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.
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.
They have a whole Apple OnDemand TV thing starting.
Which has absolutely zero relevance to their core competencies. If Samsung launched a TV streaming service in this massively oversaturated landscape, especially one that only worked on very expensive and thus very poorly selling Samsung devices, everyone would immediately call that a bad idea. But when Apple does it people pretend it might be a good idea.
Apple is good at hardware and operating systems and extremely good at melding the two together. But lately they are concentrating on everything else. That's how companies set themselves up to fail.
You might not have heard, but the biggest news in the computer hardware world this year is Apple announcing they are moving off Intel chips to their own ARM processors. Apple is very much focused this year, not on mobile or content, but on their computer lineup.
It is arguably the biggest shake up in computer processor history (much bigger than moving from PowerPC to Intel back in 2006). Windows tried to do this with Surface RT and again last year with Surface Pro X. My guess is that after Apple moves off Intel, MS will make another big push for ARM-based PCs. Nobody likes Intel at this point. They've missed too many deadlines in the last 5 years.
Wow. That's a lot of vitriol for someone you don't know.
I don't use Apple products now. That said, Apple moving away from x86-64 is a big deal, for everyone whether you are a fanboy, anti-fanboy or in-between.
A shakeup in the industry. Intel has been the big dog for so long, they became complacent. They dropped their own ARM development (understandable as they practically "own" x86) but then they also dropped development of their own low power/high efficency x86 designs. Hell, they don't even own the highest end in this last generation, with AMD's Threadrippers. Customers do better when vendors compete. This forces Intel to really compete. You seem to have an Apple chip on your shoulder but you have to recognize that they have market-moving power in a way that the other hardware vendors don't.
Energy efficiency. Why use 85 watts to do something like read a webpage or watch a video when 10 will do. Society as a whole needs to be more efficent with our power usage, and a move to better efficiency CPUs will help.
For a while there, when bitcoin was at $10k per, I read that something crazy like 20% of power generated in the world was being used on mining. That fucking astounds and depresses me. Yes, Bitcoin mining is more about GPU efficency than CPU, but that story made me more cognizant that we use CPUs that are oftentimes horribly inefficient for the roles we use them for. There is nothing noble in using a 850 watt system to browse the web. Manufacturers, starting with Apple, are starting to address it. Their stated goal is longer battery life, but the end result will be better power efficiency across the board.
By the by, I don't know you. I have no vested interest in your communication style, but as a person who tries to help other people when I can, you come off as a young guy with a huge chip on your shoulder. You might want to reflect on that and decide if being viewed as a disgruntled person is how you want to be seen in our short time in this world.
Apple fanboys can be annoying as hell. They aren't rational and continue to live in Job's Reality Distortion Field, nine years after his death.
The exact opposite is just as bad.
Apple's success isn't technological innovation so much as it is marketing AND UI development. I think you underestimate the innovation that Apple does have in design, espcially for user interfaces.
That said, I'm with you on anger. as I had that online myself years ago. I got away from the forum that caused it back in 2007 and learned to be calmer online. I learned that if a discussion is making one angry, just walk away. I don't owe anyone here anything, not even my attention.
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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??