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Comment by yaseer | Hacker News Reader

Although I think Nadella has made some good changes to company culture, there's a lot more variables that influence a company's performance than the CEO, just as there's a lot more variables that influence a country's Economic performance than a ruling party.

The piece does that all-too-common simplification of providing a single cause to explain the fluctuation is MSFT's fortunes, a form of cognitive bias I believe. We like simple stories for complex phenomena.

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

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What if the lesson is not that Nadella is a great CEO, but that Ballmer was actually terrible?

Agree, 100%... One more variable I think it's also a combination of timing too. For example: Tim Cook is busy destroying Apple's product lineup forcing a lot of people to reconsider Microsoft.

Comments like this are a dime a dozen on Reddit and Hacker News but Apple is doing fine.

Higher MacBook Pro sales, highest ever iPhone sales. Services doing well...

I'd say their biggest problem is MBP pricing is high and a stagnate desktop line.

MBP pricing is typical for a redesign, not even high if you include inflation. They'll likely go down with time as they have in the past.

And desktops... Well hopefully there's something this year...

They might be doing "fine" right now by some metrics like sales numbers, but that doesn't imply they will continue to be successful. Many companies have posted increasing sales figures right up until they crash.

I've been increasingly unhappy (as a user and developer) with Apple's Mac systems for some time. I'm by far from the only one. They have lost several potential sales from me, and my team at work, simply because they aren't offering systems which we wish to purchase. Until they do, we will end up purchasing systems which provide the features we need, and move to platforms which are maintained competently. These are lost sales both in the present and the future. We'll see how things play out over the next few years, but I would not be at all surprised if there isn't a dramatic reversal of their fortunes at some point.

I'd be really interested to know what features you think are most needed and are going to "crash" them. What I most commonly see is "neglecting pros by not offering 32 gigs of ram" which targets a pretty specific demographic. Honest question, not trying to be flippant in anyway.

I switched recently because whether it be sony, hcp, or lenovo every laptop me and my girlfriend went through broke down in someway and we had to deal with the horrible process of going through those companies support system. Apple laptops may get defects or break down, but at least they the best product support, and in general their quality is superior to others in terms of failure rates[1].

[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/laptops/LaptopReliability

It's not just due to the recent MacBook Pro controversy; that's just the latest event in at least five years of decline.

At work, we target MacOS as a supported platform and have systems for continuous integration and deployment on this platform. There is no Mac system suitable for this task. Previously Xserve would have been used. Mac Pro is unsuitable and too expensive for the role. Right now we have a few mac minis on shelves in a machine room. They are crap. They are not suited for remote management, they have slow discs and bad performance all around, and the recent models are much worse than older ones. MacOS doesn't allow virtualisation on non-mac hardware so we can't use our beefy VMware infrastructure for the task. Bottom line: supporting MacOS for development and deployment in a serious capacity is not possible without suitable hardware or virtualisation. If Apple allowed MacOS X licensing on VMware ESX on non-Mac hardware, brought out a new Xserve, or even a more capable Mini or proper desktop Pro, we'd buy several tomorrow, because right now it's painful to maintain, and we just about cope with the poor minis which are creaking along while loaded to the max.

Decent graphics support is a problem. My group works on scientific and medical image storage, processing and visualisation, and the state of Mac graphics is sad indeed. Both on the hardware side and the software side. No OpenGL updates for years, and anaemic hardware. I get better graphics support on FreeBSD today... If I need a decent GPU with a decent amount of memory and current OpenGL support, I can buy one for a small fraction of the cost of any Mac, and use it with FreeBSD, Linux or Windows. The Mac is a barren wasteland.

And the software side is also a problem. It's been in continual decline since 10.6. Much of the base system hasn't seen maintenance in a decade at this point. Inter-operability and compatibility with other platforms is becoming increasingly problematic, since it's fallen a decade behind for much of the core tools. If you want a UNIX desktop, it's no longer ticking that box. You can get by with homebrew, but the hassle and poor usability makes it easier to just use Linux or FreeBSD. Right now, I use FreeBSD to debug clang++ C++ code because it's easier to do debugging there than on MacOS...

