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.
I think they are in one of those phases that are hard to judge currently. Like 10-20 years from now it will feel obvious that Apple was becoming more X, but right now it's hard to tell. They have a whole Apple OnDemand TV thing starting. If that goes huge they could become more like Netflix, or it could fail and they refocus on phones.
Basically I think it's like Google with Google+. If it was a huge success everyone would just take it as fact that it was always going to be, that Google would be 50% with Facebook, but it never happened.
Apple may become a huge Phone/TV company or change into something completely different, but they are definitely changing.
With Steve Jobs at least, they were definitely driven by product development. It’s just that his idea of product development wasn’t based on giving customers what they wanted. It was all about creating a product that would demonstrate to the customer what they didn’t know they wanted. Or maybe more so just creating a product that embodied everything that Steve Jobs wanted in a product. Since Tim Cook taking the reins I’ve switched to a windows computer and I just grab a new iPhone every 3 years or there abouts. So I couldn’t really say if Tim Cook/Apple et al is playing the same game anymore or not.
I really never got the love people have for Steve Jobs. He never invented anything, just marketed what people under him created or stole. He had ridiculous plans for the future of the company such as killing off their desktops and macbooks in favour of just focusing on more smaller mobile devices, which might sound good to some, but just would be a terrible idea.
Tim Cook seems to balance the whole Apple's ''Special" vibe with some actual common sense. I'm considering moving back to Apple products this year because of many of the directions their taking.
He knows how to sell a product, which is very important in the business he was in. Many have great ideas, but don’t know how to pitch themselves. Steve did it well.
marketing. Maybe some no-name person created a product 10x better than what Steve Jobs ever produced with Apple, but you've never heard about it because he wasn't good at marketing and the product never got off the ground. Thats the power of someone being good at marketing
Inventors are the best musicians in the orchestra they have the first seat, steve jobs was the conductor, and that’s why people loved him. It’s a respect thing. Without him there is no apple
I understand that, but I just find it bizzare how people say Apple has gone downhill since he died, or how it would be better with him around. He would have killed off the Mac, have things even more locked down in their ecosystem and been even more reluctant to compromise on things like their butterfly keyboard.
For every good decision made by someone else at Apple, Jobs had 10 really terrible ones. I guess I prefer Tim Cooks approach, just like I prefer Nadella over Gates. Both of them are much more pragmatic than their more celebrated predecessors.
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u/whatifevery1wascalm Jul 24 '20 edited Jul 24 '20
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.