Steve Jobs, BMW & eBay
blog.adamnash.com
blog.adamnash.com
Isn't it survivorship bias?
Where does MBA's versus engineers ever come up? Jobs' speech is about creating a competitive advantage by building a premium product and focusing on a specific user - something eBay doesn't have the freedom to do.
During the 2000s eBay increasingly focussed their business on the largest sellers, helping push the site from a many to many business to a more traditional fixed price eCommerce business. Along the way they forgot about the awesomeness of their tiny auction customers who liked the fun of both placing auctions and buying goods, and as a result the site 'lost it' for many. The right customer for eBay was not the big merchants but the masses.
The OP's point about Steve Jobs is that he brought his team in for a huddle, and gave them the play, and some of them are still running it, even after leaving Apple, and after Steve left us.
I think this supports what Jobs said rather than diminishes it. People love the BMW for the image, and for the performance in certain rare cases. (The BMW is superior to any Toyota I've driven once you get above 100Mph) People love the Toyota because it's an economical, reliable car that performs quite well at the speeds you normally drive.
The mac has a certain image that people love. I mean, that image, personally, does not appeal to me, but that was Job's point. If you can make a product that resonates with a small portion of the market; and if that product resonates to the point where they are willing to pay a large premium, you can make quite a lot of money. Maybe even more money than selling a lower-margin, higher-quality product to the masses.
Deciding to trust the good judgment of your customers and put faith in your ability to appeal to their sense of value, rather than simply their cost-watching ability, is a brave and bold move. I think it is awesome that it turns out to pay off.
PC manufacturers went with the strategy of “we used to be able to sell a machine with these features for $1000, and now that components are cheaper, we can sell it for $800”... and then they got into a price war that destroyed one another’s margins.
I am sure there are many lessons to be learnt from Steve Jobs, but I think we should be careful in not making everything he said or did as a lesson to learn!
" ... I actually did attend the meeting that John describes in his blog post. However, as a full time engineer on WebObjects, I also had the opportunity to attend a different all hands that Steve Jobs called ... "
Every product cycle you see the blogs and the pundits speculating on what Apple will do, and exclaiming what Apple should do. Just today I saw an article along the lines of "now that Steve's dead, here's the four things that Apple MUST DO!" None of these people get it, and that's why they are always wrong.. and then after the fact, rather than learn from their errors, they start spinning why the iPhone 5 wasn't announced. Anyone paying attention knows the tick-tock pattern Apple is following.
People seem to think that apple has become microsoft-- some monolithic entity, focused on having a monopoly and controlling everything.
I can assure you, controlling everything is the last thing Apple wants. Apple is not proprietary. Hell, Mac OS X is the most popular open sourced operating system on the planet. The Safari web browser is just a thin shell around webkit. Apple could have kept both closed and innovated on them, instead they innovate on them and give them away (and yet so called "open source" fans actually complain about this.)
What Apple does care about-- the singular purpose that drives them to make the decisions they make-- is the best user experience for their customers.
IF you ever wonder why Apple did or didn't do something, that's why.
And that didn't go away with Steve's passing. Even in the years when Steve wasn't there, and the company suffered from bad management, they still operated in the Apple way, just not so effectively. Now they have great management, and though Steve is no longer there, it's a lot easier to keep to their purpose...
Maybe this is the real reason Apple accumulated so much cash. It will be a long time, and likely never, in a situation where outside investors and wall street can dictate the CEO position, and so Apple can operate without fear that people who don't get it can undermine its mission.
The real question, though, is why do so few people get it? There's nothing really secret about all this... but I'm unaware of a single other company that operates in this manner.
Let's not let our enthusiasm blind us to reality.
Of course it isn't open in the Stallman sense of "if you don't melt the ore yourself, it's not open" but then again Linuxes and others aren't, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X - mentions, its under a proprietary EULA.
I would almost certainly be running OS X even if none of it were open source, and I tend to believe that that is true of most OS X users (even those users like me who can program). In contrast, the fact that parts of OS X are open source does not seem to help OS X gain traction in markets where completely open-source software stacks are vastly more popular than OS X, like embedded systems, supercomputing and internet servers.
