Steve Jobs on why Xerox failed
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1: https://kotaku.com/with-activisions-influence-growing-blizza...
They have no idea why people are angry with them. None. But that's not surprising, because they have no idea why their company was loved in the first place. They view users that balk at the imposition of exploitive business models as entitled internet trolls (nevermind that their most famous and successful product owner is literally a famous and successful internet troll).
How could they be so disconnected? Well, it seems there's a massive normative shift following WoW. Most of the staff I spoke with date to after the MMO's massive money-spewing success. They're in their mid-twenties and didn't really play early Blizz titles at the time they came out. The few greybeard OG nerds I spoke with that were there still got it but didn't care. The ones that cared left, the ones that didn't stayed.
Maybe they got tired of fighting back against the suits when Titan failed to become WoW2.0? I don't know.
Morhaime's departure, and his replacement, are emblematic of this this shift to post-WoW money inurement.
This is the first year I'm considering skipping my annual visit to Blizzcon.
"Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview"
Previously as F1-12 Buttons they were overloaded with OS functions such as brightness and audio controls, moving the application Functions to the fn+ combo key.
With the Touch Bar not only are buttons only available when applicable, they also allow for custom inputs such as a range instead of a binary click and their meaning is a lot more explicit with icons and text as opposed to F1-12
I actually think it’s more of a application support problem. If more applications offered better touchbar support I’d be happy about forgetting a series of hot key keystrokes.
I think the target market should be for non-professional users (who don't otherwise use external keyboards and have shortcuts memorized) which is why it's weird that it's a top of the line addition (obviously, a cost issue).
I assume X means 10 like 'OS X', so I would assume it's the 10th gen iPhone, but I don't know.
These are questions I've heard over the holidays from friends and family, questions that were unthinkable when Jobs ran Apple.
I presume there are some processor differences and such, I think the X models don't have the home button, I think all the X models have the notch as it's where the camera/ir module for the face unlock is located.
All of them.
> Which one has a home button still?
None of them.
> So whats the difference
<>S is the refresh, same as it's been for years. Max is the physically larger size, what used to be called the "Plus".
> These are questions I've heard over the holidays from friends and family, questions that were unthinkable when Jobs ran Apple.
I mean, Max/Plus is annoying, but I think Jobs was alive when iPhones refreshed with an S so this seems like a silly statement.
Frankly X was just a dumb name.
Why are we suddenly expected to do more research on various models when part of the reason why the iPhone was successful was due to it's simplicity?
And even if you knew the XS was the refresh, would guess the XR preceeded or succeeded it? R comes before S, so maybe S is the newest?
Personally, the X naming feels like kind of a gaff.
Feels like there's a disconnect in the marketing department.
* 7 macs
* 4 ipads
* 4 iphones
* 2 tv's
17 products ?
The thing is, for some big companies Product is under the wing of marketing in some way... even if product releases are from a selected internal catalog to fill local market needs.
ceases
I remember pretty clearly how we all thought Apple would be doomed while they were still struggling to bring Copland out.
The first few years of Steve 2.0 were largely about REDUCING the number of products, and improving the MARKETING. As for the products:
* There was the iMac, which was notable for having FEWER features. Sure there was USB, but everybody was complaining about their ADB and serial peripherals no longer working without dongles, and about the omission of a floppy drive (sound familiar?).
* There was the iBook, which certainly had an iconic look (especially the handle), but not one that had a lasting impact.
* The PowerBooks were nice designs.
* The Power Mac G3/G4 towers with the opening latch and handles were a really good product with a lasting form factor, in my opinion.
* The Power Mac G4 cube was a commercial disaster, doomed, among other things, by bad pricing positioning in a weakening economy (sound familiar?).
* And don't get me started about the hockey puck mouse — the kind of product design that tends to get forgotten in Steve Jobs nostalgia threads.
That said, I think Apple is sitting on top of another blockbuster, similar to the iPhone in terms of impact, if they know how to play it well. I'm referring to the Apple Watch equipped with a non-invasive glucose sensor.
I realize that they have a bit of a regulatory battle to fight before releasing it. But the potential is immense. It will change how people eat, not just diabetics. It's pretty well established science now that if we reduce the area under the glucose curve (read minimize glucose spikes), we will age more slowly and we will reduce metabolic disease enormously.
As someone who has dated someone that is diabetic and now works with someone who is diabetic--someone who likes to sit at the cutting edge of technology and is even using hacked equipment to improve his experience--I don't think we have that technology yet.
There's also an alternative using radiofrequency: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641327/
That product doesn't exist yet, the video on the home page is 18 months old so it's probably not feasible / accurate.
Also, love your username, I grew up there!
http://173.239.45.5/~joshmitt/data-beta/Horvath-NatureRev201...
