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Is it time for Trip Hawkins to come back to EA?

Articles NewsPublished March 19, 2013 at 7:30 pmComments Off

When Steve Jobs made his return to apple, it meant rebirth for the ailing organization. Could lightening strike twice by brining EA back to its roots and core values as well?

Is it time for Trip Hawkins to come back to EA?

When Steve Jobs made the decision to leave Apple in 1985, he recognized that a great majority of their business was coming from the education sector. He then went on to form NeXT, Inc which was a computer and software platform built around higher education and select business markets which was eventually sold back to Apple prior to being brought back on as CEO in 1997. From the moment Jobs was brought back on board, he executed upon a strategy that pulled Apple back from the abyss and laid the groundwork for what is undoubtably the greatest success story in US business history. Jobs tactics, salesmanship and ideology helped turn the company back around and helped restructure the company from top to bottom. Over the next few years, Jobs would trim away the excess, eliminating printers, digital cameras, PDAs, etc, and focus exclusively on design (Johnny Ive, iMac), sound (iPod) and proprietary applications (Final Cut, iMovie, Garageband). The rest is history as Apple, whom everyone had pegged as dead and gone, is now often referred to as the best business in America amongst executives.

Apples stock growth since 2000

Trip Hawkins was (and still is) apioneer in thegames industry known for treating games and software as an art form. In 1982 Trip Hawkins was the Director of Strategy and Marketing atApple when he made the decision to leave and found his new companyElectronic Arts. While Steve Jobs was a great salesman,Trip was a tremendous collaborator and was able to bring the worlds of LG, AT&T, Panasonic, MCA, Time Warner and others together for a common purpose. In addition, he was a champion of the game developer often calling them, software artists and working to give them rockstar status by including their pictures inadvertisements,credits and on product packaging which looked more likealbum coversthan computer software. Trip agreed with sharing EAslavish profits with their developers which allowed them to attract the best developers available at the time including Dan Bunten (M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold) , Bill Budge (Mousepaint, Pinball Construction Set), Paul Reiche III (Archon, Star Control), Will Harvey, Annie Westfall, John Freeman and others.

While Steve Jobs return to Apple took only two years, Trip Hawkins has been away from Electronic Arts for ten times as long. Still, the complaints that arebeing put forth by the consumers, theDraconian Working conditionsand the idea that EA is literally Hitler when it comes to perception these days are directly responsible for their stock dropping more than 50% over the last five years. Bashing EA has become the status quo and AAA titles like Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Dead Space 3 and Sim City 3 are regularly being lambasted by the gaming press which has pushed EAopposite end of the spectrumfrom Apple in regards to popularity.

65% stock losses in the past five years

Like Steve Jobs, Trip Hawkins focused on what made their companys great and played to those strengths. For Steve Jobs is was about simplicity (now known as magic), sound design principles and building The Peoples Computer (similar to what Volkswagen did when they hit the US market). For Trip Hawkins it is about the art, the developers and the people themselves that make the experience, and their company, great. Can Larry Probst and the rest of the EA board turn things around on their own, or is it time to bring the organization back to what made them great all those years ago?

It worked for Apple.

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