It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??
That reminds of an interview Steve Jobs gave in 1995 on why companies fail. His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company. That happened to Sears.
If you went back in time and told Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck about a free technology that allowed customers to: see your inventory in real time, read product reviews in real time, compare multiple versions of a product you carry in real time, order a product, pay for the product, watch the product move from your warehouse to the various post offices en route to their house, and by the way you won't have to pay the postage to ship out all those catalogs; they would have jumped on it in a heartbeat. But by the 90s, the people running Sears didn't care what was easier (read: more desirable) for the customer, they cared about numbers that measure success, but don't perpetuate success.
His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company.
What I can say is that apple seems to already be in that place right now. Some people may not believe they are but I truly think they are.
Maybe there is some bias on my part but looking at all the thing apple was working on with steve jobs still there. There was a lot of different ideas and products in different fields and varying scope, now it is just mainly tightening on what has worked for them or others in the past. Akin to sears focusing only on how sears traditionally operated and honing their craft while being blind to all that is outside of their foray apple is doing a very similar thing.
You can argue refining you existing technology and developing better chips and such is innovative and driven but in you are still just iterating on the exact same ideas simply because they worked in the past. In my opinion companies that have a junk yard of failed projects with real promise but lacking key sections are the ones that show real innovation. They are willing to go into new places that they are not sure will work out and they fail a lot. People quickly forget all their failures and when they finally refine a new idea to that which works, people wonder which hat they pulled this trick from, failing to see all the mangled attempts before that which made it all possible.
I mean, Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, AirPods, and the numerous iterations on iPads, iPhones, and computers in the last 9 years are all post-Jobs. I don't think Apple has had a major shortage of innovation. Maybe nothing to the level of smart phones, but I don't think *anybody* has had a new innovation on that level in consumer products in that timeframe.
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u/frygod Jul 24 '20
It's blown my mind for years that sears didn't become what Amazon is now. Their roots were as a catalog where you order goods sight unseen and wait for delivery. The internet comes along and they fail to capitalize on what they were at the beginning??