According to the article, Jobs' solution was to organize Apple around making great products. This is enough to make Christensen himself call them "freaks".
Caring first about great products makes you a freak? Something seems deeply wrong with that. (Edit: this was unclear. I agree that "freak" is accurate in the sense that this is rare. My point is that it says something staggering about our economy that it should be so rare.)
If Apple are the only ones who do this, I would sooner call everybody else the freaks.
The definition of 'freak' for most people is "people who don't have sensible regard to norms". The norm for almost all companies is that the bottom line is the overriding factor.
So Jobs priorities made Apple a freak in the eyes of most managers. Apple didn't get any respect from ordinary managers before the iPhone sales took off and made the bottom line became impressive.
I have yet to work at/for a company that cared about its products.
Sure, this is how most everyone does it. But sometimes a lightning bolt lights up the night sky for a second and lets you see that it is the "freak" who is right and everyone else who is the aberration. I think we should be grateful to Steve Jobs for providing so spectacular a counterexample. He didn't just not follow convention, he built the most valuable company in the world doing it - something that, if the managerialists were right, ought to have been impossible.
There was a cultural revolution in business whereby people saw the role of the firm as profit-maximizing, where profit is measured on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
In that light, Jobs was crazy for focusing on the product (and letting the profits flow).
Caring first about great products makes you a freak? Something seems deeply wrong with that. (Edit: this was unclear. I agree that "freak" is accurate in the sense that this is rare. My point is that it says something staggering about our economy that it should be so rare.)
If Apple are the only ones who do this, I would sooner call everybody else the freaks.