What People Who Demand Innovations from Apple Don't Get

Yeah, even if you argue that the sideloaded app stores and whatnot that you could put on a jailbroken iPod Touch (remember those?) and 1st gen iPhones existed for a little before the official App Store, it was hardly the experience people think of today when talking about apps.

>Holy Cow! I want that phone! I've only got 8 GB of RAM on my desktop.

They probably had in mind smartphone disk storage options.

That said, technically speaking, they are correct in a pedantic way: a phone's SSD is also RAM, as there's a constant time of accessing any random address on the drive.

I think MacBooks were created after the market crossed the chasm already. There was nothing revolutionary about those laptops. They just keep on improving them, making them… thinner.

Dictators can run governments the best. too. The problem is they can be also the worst. And the whole inheritance thing.

Apple's problem right now is not so much Cook's objective qualities, but perception. And perception leads to positive feedback loops and self fulfilling prophecies.

If the market sees Apple as company in trouble, some part of it will also start seeing themselves that way. And the company will start behaving appropriately.

>He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-taking mentality.

If there's one thing I've learned in my corporate serfdom is that primadonnas can't handle other primadonnas. Do you think Steve Jobs would be able to work with another Steve Jobs? Jobs picked Cook because Cook wasn't Jobs, so Jobs was able to tolerate him. The problem is a company like Apple probably needs a Jobs-like character.

I see this all the time in the workplace. The difficult higher-ups always hire fairly milquetoast personalities they can easily control but when they leave, we now have a department of largely unmotivated 'yes men,' unable to do anything but take orders.

>As a shareholder, I have to admit I've lost a little confidence in Tim Cook. He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-taking mentality.

The same guy who's (from all we know) pivoting Apple into car making?

So exactly what consumer electronic market should Apple get into that's even 20% the size of the phone market?

Even before the iPhone was introduced, the phone market was huge by volume if not revenue.

Don't forget more relevantly, RIM who had the smartphone market completely locked up but couldn't get comfortable with a large, keyboardless, touchscreen device that was graphically oriented despite Microsoft having created these devices before the iPhone explosion. The question is are the innovations coming out of non-Apple mobile computing on par with the touchscreen/gui revolution of the late 2000s. Water Resistant? Wireless Charging? Wearables? Voice Control? None seem likely to supplant the basic form factor.

After all, post 1995, there wasn't a major innovation in the desktop or mobile pc market that took over. Flat Panel monitors maybe. Desktops and Laptops are simply faster and possibly smaller versions of what we had then.

The point I'm making is that tech innovation is going to shif t to something outside handheld. Cloud, IOT, VR/AR, AI, Wearables, Voice are leading contenders right now and Apple is certainly thinking about all of them.

The author's point is that the proper and profitable way to run a company - once it's crossed the chasm - is the way Cook is running now.

You needed Jobs (or someone like him) to get Apple to where it is now by doing things that fit the early adopter market. But once you have done it, it becomes the wrong thing to do - because doing what the early adopters want/need will hurt the much larger, much more profitable part of the business and customers that actually do prefer the stability.

It's not a dead end - it's harvesting the field you've planted instead of neglecting it to try other fields/crops; it's what the shareholders would likely prefer and unsurprisingly they have done so.

Healthcare, cars, NLP, AI and eventually space exploration and tons of other things besides...