I'm still using a 2011 Macbook Pro with a matt display, Radeon GPU and lots of ports. It's been due for replacement for some time, but when my boss offered me a new one I said I'd be better sticking with the cheap Dell desktop I dual boot with Windows and Linux. Because other than the superficial aesthetics of the laptop, the desktop is better on all counts, and vastly more productive and more ergonomic--with a good quality monitor and keyboard.

Over a decade ago, at the university I worked at, you saw people dropping serious money on fully loaded Apple G5, then Intel towers for serious computation, and people had them under their desks and also in central compute facilities. Because that was the best you could get at the time, and people pushed them to the limit doing bioinformatics and simulation work. Today, they have nothing in this space. I also saw entire departments shift from 100% Windows to 100% Mac as their benefits and cost were realised. Today, people are moving back, because today's Mac hardware and software no longer has any meaningful advantage; it still has some advantages, but the cost/benefit has declined. If you need decent hardware specs, you can get better from Dell for a faction of the cost, and that's pretty sad to say.

They have increased sales by targeting causal users who want to spend a bit more on a laptop, but they have at the same time seemingly abandoned the high end, and the needs of technical, scientific and professional users entirely. I'd like to be able to purchase a decent mini for home use, and a new laptop for work, and hardware for the datacentre at work. But they aren't producing anything suitable in any of these categories, and haven't for a good while, and if they don't have anything I want to spend money on, I won't be giving them any business. Macs used to be machines I desired greatly but couldn't afford; today they are machines I could afford but don't desire. They've messed up badly.

For the software our group writes, we previously supported Linux, MacOS X and Windows as client and server platforms. We dropped MacOS X as a server platform a while back. For more recent work, we've found MacOS relegated as a client platform as well. Those CI support costs and compatibility problems due to the lack of real MacOS X maintenance resulted in it being deprioritised; Linux and Windows are the two main ones we support now, with MacOS being supported as a lower tier platform. That's a problem entirely of their own making.

We'll see what happens, but I can't help but feel that their current growth from phones and MacBooks is going to plateau and decline; their growth is certainly not from technical users who have been ignored for some time, it's from selling mediocre hardware at high prices as fashion accessories. I'd like to see them turn that around, but I can't see it being tenable to continue to purchase Mac hardware and support MacOS X in the medium to long term with the current trends.

No...

All the wonderful presentation done by Jobs then is nowhere to be seen these days. I used to stay awake to watch it live from 2AM but I only read the reports later these days.

Cook keeps cutting everything but the most profitable departments just to make the numbers look good when Apple was about this unified experience on various aspects of what makes up as a digital life.

Your assumption is like praising a movie doing really well because the prior installment did excellent and people expect the same until they realize it isn't what it was.

I think the space to innovate might not be smaller now, but it's less ripe for big dsiruptions until VR or something else can start grabbing marketshare. Phones and laptops are pretty stable.

Apple is trying to get into at least one exciting field, self driving cars. Supposedly AR/VR too. Maybe others. They've also released some pretty solid wireless earbuds last year. Sure, it's not the next iPhone, but honestly no one else has yet either in the past five years.

I fear that is like the Diablo, Sim City, or Civilization game brands. Even if they have a very bad release, they could still easily have a release that beats the previous one. But it erodes the brand. In other words, as long as Tim Cook didn't screw up, a simple Mac lineup iteration would've had fantastic sales.

Microsoft did "fine" for a very long time too under Ballmer.

Sure but Microsoft was 'doing fine' well into the Ballmer period everyone now acknowledges was a decline. So was Blackberry for a few years after the iPhone was released.

But they're stuck with two distinct platforms: iOS (touch) and macOS (non-touch) while the hardware the world wants is not so binary. Basically, that we can't touch the screens of the high cost workstations and laptops where we do our creative work, kind of brings down the whole ecosystem.

I consider this to be one of their better decisions. With workstation and laptops, you already have higher-precision input devices available that also are less prone to causing fatigue.

For some specialty application I can see the usefulness of digitizer pen input like some Thinkpad X series models (e.g. X220T). But fat-finger touch? What for?

For big movements (getting a window out of the way, viewing media, etc.), anything collaborative, and for anytime the machine is being used in an awkward position (so when not seated comfortably focused on inputting).

