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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

There's something deeply wrong with the incentive structure in many IT companies.

I remember standing in an elevator with my manager on the way to sign a contract for a new bit of software. It would cost us 100k per year for this software. I asked my manager, “don’t we already have this product in-house, at least most of these features?” Their answer: “who cares? It’s not my money.”

I think there’s not so much an incentive problem, but more of a “hiring the wrong people” problem. People that literally don’t give a crap about anything but their next bonus or raise.

It has been established that most people are motivated by their personal short term gains, they have no real reason to care unless there's a positive incentive for them to worry about the long term consequences of their actions.

Chances are that those managers will be able to deliver their features on time, meeting all KPIs & OKRs, while accumulating a stack of technical debt for future maintainers.

> .. meeting kpis … while accumulating .. technical debt

Isn’t that life in a nutshell?

I wonder how Apple keeps its sh$t together. I know they have made some mistakes in recent years that hurt Apple's reputation, but overall it's been successful at maintaining a positive brand image and consistent product attributes. Sometimes this has been through backing down on wrong decisions they made before (e.g., look at the new Macbooks and all their ports.)

I think last time Apple "pulled a Microsoft" was when Ive removed a bunch of really really useful stuff in MacBooks (e.g., the ports-gate). I can imagine some forces inside Apple went like "that's it, enough." I'm genuinely curious how management in Apple works and how it promotes ideas that are truly worth it.

From my outside perspective, it seems like they must have an incentive structure that allows departments/products to forgo individual revenue if they're seen to be contributing to the wider company.

And yet, they put ads in the iPhone settings app.

It feels like they're really desperate to make their services ecosystem a thing, despite no one ever asking for it. But then services are the one area where it's possible to make shitloads of money out of thin air via recurring payments in a way that doesn't offend the users ("I'm using disk space on their servers and it needs to be paid for"). Locking people into these kinds of walled-garden services must also help somewhat with hardware sales.

Regarding the ports on macbooks, IMO it's just that Ive left and so everyone was allowed to design practical devices again, instead of admirable but impractical art pieces.

I cannot find any evidence of this. The only article I found even related to this was showing a feature where if you had the Siri suggestions widget then you might see an App Clip for a store nearby. It works like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62559071/how-to-add-appc...

The only other advertising system within iOS that I’m aware of is the App Store, both in recommendations and search, and of course, that Apple will advertise their own services for iCloud, Storage and so on.

Is Apple an advertising-based company? Not really. Are they marketing-driven? Absolutely. I think the difference is about user value and user impact.

Apple tends to go the Amazon route of trying to capture value from the interactions users might already do, though their iAds network from a decade ago did show an unsuccessful attempt to capture the in-app ad market.

But I can’t think of the last time I would have seen an “ad” in settings, though since App Clips appear in settings for up to 10 days once installed, I can see why some might think so.

They bug you to set up wallet, there's no way to opt out.

I think all the bugging can be skipped if you tap on it and initiate the setup flow then exit out of it or cancel it.

I’m not sure whether that applies to the wallet but it definitely works for Siri.

You were mostly right. I went as far as seeing a "Set up later in Wallet" button and tapped it. Now it's no longer showing an obnoxious red badge in settings. Thanks.

Click on setup and then exit and it’ll never ask again. Never had an issue with that

Theres nagging to setup Apple Pay (which apple gets a cut of), and now they also push trials of Apple Music and Apple Arcade - https://postimg.cc/YM9xW5B4/

Where?

https://i.postimg.cc/YM9xW5B4/40qz3647fuq71.webp

I've seen other crap notifications on my iPhone from other Apple products in the same location.

It's a major turn off.

Eh.. It's not that bad really. It's their own service and it's pretty unobtrusive. I'm not saying I like it at all, but it's a lot better than microsoft's ad notifications on windows. The windows notification immediately triggers a stress reflex in me now.

Apple has one profit and loss statement, that’s how.

Does it? There's now ads in iPhone settings, modal dialogs everywhere to upsell you onto Apple Music and whatever other features.

https://stevestreza.com/2020/02/17/ios-adware/

Also constant emails tellig you’re out of storage space trying to upsell iCloud storage space. Which, fair enough, is cheap but the emails are a bit spammish.

On the other hand, is not as if every single other company doesn’t do it, which doesn’t excuse but does explain it.

In a lot of places the “product design” is just the agglomeration of AB tests conceived by a large and widely distributed army of junior PMs. There is no one person responsible for the end to end experience, no top down vision, no one who’s ever going to say no on design or conceptual integrity grounds. At most an idea can get killed for having weak or negative experiment results.

I’ve never worked at Apple, but my understanding is that they have/had gatekeepers, from Jobs himself on down, to tell you your idea isn’t part of the vision and we’re not going to do it. And a lot of workers hate that!

It is a lot easier to keep your product integrity when your margins are fat because you serve only the upper crust of the markets you're in.

They’ll get there in a few years. If you fire up some of their apps, like News, that have a premium Apple subscription component they try to gently upsell you. Expect that to become more aggressive as they taste more of that sweet sweet high margin service revenue.

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