What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business | Hacker News Reader

What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

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28 pointsjerianasmith55 comments

I don't call this events failures, I call them tries. And many, many tries are required to learn and create a single success.

But maybe that is why I'm no analyst.

I can't help but see this as a post hoc rationalization.

When Steve Jobs was at its helm, did Apple have failures that it needed to rebrand as "tries"?

I think you overestimate Steve Jobs.

What goes up must come done. It's very normal for a growing company to see a period of loss. Even invincible empires died as history tells.

Of course Steve Jobs created a big company. But it doesn't mean Apple would never fail if he was still here.

Don't get me wrong, there are failures, Ping, or MobileMe being some examples, but I think that is the result of not trying (and learning) enough.

For example, it is said when designing the iPhone they tested (tried) two different operating systems, one based on OS X and the other one based on Linux. Even the hardware itself was first started as an iPad like device and was later decided to shelve the original project and do the iPhone instead. When you try an idea you learn, and you might even learn that it is a bad idea. I don't think of that as failure, the only failure is to not use what you learned. I'd be worried if they, despite the knowledge gained and to not be thought of as a failure by pundits, decided to be courageous and go to market anyway.

The article refers to the secret car project that was never launched. It is fairly likely that in Jobs' time there were a fair amount of cancelled or downscaled projects as well but we just haven't heard of them. For example, the TV comes to mind - there were a lot of rumors about it at the time, and it was mentioned in his biography - and nothing came of it.

Not sure why this is being called a failure when there was never an announcement about its efforts. How many skunks works projects were attempted and quietly folded in history?

They were quite public and arrogant about it

Based on the last earnings call, they still are.

a seemingly rare defeat for a company that has done little-to-no wrong in the last decade (save for maybe the Apple Watch depending on how you look at it).

--> Google Maps vs Apple Maps?

Took 3 years to turn that around

> Apple Maps is now used three times as often as its “next leading competitor” on iPhone and iPad

https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage-numbers/

It's still inferior to Google Maps tho. It's not outright bad, but for directions/traffic Google Maps is still miles ahead (at least in random European countries).

Shouldn't it be kilometers ahead in random European countries?

I'd say that Google Maps is streets ahead of Apple Maps still. :P

Not in the UK, should the RNG be so disposed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_mile

s/random European countries/everywhere except GB/

Of course, it's the default app opened on click that cannot be changed.

This! In iOS you can delete Apple Maps but it then just prompts you to re-download it when an app tries to open a map. It's worse than the old IE default browser.

Those numbers might be driven by the quality of Apple Maps, or by changes in iOS: it became less intuitive to use 'leading competitors' on the iPhone and iPad. At least I was unable to send my mom's iPhone to Google Maps when she clicks on an address I sent her - I have to send her a Google Maps link.

I never actually open the maps app on my iPhone. I just ask Siri for directions, and I presume she uses the default Apple maps as the base.

I'd suggest that the data is skewed because a lot of people would be doing the same thing. The evolution of the phone UI basically indicates that individual apps are fading as identifiable components. Modern bots and mashup interfaces just pull data from different app/sources and present an amalgamated view. I neither know, nor care whether Siri is pulling her route data from Google or Apple maps, or somewhere else.

Reasonably, for Europeans this helped them a lot because google maps enabled iOS could not search for businesses or restaurants outside of the USA.

Even if navigation took a few iterations to catch up.

I use both Google, Bing, Apple maps and OpenStreetMap:

- For general searching and desktop use I prefer Google

- Bing and Apple have much more up to date "satellite" views than Google (for the areas I am interested in) - Apple maps have a spectacularly good 3d version of the city that I live (Edinburgh) in which I love looking at - Google 3D version had a huge error near to where I live

- Bing has UK Ordnance Survey maps, which is brilliant for outdoor activities

- OpenStreetMap is great for paths/cycle-paths in some areas

Edit: For one area I've been looking at (in Fife) the Google Earth view is about 12 years old - which is actually quite handy as we are looking at buying a house there that was built ~10 years ago so it is interesting to be able to see what was there before the houses were built!

I am not sure the watch is a failure yet but not the best start. I wrote a piece on how much the watch devalues which I find odd how high that figure is https://medium.com/@AndyStannard/apple-watch-depreciation-so...

Apple's quiet failure has more to do with forgetting key values than the fact that the car market is incredibly difficult. (Of course it is, but that's not even the main issue.)

Jobs era Apple had a clear focus on user benefits. They were part imaginary - look and feel, styling, status - but part real, in the sense that when you bought an Apple product you were getting a specific set of experiences and possibilities which you probably felt were exciting, novel, and cool.

Cook era Apple has lost that. Apple Maps was me-too, the hardware is me-too - competing with the old Apple against itself - and the new projects don't have the old vision.