Who is advocating for this besides you? Current Apple displays are some of the worst computer displays ever when it comes to fingerprints and grime - they would have to get rid of glass. I have been using an X60 for about five years and have literally used the stylus twice, just to see that it works. My wife is a commercial artist and uses Wacom tablets. If she had wanted a drawable display she would have found some way to trick me into paying for a Cintiq by now. The collaborative thing is a non-market - the last time I used a digital whiteboard was in 2006.

I can see a giant tablet with a desktop stand and keyboard becoming the new PC as a more plausible scenario than the iMac/OS X getting a touch UI.

My apologies. I wasn't aware of you and your wife and that you guys had this all figured out.

My opinion doesn't represent everyone's of course, but I don't like touching my desktop/laptop screen and getting smudges everywhere. I'm quite happy with a keyboard and a (good) trackpad.

Apple said the touchbar is their first foray into a new system of inputs, perhaps a larger touchbar and some sort of haptic feedback is a new interface their going down, I think that could actually be pretty cool and innovative.

As for putting a touch screen on everything and desktops, eh... I mean, that Surface Studio looks amazing and likely appeals to creative professionals, but probably doesn't effect many people besides that. Kudos to them for the innovation, but I don't think it represents a better ecosystem.

I pointed this out on HN before with the same opinion and someone pointed out that they might just throw away MacOS. iOS is a smaller codebase, has superior multitasking (ever needed Activity Monitor on iOS?) and generally more future proof than MacOS is. An iOS laptop or desktop (like the Surface) wouldn't be out of the question.

Desktop and phone are very distinct interfaces. Last time they tried, such as adding the Launchpad, it didn't add anything.

I hope they don't come up with any other funny ideas.

Seen the desktop surfaces? Or used an SP4? An iOS equivalent would be excellent.

So... Windows 8 UI was a good idea?

Apple's financials are fine, for the time being. The pace of their product innovation has noticeably slowed down though, and many products seem to have gone backwards in terms of quality and desirability.

> Tim Cook is busy destroying Apple's product lineup forcing a lot of people to reconsider Microsoft.

Tim Cook is not helping accelerate Microsoft's cloud and SaaS businesses.

But he is helping the rejuvenation of Microsoft's phone and tablet business. Oh wait.

I disagree. Microsoft in terms of products under Nadella has been largely a continuation of Microsoft under Ballmer. Inside the company things will be different, but in terms of actual output the company has become much more risk-averse.

And Tim Cook is far from destroying Apple.

He's keeping the numbers, for now. Mind share is definitely not what it used to be, which will appear later on as numbers.

The latter is not very controversial. The question is can a tech giant be saved? The track record generally isn't great for companies that pass their day in the sun. Having a great CEO is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a rebound.

I agree there is no single cause but you are also under estimating the power of a CEO who is responsible for resource allocation and investments. Where he chooses to invest is what becomes of a company. Culture also flows from top down and CEO plays a big role.

Oh I don't dispute that his impact has been significant and positive. I just think there's other factors at play here. For example, Google was extremely slow to market with a competitive cloud strategy, and Apple has been a less competitive player the last 3 years with its own product innovation.

Isn't that kind of like saying that a runner doesn't deserve credit for her win because the other people in the race ran slower than she did?

Change the runner analogy to manager of a sports team.

It's hard to only credit one manager over another when the opposition is a big factor in the equation (along with the strength of the team).

You can also say this in a different way- Microsoft was faster than Google when it came to cloud strategy.

It's almost like a corporation is a mini fiefdom. Like there is a petty dictator at the helm , no matter how benevolent. Weird how capitalist companies are structured that way

Or that there is another single factor which led to the hiring of a CEO like Nandella and not like Ballmer.

I see it quite differently, the leader is the single biggest influencer on the performance of the group. There are many examples in sports where just changing the coach has changed the team from an underperforming team to a leading team. Similarly with companies, a leadership change has often lead to a significant change in performance.

To understand that you have to understand that pack behavior tends to mimic the leader, so if the leader does X, then their reports do X, and the people who report to the reports do X. In large organizations you may find pockets where someone in the change decided not to do X and then everyone below them is free of that expectation (for better or worse).

  >> mimic the leader, so if the leader does X, then their reports do X...

Certainly true - perhaps the best definition of a leader.

There are plenty of people who are managers and not leaders, though.

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