Sounds similar to Boeing. You begin to wonder when these kind of lessons start entering management textbooks.
The problem is the existence of a business management layer as an idea - it's an attempt to get back to the good old days of feudalism, whose chief characteristics are nepotism, stagnation, corruption and nihilism, now that we've gotten rid of the mental pacifier of 'heaven' for the oppressed and hell for the ruling elites (religion).
the inner sanctum of very flat Apple was as far from feudalism as could be, for my several years, and it functioned like a very performant ecosystem of engineering. This diametrically contrasts precisely with Amazon engineering, where I saw all the horrors of feudalism and generalized nepotism (racism for example, sexism promoting incapable people to fit quotas, and flagrant corruption). Facebook was somewhere more like Apple but not in its DNA...just in the imitation is flattery sense.
I run into non stop issues when interacting with apple software as an app producer, from Xcode to iOS to App Store to App Store connect. Their apis are pretty horrible, both the reliability and the design.
As an end user of apple products, I regularly run into odd software problems with my MacBook and iPhone. Every CarPlay experience I have had is buggy, both from the actual CarPlay connectivity as well as apples own CarPlay enabled apps.
Apple Watch is a horrible nightmare to make anything more complicated than a simple remote display.
I could go on and on. However on the Amazon side of things I have never experienced a significant bug, aside from the audible app freezing on occasion when interacting with CarPlay. I blame apple though based off how their own apps work. I say this as an extensive consumer of Amazon products both as a business owner, developer, and SRE, as well as an extensive user of Amazon consumer products.
All this being said I don’t like amazon as a business, I can find flaws in their decisions, but they are business decision flaws not just straight buggy products.
Amazon makes the Fire, which is terrible, and the website, which isn't user-friendly.
AWS is pretty good.
>As an end user of apple products, I regularly run into odd software problems with my MacBook and iPhone. Every CarPlay experience I have had is buggy, both from the actual CarPlay connectivity as well as apples own CarPlay enabled apps.
>Apple Watch is a horrible nightmare to make anything more complicated than a simple remote display.
So why do you keep paying top dollar for Apple products? For work stuff, I can understand, but no one's forcing you to buy an Apple Watch.
Of course, many competitors to Apple products aren't perfect either, but they don't charge Apple prices either. I have some cheap Chinese fitness band and it doesn't work perfectly, but it was also only $35 so I really don't care as long as it mostly does what I want it to do, which it does.
I’m not here to debate why apple has the most popular platform, I’m just stating what feels to me like a fairly unequivocal observation - apple’s software is pretty bad compared to Amazon’s. For whatever reason the company that takes millions in App Store revenue from my company, certainly doesn’t use it to make their software better!
As I said before: "So why do you keep paying top dollar for Apple products? For work stuff, I can understand, but no one's forcing you to buy an Apple Watch."
Your work making you use an iPhone for testing does not mean you're required to own and use an iPhone as your personal device, or buy into other parts of the Apple ecosystem. If you really dislike Apple's software so much, why are you still using it outside of work? You complain endlessly about Apple, but you happily continue to send them your money. Multiply this by countless other Apple consumers and you have your answer about why they take millions in App Store revenue from your company and don't bother to improve their software: why should they? If I ran a company and people shoveled their hard-earned money to me no matter how lousy my product was, why would I bother making my product better?
I have witnessed this with other companies; and I am sorry they are never going to return to what they once were.
It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job elsewhere.
As an accountant, I would quibble with this aspersion and lay the blame with management and other, broader issues.
> It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job elsewhere.
This seems true of many companies. Many of us are just playing musical chairs with our careers and jobs trying to find that job that doesn't suck.
And you cannot have engineers running everything because then you will have a half-built Concorde and a bankrupt company.
But there is a balance. And if that balance tips for too long, you end up with the whole organisation content with just doing maintenance. And when that happens there is just no going back.
It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called 'stealth'. If you look on Google you can find the PDF.
Another book about organisations having to deal with ossification is 'the soul of a new machine'. It's written by a journalist that was embedded in a R&D department of a computer manufacturer in the 70's and 80's. The place is run by someone a lot like Kelly Johnson, and the author managed very well to get into his mind. Again, I believe you can find a PDF on Google.
The time period doesn't quite match up, but I found Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/ to be quite interested if not quite as interesting as I'd hoped when I bought it.
No worries. I didn't mean to sound angry. I appreciate the apology, didn't think it was necessary, and understand where you're coming from. I think you have valid points. I am very bad at reading and writing tone in quick comments online. I agree that having accountants and mba types in charge isn't a great idea most of the time or that accountants are necessarily the best people on average, but I am wee bit biased here against such blanket statements regarding my profession, as an accountant anyways.
It's quite like engineers taking over the marketing department.
I believe it said that Boeing was less profitable when it focused on increasing profits and more profitable when it focused on improving engineering.
1) When looking for more profits/revenue at a technology company, they'll often either try to push an R&D "big bet" to market half-baked, in hopes of it pulling in new revenue OR put the screws to product and engineering to churn out some "quick wins" to give them some momentum.
2) When focusing more on engineering, it's often because they're either distracted by other challenges faced by the organization outside of engineering OR they are up against an existential threat that mandates engineering investment and letting them steer the strategy somewhat.
That's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme. Which would seem to transfer over to this not quite as dishonest domain.
Reverence for GE, a company doing technical things that started stack ranking and firing their employees.... Plus eventually got first their fingers and then last time I checked their whole body burned by going into financial businesses, very much not a core competence.
Not really - I mean, if I run Toyota should I not be producing cars I can sell at a profit? And if my sales are falling, isn't that a bad thing?
Rising sales are good, of course - but not oscillating sales. If the rise is going to be followed by a sales slump in a few months time, do I want to take on extra staff who I'll then have to lay off, causing them untold strife and inconvenience? Do I want to build a new factory full of expensive machines, then have them stand idle while costing me interest and rent?
Industries like Software and IP licensing are, of course, often a different matter!
Yes to both. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the concept. "Steady" to me in this context means the same, thus financial shenanigans to make sure you don't report "excess" earnings in one period so you can have them in reserve for a future one where you have a slump.
"Regular" profits are ideal, but Toyota today is not a good example, it's a mature company in a country with a mature automobile industry. As a counter example, see the story sold to the investing community about Amazon, not that they would make a steady profit, but that they would become huge and then do something like that. Which they've delivered on (and I wouldn't judge them on anything in the COVID disruptive period 2020 to now).
Is that not true?
For traditional businesses, the metrics are profit and in particular profit margin (profit/revenue), so more revenue at same profit is bad. And other metrics like ROCE (Return on Capital Employed) and FCF (Free Cash Flow)... which incentivise lots of debt if you can borrow cheap but discourage capital investment. This is obviously antithesis of tech startups.
But they had never seen VCs like today and could never conceive companies that could go for years with no profits and maintain high stock valuation. The world changes. So there's your answer: sometimes!
I’m sure there are plenty of case studies in text books that management could read. Either they don’t read them or they take away the wrong message. Don’t forget the execs at these companies probably cashed in some big bonuses.