Bagsvaerd is great. I was living in the Lyngby-Naerum-Birkeroed-Farum area for many years, working in formal methods. I hope to be back soon! Are you still in the area?
I moved to Copenhagen, but I guess that qualifies as the area :P
I recall at one of his last keynotes Jobs pointed out that compared to what the iPhone and iPad were bringing in the Mac/macOS division was small by comparison but compared to computer companies like HP or Dell that Apple was shipping more units of higher quality products to fiercely loyal users/fans (this observation preceded announcements of new/upgraded computers iirc). I realize Apple has an obsession with Ferrari-like cool, slick looks to their laptops but I think a blue-collar, enterprise-aimed laptop that says "I'm a serious developer/business person, I will lug an 8 pound laptop if it gives me lots of RAM, lots of processing power, and an all day batter, even if it's not sexy but gets the job done more reliably than anything else in existence" would be a wildly popular product. In short: something like a Lenovo P series (with 8 cores, up to 128GB RAM and a full, QUALITY keyboard without the BS touchbar) but running macOS. Hell, steal the advertising memes that Ford and Chevy use for selling their trucks: an industrial-grade laptop workstation for the knowledge workers who make the knowledge economy work.
I would buy two right away.
Not that I necessarily believe the quote, but I've seen no sign yet that it's likely to happen any time soon.
Also under Tim Cook’s reign Apple has dominated the wearables market with a product that everybody dismissed in the beginning.
And right now they are being more number centric rather than innovation centric as in the past years.
“Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.”
And plenty of innovations for me: A12X/T2/W1 SOCs, FaceID, Apple Watch ECG, HomePod spatial detection, Beats1 Radio, Handoff/Continuity, Apple Pay.
One of the reason why Steve never initiated Stock buy back and were sitting on big pile of cash were simple, he could bet on products that might or might not make money. ( He was never really sure ) They will have enough resources to weather the storm. He knew technology moves so fast that one single misstep will means 2 - 3 years behind.
As bad as Apple might seems today ( they aren't bad... we just thought it could be better ), it is still far better than it was in the 90s.
Today, Apple earns 70b/year profit, is growing at 10% per year and is incredibly diversified. They could survive on any one of their businesses and in recent years grew two from nothing i.e. Services and Wearables into 1B+ businesses. And they still have their 1B/year content play starting in 2019 and they have AR glasses rumored for 2020.
And you think Apple is doing bad as a company ?
And those points are precisely, numbers. In terms of Products, Three years after the introduction of MacBook Pro Touch Bar, I still think the previous gen MacBook Pro is much better. Four Years after introduction of Homekit, Nearly 7 years since they kicked out Scott forstall because of Apple Maps, and it is still pieces of crap outside US, UK and China. How Many years after App Stores? Think MacBook Air was long in the work? It was because of huge amount of criticism from MBP they decided to make a Retina MacBook Air just to shut us up. ( For the time being )
It is not that their numbers aren't doing good, but their product and services quality are declining. Most of their Product Line seems like a mess. And we are paying a premium for it, we are not iSheep, but that value proposition is declining everyday.
Oh, Did I mention All MacBook Pro TouchBar had a design flaw with Thunderbolt that increase the MacBook failure rate? Yes these things happen under Steve as well, but once these were known a new iteration of design would have been make a year later, instead we are sitting on the same shit for years.
You are still part of there marketing machine.
Compare that to for example how Microsoft have split their dependence on Windows, and now have xbox, azure, office as truly diverse business lines. Or Amazon and their AWS division (their content still relies too much on Prime subscriptions coming from the store).
"Doing bad" is not a good description, but in terms of trajectory, they are far from a safe strategic bet right now.
Formerly loyal customers are giving Apple TONS of great product ideas but they aren't listening.
Just like many former buyers of iPhone will not be coming back. Apple can "innovate" all they want, but customers aren't going to blindly buy it.
I can't say the same for 3.5mm (although I think both groups are misguided).
Tim Cook & Apple's board have an absolutely stellar team of VP's, from customer service to engineering, but I think they've given themselves too much freedom in terms of "throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks". They're so comfortable with their brand, cash piles and whatnot, that they can release so many variants of so many products and not even worry about the wasted man-hours and resources spent on it.
I get the feeling there hasn't been anyone there taking a step back and going "Y'kno, we can totally do this, but we shouldn't".
Butterfly keyboard? I love how slim their laptops are now, but did they really have to go and re-engineer how a keyboard works? Even in its 3rd iteration, I have a space bar on an almost new Macbook Pro that just won't stop sticking.
iPhone XR? We've priced out the XS for most folks, but let's make a cheaper one too! Oh wait, we have the 8!
Watch Hermes? Or ceramic? Around the $3k mark you're in Rolex, Omega territory; and those watches will be worth more in a few years than anything Apple release.