What's the novel, exciting benefit of Watch? Er...

Apple has missed some important markets, including home automation (currently a mix of competing products that barely work together, and often barely work at all), the indie content creation market (which it half-owned with podcasting, but then gave away to YouTube), and social networking.

But the biggest difference is the shift from an Apple that tried to make products to empower and delight people, including creators, to an Apple that encourages passive consumption of its products/objects/services, because "we make stuff and market it to you, and you buy it."

It's a lot easier to do the latter than the former. It looks like a subtle shift but it's really a complete change in direction. And it has made Apple a much less interesting company.

> I would rather commit seppuku than fail -- Elon Musk on failure

Project Titan is not a failure but it has suffered major setbacks, the credit or blame for which lies with Tim Cook. It takes unrelenting passion and fanaticism to wield the fortunes in your favour. Jobs had this and Musk has it too.

If project Titan is not about building a car then it's just about components. Apple has historically owned the vertical and there is little exciting about being a component supplier. It's a losing bid. Google does mapping better than Apple. It does voice recognition and AI better than Apple. The car manufacturers desire a steely grip on their UX and design so Apple's strengths there won't come into play either. Ive's own ambitions seem to indicate the poor state of cars:

> “There are some shocking cars on the road,” Ive said. “One person’s car is another person’s scenery.” To his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, “For example.” As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its design: “It is baffling, isn’t it? It’s just nothing, isn’t it? It’s just insipid.” He declined to name the model, muttering, “I don’t know, I don’t want to offend.” (Toyota Echo.) [1]

I for one would have loved to see an Apple Car and disruption of the auto industry. Am hoping Apple hasn't conceded on the bigger vision but it does seem bleak at the moment.

   [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come

I'm not sure it can be classed as a failure. Pivoted maybe, but failure? In what sense?

In the sense that they started out wanting to build a car and later on they decided not to build it anymore after having realized what it actually entails. I'd call that a failure, as in "failure to build a car which I wanted to build". Pivoting doesn't change anything, we all move on after our failures.

How can a company with literally mountains of cash plus the engineer power Apple has, fail to make a self driving car? I'm not saying at all that is something easy, but Apple is a beast in terms of resources. I confess that I don't get it.

Afaik, Apple starts lots of development projects and a lot of them gets "Steved". If the new product isn't enough better than the competition or won't have enough profit margins... axe.

(Point is, the project might have been doing well and following the plans -- but Apple might have found that the target market niche was too small. Or the margins might have been too low for Apple.)

Very low margins generally in the car industry. It would have been a money pit for Apple

There are low margins generally in the phone industry, too. And in the computer industry.

My point was that Apple probably cuts large projects with too little earning potential.

Premium is very premium in the car industry. It is one thing to find $3000 to buy a laptop. It is expensive for a laptop, but it is in the realm of purchasable by a large chunk of the population.

It is quite another endeavour to find $100K+ to buy a car, no matter how you can rationalise it. The total market size for car at that price is probably in the 6 digits cars worldwide and shrinking in the western world.

That falls quite far from Apple business model and expertise.

> How can a company with literally mountains of cash plus the engineer power Apple has, fail to make a self driving car?

Because:

(1) it hasn't been done yet, nobody has a self driving car that is even close to being ready for the market

and

(2) just designing and manufacturing a new car is a huge undertaking.

Still better "failure" then Googles "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" with its products (or even multiple similar existing at once - see messaging) that year per year slowly eroded the trust in the company.

"throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" - Is this really a bad thing? You have to try things in the real world to get anywhere. Are there any companies that can see into the future to see what works?

> "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" - Is this really a bad thing?

If you're one of the people who pay real money for a product that doesn't stick, yes.

But that can always happen to any product.

Absolutely. So when I'm looking at a product, one of the things I ask myself is, "does this company have a history of releasing immature products, or dropping support for their products quickly?" Obviously it can't be foolproof, but if either of those is a company's general MO, then it's more likely to happen to a new product of theirs, than a company which rarely does that.

"given that computers are much better drivers than humans"

I can't tell if the author agrees with this premise or not. Clearly they are not better drivers than humans or there would already be fully autonomous cars on the road.

> Rather, it’s paring down its ambitions to focus on autonomous navigation and in-car entertainment — two things that make perfect sense for the market space as well as Apple’s existing expertise.

Entertainment, yes, but autonomous navigation is not really within Apple's existing expertise. With so much competition in this area, including from Google which as way more experience, I wouldn't expect cars to run Apple's auto-navigation application (if they ever release one) any time soon.

Failure is the path to success

The crux of Apple's big success was built on the back of the music industry. Obviously iPods gave birth to the iPhone. In any case, the fact is, Apple needed a desperate victim, if you will, and without that situation to boost it, it's commonness is showing through.

