I've seen this many times, so great. Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today.
In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today?
In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today?
ps: by that I mean, the show goes on but the soil is dry, I don't think the world dreams or needs more digital tech. It's ironically in autopilot.
The next great technology revolution will give people (developers and consumers) the ability to imagine new possibilities. Some would say that requires new hardware embodiments (AR/VR), while others would say it's a merely a psychological change from the folks who build today (FB/Google repenting).
At the more extreme end, Keiichi Matsuda's "Hyperreality"* absolutely is a nightmare. It's not even the intensification of media that I find so abhorrent. It's the coercion and lack of user agency.
I'm not sure AR/VR will make a big diff but time will tell.
- Users prioritizing new features over rock solid performance hurt us badly. Basically, we as customers are our own worst enemy.
- Software done as distributed services when it doesn't need to be. Each tier added to a distributed architecture is a point of failure. And each tier needs to be supported in vendor upgrades and the like for server software, VM software, security patches, etc.
- Reduced emphasis on protocols. When my team started to develop services for the first time we decided to use JSON as the lingua franca for communicating between them. But we didn't think about developing protocols using JSON. Now it's a shit show of different messaging formats in JSON. So we don't have any standard components for parsing and forming messages.
- Here's a particular pain point with me. I'm sick of creating an account for every damned service I use. When I pull up an app to order takeout from a restaurant, I shouldn't need an account. All too often, I'm required to create one. I have accounts all over the web now and I'm sure I don't remember half of them. Of course, having lots of accounts requires lots of passwords to manage. So I have a password manager which works mostly until I'm in a hurry and then it doesn't.
I don't see a way out of our current predicament. But I do hear an undercurrent of "I want to simplify my life" growing. I believe that tech is taking too much cognitive effort from non-tech people.
Anyway, bit of a rant there but it's another symptom of software essentially disrespecting the user/customer and making them "pay" for the choices of product design.
Regarding cognitive effort, I talk about this with people on a pretty much constant basis. My feedback to designers and product people is always about how much cognitive energy I have to consume to interact with this feature/app/etc. We live in a time where our cognitive capacity is constantly sapped by exactly the things we're discussing in this thread. Extraneous notifications, software update reminders, "dark pattern" UX on news websites, animated advertisements, inconsistent/unintuitive design patterns across different software/platforms, low batteries (or other tech problems), etc.
Every bit of effort we can make on the creators' side to make the user's life easier is a 100% worthy undertaking, IMO. Not only is it a good thing to do for our fellow humans, they will recognize the ease of use and be a happy user or customer as a result.
Sure. Developers today would ask him about AppStore policies and things like that. No one would ask technical questions as it wouldn't make sense. And I am quite sure this scene will only ever exist in my imagination. :)
Most people only see App Store fees as a tax -- in some cases it really looks like that, but in the bigger picture, it's a beautiful example of values codified in a business model.
It's super easy to declare whatever executive to be some evil guy because he shot your product down because he killed your framework or whatever.
But sometimes these things are painful, but are done for the 'right' reasons.
Steve was able to communicate those things, I think most folks can't and thus don't.
On a personal level he's also a much more compassionate/empathetic person which I think plays well in the current social climate. I can't imagine Jobs getting away with some of his fabled antics today.
Finally, and probably due to the previous point, Cook is much more adept at playing the geopolitics game with India, China, Trump, etc..
But yes, him fielding random developer questions would be awkward at best. Which is why they shoo him off stage in favor of Craig/Sruji/some mid-level manager to talk tech every chance they get.
I ask that because I don't know. He does seem empathetic in his words. But the actions of Apple (from its production processes and sub-contracted systems to its treatment of developers and even iphone customers) seem as draconian and cut throat as they have ever been.
Cook does not have this reputation. Whether that's a persona or the real deal is impossible for us to say (I've never met him and I'm not at Apple anymore), but I think it's not very useful to think about what he's "really" like. We can only see how he presents himself, and so far his self-portrayal is significantly more positive than Jobs's, regardless of how the company is run at a larger scale.
