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Comment by Devolver | Hacker News Reader

That's a very good point. I could add that Steve Jobs was marketing genius at core, that Salesforce's success (especially early on) was heavily driven by marketing, and that Snap's recent rollout of Spectacles is one of the best product launches I've ever seen.

I'll think about that.

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But then the three examples you give are of product launches, not acquisition and retention.

Apple is an example of a product driven company. A really well marketed CreativeRiver is not an iPod, a really well marketed Motorola Razr is not an iPhone and I wouldn't substitute any Galaxy Tab device for an iPad.

Also, since Tim Cook (who is no ones idea of a marketing genius) took charge, Apple's stock price has more than doubled.

Also, as Steve Blank points out (perhaps a bit too harshly), Tim Cook is a brilliant operator and optimizer, but very far from a visionary or brilliant product/marketing mind. So far, he's taken the foundation that Jobs built and made it sing.

https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...

But so far, the products Apple has launched under his leadership haven't actually been all that well conceived.

V1 of the Apple Watch was a confusing mess that didn't have a real, concrete purpose or place in anyone's lives.

With v2, they stepped back and focused a bit (on the active/athletic market), but it's hardly a breakthrough device yet.

Meanwhile, the iPad is (so far) falling far short of its potential to revolutionize computing.

All of this could change. But for me, despite the stock price, the jury on the Era of Cook is still out.

C.f Apple Watch - its too early to tell. v1 of the iphone, which shipped without third party apps, and which WIRED recommended that you should jailbreak if you bought it, took many generations to reach maturity.

The iPad takes a beating - somewhat unjustly - for failing to live up to the promises made of it by its marketing. Judged against almost any other product other than the iPhone, it's an enormous success. It created an entire product category, it sold more devices on its opening year than all previous sales of tablet sales combined. It captured an enterprise market that almost everyone said Apple would never be able to touch. It changed the behavior of the competition - BlackBerry, Google and Microsoft all rushed devices to market and Windows 8 was of course heavily inspired by the need to run well on touch devices.

My wife works in an Apple store. During her training/indoctrination/kool-aid drinking, she was asked her impression of the iPad, and she said that it was a device for couch potatoes, consuming content. She was slapped down pretty hard for that. At the time, the ads for iPads showed users climbing mountains, exploring caves, writing symphonies, etc., with the iPad being an essential part of the activity. If the iPad is used in this way at all, it must be with a very, very tiny fraction of users, but maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe the point was to appeal to couch potatoes who imagine themselves to be more active and creative?

I'm not sure there's anything majorly different with iPads in that regard.

A lot of the Surface book and ultrabook adverts have focused on more creative and sexy applications. I haven't seen one for a while that says 'Runs Powerpoint like a motherf*cker'

Also a great point. In my mind, Steve Jobs was a genius marketer AND a genius product person.

His keynote speeches "One More Thing..." were the pure essence of great showmanship.

An amazingly designed and engineered product, marketed brilliantly is the platonic idea. To be "insanely great," you usually need both.

Aside from what someone else said about Jobs being product, not marketing driven (just go google what he said when the org loses focus on product and the focus shifts to sales and marketing), you could argue it takes someone really good at X in order to be independent of X.

For example, I am reasonably good at coding and ops. Therefore, most of the side projects I do are not constrained by coding or ops, but rather, e.g. my ability to design.

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