Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

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From its actions, it's becoming quite clear that Apple does not know what to do with its financial muscle or no longer knows how to do things in parallel. The recent product abandonments seem to point to a future where only iPhones and iPads exist along with one laptop model (Apple TV may also disappear in a few years if Apple cannot or does not want to somehow get into large content production). Everything else is useless in the eyes of Apple and is easily dispensable. I wouldn't be surprised at all if by this time next year the only "computers" from Apple one MacBook Pro w/Touch Bar and one single iMac.

To a lay person, this doesn't look like better focus. It looks like:

* Incompetence in management, because of all the outdated stuff still being sold at high and old prices

* Inability to attract and/or retain good talent, because Apple is not expanding teams to sustain its product lines. It's instead closing down and collapsing them into the iPhone/iPad/MBP lines.

* A complete lack of vision, because nothing is being done for years on several product lines. If that's not shameful, I don't know what is.

It's very sad to see this unfold, but I guess all good things come to an end, and this is happening sooner than expected.

Tim Cook was supposed to be a logistics guy. "In parallel" should be his thing. To have years in between updating products is the opposite of what I expected to happen. Thought he'd put Apple on a schedule with periodic updates, like ducks in a row. This plus the lack of vision is sad for a company that had both.

EDIT: And look at Tim's wikipedia page, there's a quote: "You kind of want to manage it like you're in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem"

That's why you can't have administrators leading an innovation company. Administrators and beauracrats lack creative vision, and that's what sustained Apple all those years.

The sad thing is that creative vision is one of those things that all of us start out with, but then it gets beat out of us through the course of childhood and mandatory education.

Referring to Tim Cook as an "administrator" or "bureaucrat" betrays a stunning level of ignorance of his achievements. His significant optimizations of Apple's massively complex supply chain is the reason the company has been able to sell over one billion iPhones (and countless other devices) to date. So he has plenty of innovations under his belt. They are just operational innovations, so most techies tend to either not be aware of them or take them for granted (since it's not their domain of expertise).

What made Steve Jobs different was that he was a product guy and an incredible visionary to boot. He had the rare ability to care about details of individual products while also having a solid grasp of the big picture in terms of how those products should come together to form an ecosystem. I think Tim Cook tries to delegate those things to people who just aren't as good as Steve Jobs (naturally), which explains the questionable decisions Apple has made recently regarding their products.

So he's a supply-chain dynamo. Vastly different skill set than that of a strong-willed and opinionated designer. You are right though, he is delegating the 'vision' parts of his assignment to his inferiors and Apple suffers for it.

I don't know if you have ever hang around supply-chain people, but with the ones I know, I would not want them designing stuff.

You make it sound as if he single-handedly sold over a billion phones. What else helped sell over a billion iPhones? Saccharine, simplified, cheery, brain-dead UI; an army of Apple loyalists, explainers, and apologists (still mourning the loss of their Beloved Leader); several metric fuck-tons of marketing and advertising spend, a panoply of factors that result in a once-per-year or once-per-every-other-year purchase cycle, and a phalanx of impeccably-decorated retail locations, among other things. Sure, Mr. Cook plays his role, and Apple's SCM is best-in-the-world, but I think there are more Tim Cooks out there than Steve Jobs.

That quote is about Inventory and Just-In-Time production.

Not product freshness.

> no longer knows how to do things in parallel

Doing things in parallel isn't how the org is setup: instead of vertical feature groups like most other companies (a Mac division, a phone division, accessories, etc), the company is split into design/hardware engineering/software. Means you get more integration with each part and less cross-org battles that Microsoft was famous for back in the day. Downside is that when the next iPhone was all hands on deck, they were pulling people off of Mac OS to work on it.

>A complete lack of vision

Actually its the complete opposite. They have a strong vision of the future and are shaping whole company to be ready for it. That means dropping all the things that will become irrelevant/commodity in ~5 years. Personal computer is one of those things.

In Apple vision future iteration of iPhone will replace _everything_. Small portable gateway to the cloud.

Yes, this means dropping all the pro-summer products. Apple doesnt need top 5% consumers anymore, the Final Cut Pro/Aperture fanatics, the DTP market, education, software devs. This was important in early 2000 to establish leading brand thru influencers. Today all of it gives marginal return on investment, so why bother when you can concentrate on volume?

The impression i have is that Apple under Jobs was about pitching products to one guy, Jobs. If he wanted to use it, it went on sale, if not then forget about it leaving the lab.

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