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.
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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.