How is it obvious that the iPod gave birth to the iPhone? It is a completely different operating system with a completely different user interface.

If anything, the Mac gave birth to the [concept of] iPad, which gave birth to the iPhone, which in turn led to the real iPad.

This is what happens when you're a design company masquerading as a tech company.

Do they design beautiful products? Abso-freaking-lutely!

Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no!

They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services, their websites suck (particularly their developer portals), they can't write a functional USB stack, macOS has more bugs than ever, even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

Don't get me wrong, they have top-notch product designers and UX designers. But engineering has been second fiddle since the iPod launched. Self-driving automobiles is entirely an engineering problem, design doesn't even come into it.

Come on. Are you seriously suggesting that Apple is not a tech company? Have you seen their chip designs? Do you know of any company that ships in volume that has successfully migrated from two chip architectures which is still around today?

When you've got the cash Apple has, you can make (and they have made) some really nice acquisitions, and undoubtedly there are some pockets of real geniuses (pun intended) working under the Apple banner. However, those very engineers are cultural misfits at Apple.

I do have to admit that Apple's complete lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine exactly how dire the technical skill shortage is at Apple. However, if you've ever tried to report a bug to Apple (a proper detailed bug report) the engineer who gets back to you will most likely be an arrogant latte loving hipster who is more interested in the latest trendy social sharing app than quality engineering. Don't expect an intelligent conversation!

If Steve Jobs hadn't returned to Apple, we would be talking about the Macs the same way we talk about Amiga and Atari nowadays.

I clearly remember the not so good situation Apple was in around 1994, with Copland failing to impress.

The hyperbole is strong in your comment.

> Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no!

I love me a bit of schadenfreude about apple in my time, but come on - they took a unix base and turned it into a desktop that that naives can use pretty safely. No-one else has done that, not without dumbing it down into a simplified OS like a smartphone OS.

They certainly do seem to be sliding given that their users are grumbling more and more, but really, they've got a fair few notches in their belt (though they definitely do also have some turkeys)

> they took a unix base and turned it into a desktop that that naives can use pretty safely. No-one else has done that, not without dumbing it down into a simplified OS like a smartphone OS.

Ubuntu works fine, before that there was SGI Irix which worked ok.

> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services,

So does everyone else.

> their websites suck (particularly their developer portals),

I'm sure consumers care about developer portals.

> they can't write a functional USB stack,

Never had any problems with it.

> macOS has more bugs than ever,

How did you quantify this?

> even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

How did you quantify this?

... I'm not trying to discount your experience, but you really can't decide whether a company is good at tech based on n=1. I happen to think the design of everything since the iPhone 5 sucks, does that mean Apple is a tech company masquerading as a design company?

You can make that n=2.

Apple really pushed hard to get me to adopt their products, going so far as to give me free hardware to develop on, I never really saw the point. From an engineering point of view I'd rather develop on Linux, from a consumer point of view I like the hardware but the software just isn't there.

>> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services,

> So does everyone else.

That's fair, but given the size of Apple they're doing disproportionately poorly.

>> their websites suck (particularly their developer portals),

> I'm sure consumers care about developer portals.

I didn't say consumers care. Consumers care about design, which is what Apple focus on, that's my point!

>> they can't write a functional USB stack,

> Never had any problems with it.

Plug in a USB 3 hub. Any USB 3 hub... seriously.

>> macOS has more bugs than ever,

> How did you quantify this?

As mentioned, Apple have a complete lack of transparency that makes this difficult to quantify. However, articles like https://eclecticlight.co/2016/09/28/known-bugs-in-macos-sier... give some incite. I've been using OS X/macOS for years, and at least in my personal experience it's been mostly downhill since Snow Leopard. Finder is particularly buggy, although Apple Mail also crashes at least once a week. Waking from sleep seems to wreak havoc on all sorts of things, why does my mouse and keyboard start playing up?

>> even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

> How did you quantify this?

As above. Just personal experience. I genuinely do not use iOS much, I do admit that. I use it purely for development, a lot of which recently is just web development. However, Safari seems to have an uncanny ability to crash iOS entirely! Allocate a lot of large WebGL textures and watch the system burn.

EDIT: To clarify the "downhill" statement, large WebGL texture allocations on iOS 8 do not cause a system crash, just the expected Safari tab crash. On iOS 9+ you'll be sent to the white boot screen at least 50% of the time, and things will get hot (on the same iPhone hardware).

Are you seriously suggesting that their teams of cpu engineers, battery engineers, material engineers, wireless engineers and electric engineers, among many, many others, don't have the chops required to design, build and manage the complexity of maybe one of the most valuable products in the world right now? all because you think their software engineers are not as good as you?

How do you think they got to be one of the most valuable and profitable companies of all time? by luck?

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