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I also think it's impossible to compare Jobs's ethics to Cook's ethics by looking at how Apple as a company operates. The company has grown immensely in the past decade, so I think 2020-Apple can't be compared to 2010-Apple in this way. However, we can maybe look at Apple's increased commitment to certain real-world ethical concerns and stipulate a little bit.
Environmentally, they're 100% powered by renewable energy, and they recently announced they want to be 100% carbon-neutral by 2030. They have also said they want to manufacture new iPhones entirely from old iPhones, which would be great.
They're also a leader in consumer privacy and security, more than any other company of a similar size.
Then there's the manufacturing stuff. They certainly benefit from and make use of unethical manufacturing processes, but they seem to be trying to move away from that (to the extent that a company that requires as much manufacturing as they do can). I believe their chips are manufactured in the US (?), and I think they've started trying to manufacture certain other things in the US (I think the Mac Pro? or is that done with? I haven't checked in on it recently). Of course, they've got plenty of room to grow when it comes to ethical manufacturing, but what I'm highlighting here is that they've made some effort to improve as new issues have come to light, which can't be said of all companies with their manufacturing needs.
All that said, Apple as a company has plenty of room for growth in the ethical sense, but we can at least appreciate that these are issues that they address explicitly compared to the Apple of the past. As far as I'm aware, this has all been done under Cook's leadership, so perhaps it reflects on his personal values to some extent.
The former just doesn't matter that much and the later is just marketing.
What is material is their ability to make great things, delight customers, operate effectively etc..
Organizations are often led by complimentary types, Jobs is a classic Alpha, Cook a classic Beta, they happened to work well together. But Job's assertiveness, far from being a 'negative thing' may have been a quite essential spark in the formation of the company. Just because it doesn't make you 'feel good' doesn't mean it's bad for the creative process or the company. It also may have been irrelevant: it's entirely possible jobs may have been able to be jobs without that.
Apple is an IP company, their commitment to '0 carbon' is not really important compared to a chemical company, an oil refinery, or some entity whereupon operations are material contributors to carbon.
It's a nice thing to do, and it makes for good corporate citizenry, but it's mostly just that.
Bah. Apple makes a product like Airpod which is disposable and impossible to recycle. They design their products to be impossible to repair, and actually sabotage 3rd party repair efforts. Apple does not care about the environment at all. If they did, they would try to keep them out of landfills, make them easy to repair and recycle, and not design them to fail.
However, I believe it was Jobs who was the catalyst for the entire show. He was the spark that the rocket needed.
The company is in an incredible financial position but is still vulnerable to the next big innovation. The next usurper. The next Black Swan.
Jobs would be so antsy to have something new out at this point. And if he had a vision for something- which I think he would have Had- he would have made it happen.
Maybe some next great thing will happen for Apple soon? The device that cannibalizes the iPhone like the iPhone did to iPod.
And you can see them getting a little scared of this coming doom with their commitment to the App store monopolistic practices (whether you believe it's wrong or not, they really can't afford to cave on this front for their long-term sake)
But then I'm not one of those guys always staring at their phone/watch.
What's the opposite of power user? Old guy, I guess.
After Steve passed in '11, it seems his idea pipe got drained. The watch came out in '15, the earbuds in '16 (neither earth shaking) and other than that, it's been small iterations on the same products for 10 years. Where's the new excitement?
I’m almost surprised they are even bothering to continue the line and just don’t shove the dev work out to Microsoft. Especially since they have been de-thanged, Windows is no threat at all to Apple’s market.
In my opinion executive skills are of course needed but so are long term high level vision, with strong opinions like sjobs had - even if that makes them "less liked"
I think Jobs's vision was not static though.
I really dont see any of that. Definitely not to its customers or professional users and developers. If anything I think these compassionate and empathetic note, the so called "enrich" people's live is a recent thing in the past 4-5 years.
And personally I have not problem with that statement, except until you get caught not doing so people will judge you as a hypocrite. And it is exactly the same playbook as Google's do no evil. That is why Steve Jobs never talks much about any of that ( Despite I think he deeply cares about it ) and only talks about building GREAT products for their customers.
Steve cares or doesn't cares. You can tell. And he is being true to himself. Not the same could be said to Cook. I guess that is partly why Tim is an operational person and not a product person.