Etc etc.
I don't know what motivates a lot of folks to buy Apple, but for me it boils down to:
- Stellar customer support
- Reliability & durability
I don't particularly care too much about having the latest / greatest hardware inside my products; but so far Apple are still lightyears ahead of the competition on those two fronts.
I can be pretty much anywhere in the world that has an apple store, walk in and get my keyboard issue sorted, and my many other iDevices have easily lasted a few years and are still going strong.
I will say though, the current jumble of iPhone models reminds me a lot of all the various power macs available when Jobs returned to Apple, got rid of them all, and established the 4-quadrant product line of personal/professional, desktop/portable.
It is also worth mention a lot of people running the company properly know or read "The Innovator's Dilemma", but to actually understand and put things into action is a completely different things. Shareholders just don't like risk.
The Innovators Dilemma is about making a product that “overserves” the market and for companies being afraid to introduce a cheaper “good enough” product.
Also the author of the Innovators Dilemma was laughably wrong about the iPhone.
https://medium.com/@jakewheadon/why-i-think-clay-christensen...
Isn't that essentially the problem Apple now has with:
* The high-end iPhones going up in price because of more expensive components, but not providing features users would be excited to upgrade for
* Not bringing a mid-range phone to the market
But Apple’s main problem is not the high cost of phones. Apple’s problem are:
* The iPhone is good enough for most people and the upgrade cycle is lengthening. The iPhone 6s from 2015 is faster than midrange new Android phones and is actually still faster than even high end Android Phones in single core performance. No one is going to upgrade to a mid range phone. The iPhone 6s is still getting OS updates and probably will for at least two more years.
* the average selling price of an Android phone in $265 - $315 depending on which source you believe (https://www.cnet.com/news/why-your-iphone-and-android-will-c...). Even the low end iPhone SE was selling for more than that.
The 7 is a midrange Phone by iPhone standards and it is $475. If they dropped the price to $350, it would still be more than the average Android user would be willing to pay.
Yes the $329 iPad is proof that they could make a profitable iPhone that was good enough for most people. They charge an extra $130 for cellular and GPS but the chip couldn’t cost anymore than $30.
* I doubt that Apple could make a phone that was cheap enough to lure Chinese buyers and still be a decent phone.
Full disclaimer, I was a full-on Apple fanboi from the Nineties to the mid 2010s.
A lot of people seem to think that 'asshole' is a stepping stone to success. With no evidence to support it either way, I try to live presuming that it was 'despite'. That Apple could have been ever greater had he managed to be assertive and strong without being abusive.
I’ve seen this a lot. People are assholes when young and then they mature and manage to maintain their effectiveness while inflicting less damage.
I remember in each of these companies there were easily more than 10x product development people as marketing and merchandising people, but marketing people ran the companies. They had no idea about craftsmanship. Many of their ideas were in opposition to product quality would ultimately kill Travelocity as a slow poison.
My timing into all of this was interesting. I got into this in late 2007. At that exact moment Travelocity concluded industry growth in North America was finished. People had finally come online and organic growth was done. Now the only growth remaining was competition. Within a year all the executives left.
When Travelocity started its internal collapse in 2013 (I was in Afghanistan at the time) their superior products still had strong value even as the company quickly lost marketshare and employees. On top of that Travelocity had the strongest brand of the online travel companies, which was the thing they really wanted. In 2014 the company was diced up. Orbitz got the white label partnership business and Expedia got the Travelocity brand. In 2015 Expedia put in an offer to purchase Orbitz. A third of Orbitz's value was that partner business it got from Travelocity, because it would provide growth potential to Expedia it couldn't build from its brand alone. Now Travelocity is about a 50 person marketing team of Expedia, but it accounts for about a third of Expedia's core online revenue. At its high in 2012 Travelocity was about a 3500 employee company under Sabre.
The interesting thing about being at all 3 is the similarities in marketing driven goals and the similarities in technology. The technologies, the front end and the Java webapp middleware, were nearly identical. Same sorts of bloat. Same sorts of shifting positions on frameworks. Same sorts of aged archaic code that continued to live on 15 years later.
EDIT:
This is why the two products I mentioned were the industry's best. Vacation packages (flight + hotel + other things) by far had the highest margin. When you go to an online travel agency they are always pushing you to purchase a hotel, because hotels have substantially higher margin than flights, (like $50 compared to $7), but vacations packages could be worth anywhere from 1.5x to 4x hotel margin. Travelocity figured this out the best and were able to offer the cheapest packages at the highest margin rates. That was a big deal.
When all things retail fail, as they eventually always will, contracted partnerships will continue to pay. In additional to financial security they provide access to industries, data, and financial schemes otherwise not available. If you are a growth strategist this is what you want.