, I will probably piss off your entire organization. See, I hear all the Nos and Can’ts and I take them as double-dog dares.

CEO: I see. Maybe that’s what we need then.

I lasted in the job for all of three weeks before changing roles to CTO. There was a need for doing more than merely scoping out new features. There was the need for figuring out how to get them into the very tight engineering schedule. And then meant putting in place a rapid prototyping effort. During the process, I took much criticism and ridicule. My schedule estimates were way too aggressive. My ideas were too far fetched. And so on. But I became great friends with the VP of Marketing and the VP of Engineering in the process. We’re still close to this day. And at the end of the day, we had a great acquisition largely due to those far-fetched ideas.

Bringing someone new into the helm of Apple is probably going to mean pissing off a lot of people. Some will feel they were loyal to Jobs and should deserve some credit as a result. Others will feel they were due a promotion. And yet others will feel they should have gotten the job. But the simple reality is that Apple’s future won’t depend on what they did previously with Steve Jobs. It’s going to depend on what they can do in his absence. It’s going to take a strong personality who can hear the good ideas, who can make the tough decisions and live with them and it’s going to take a guy who doesn’t care what everyone else thinks. Can they find a guy like that?

My take is that Apple can very well find a guy like this to drive the company forward. That’s not going to be the problem. The problem is going to be the selection committee. They’re going to look at pedigree. And they will be responsible for killing a great company. Let’s hope they can avoid making that mistake so that we can continue to get great and innovative products from Apple for years to come. And perhaps if we’re lucky, Mr. Jobs will already have a candidate in mind who can leave the critics dumbfounded.

There are a couple of things about stock WordPress that bug me. When it comes to managing users, I really think they could have done a lot better than to simply track names, nicknames and various IM accounts. What if you’re using WP to front-end a business site and you want to track company name, phone number, address and things like that? I have found a couple of plugins out there that will allow a user to add more information after he has registered, but during the registration process. Seriously, how many of you like to go in afterwards to add more registration information?

The other problem I have experienced has had to deal with restricting certain pages from access unless someone has indeed been registered with my site. Most of the plugins that deal with this function will restrict the entire site from access unless a person has been registered. Now imagine someone coming to your home page and the first link he clicks on is restricted. That can get annoying real fast. And it’s worse when even the home page is also restricted.

So, I wanted to put in place a simple live demo page off my company’s website and wanted to make it registration based without actually affecting all of the other pages on my site. And we determined there was more a little more user information we wanted to capture. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be had with a single plugin and I really didn’t have the time to modify the WordPress database to add the additional user fields I wanted to track. I managed to pull this together with three items:

1. The iframe tag: This tag, which is used just like any other html tag set allows you to embed a website into another website. Its attributes work very much like those of the image tag in that you have to designate the src, which is the url of the page you wish to embed. Then you have to declare your height and width. I felt this would be a bit easier to manage than merely having people click on a link to be directed to where the demo software actually resides.
2. The Page Restrict plugin: This is the plugin that I used to very easily require login to view specific WP Pages. Once it’s uploaded and activated, you simply go to the settings page and then click on whatever pages you want to require login for. It’s as simple as that.
3. Register Plus plugin: This is what I used to modify the user registration information, including the additions of some custom fields. A very handy plugin to have if you care about who visits your site. Plus, this plugin provides numerous customizations to the way email notification works as well as provides you the ability to get rid of that WordPress logo on the registration page and replace it with your own logo. Great stuff!

So, there are obviously better ways for building up such a site. But if you’re using WordPress as a form of CMS, and you don’t want to spend much time or cash to develop such a solution, this is a good way to go. You can literally be up and running in a matter of a few minutes.

Enjoy!