I am not an expert on all of the reasons developers and admins of embedded systems, supercomputers and internet servers prefer completely open-source ecosystems to OS X, but I tend to believe a lot of it has to do with not wanting Apple to be able to jerk them around and has to do with the fact that if they started to use OS X, Apple would be able to jerk them around almost as much as they would be able to if Darwin, Webkit, LLVM and TextEdit were not open source.
Wow! This is great news. I've been waiting for this to happen so that I can go ahead an run OS X on any computer I choose. Kindly point me to the link? I would have guessed it was at http://opensource.apple.com but alas, that's just a random assortment of parts which I'm limited to using for "internal research and development".
You have the URL wrong. I will kindly point you to a link:
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
It's not "any computer you choose", but any desktop or laptop with hardware components that are supported. Did you know Windows Server 2008 doesn't have drivers for early Intel Gigabit Server NICs, so you can't run that OS on an unsupported computer? Just as you can't run Windows on "any computer you choose", only on ones with supported hardware, it's the same thing with OS X.
Another link, laptops this time:
http://www.mymacnetbook.com/compatibility-chart/
The following listings of Hackintosh compatible computers, parts, motherboards and drivers (kexts) should be helpful in your endeavor:
http://www.hackintosh.com/#hackintosh_compatible
Happy hacking!
// Yes, I realize your request for a link was rhetorical.
Nobody said that Windows was open source or could run on any computer. However, as I type in a Windows vm running on a computer assembled from commodity hardware, I can honestly say that are certainly a much larger number of choices, since neither of those are options with OS X.
The Hackintosh stuff is not really relevant either as a) it is not open source, and b) violates the EULA of OS X. I won't go so far as to say it's "illegal" but I don't see any overriding moral reason to violate Apple's wishes here.
"You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so."
On the contrary, running in a VM, and running in a VM on a computer assembled from commodity hardware, are both certainly options with OS X.
Running both server and desktop OS X in a VM is now even allowed in the EULA, which previously only authorized virtualizing OS X Server.
If you want to run it in a VM under Windows 7 (granted, not in the EULA), here's a link:
Install OS X Snow Leopard in VMware Windows 7
http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-install-os-x-snow-leopard-i...
"to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software"
So no, unless I missed something, you cannot run it in VMWare Workstation, and I still cannot run it on the $1800 (including Win 7 Pro) box I put together that has better specs than a $4500+ Mac Pro.
You may disagree with Apple's approach of bundling hardware and software but you would be foolish to expect a company taking that route to produce software that runs on other devices. Notice that the cheapest Windows 7 option is $120 while Lion is $20. Apple is not selling software to run on other devices. They are selling devices with their software. I hope you understand the difference between a hardware and software company.
This is one of those pedantic situations where the difference between "can" (have the ability to) and "may" (have permission to) becomes relevant.
You absolutely can run it in VMWare Workstation, as the link tells you how, on Windows 7, as the link tells you how.
You may not be permitted (depends on your jurisdiction and legality of the EULA), but you can.
Ah, in that case, bravo!
Webkit is based on GPL code from KDE, so Apple had no choice but to release the source.
Originally they just threw useless code patches back at KHTML to minimally comply with the license (LGPL, iirc).
Remember, Apple had experience web engine developers on the team from day 1. They knew exactly what was needed and how it should be done.
And yet, people think Apple have some sort of unlikely agenda of world domination. Jesus christ. They just want to make the best products possible, what is so hard to understand about that?
I've been forced to reach the conclusion that they don't get it because they don't want to. They are driven by ideology. Notice I was called a "fanboy" for defending Apple. The person who called me that name has substituted an ideology for their decision making, and thus, because I said something that pokes holes in the ideology, they must attack me personally.
Further, in the case of Apple, the fact that they are so good at being good, inflames the of people who are jealous or upset, because Apple isn't following their ideology. Richard Stallman, for instance, has been kicking Apple since they were down, and doing so while giving bigger companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft a complete pass.
They don't get it because reality disagrees with their ideology.
No. Linux.
What percentage are running Linux? (combining those that ship with Linux and those that ship with Windows but are reformatted.)
Indeed. Also telling is a lot of the stories on folklore.org - You see a lot of what was described in this article, from yet another unique perspective.