I remember being surprised when JG seemingly "failed up" to become head of Apple AI. It's been many years and it's hard to point to anything that's gone well in that category.
Seems like there's a deeper story here.
John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time.
Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly every single one of them were walked back to Steve Jobs era. Mainly by Deirdre O’Brien who has been with Apple for 20+ years.
Changes of Direction in PR. Which leads to Katie Cotton leaving.
Forced out Scott Forstall. Tim is suppose to be the mediator.
Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job. Especially after merging iOS and macOS team together.
Putting too much trust on Eddy Cue and sidelined Phil Schiller. Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Fitness, Apple Books, News, All these services are Eddy Cue. The committee that ultimately ruled for Apple's 30% cut? Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
Probably a few more names missing.
You can imagine how it usually works out ... after a few years of zero or negative progress, they'll move on to somewhere else, claiming victory on their LinkedIn profiles. Meanwhile the employees who actually built the company continue to get passed over in favor of another round of impostors.
So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted very far as you'll "never have had the big company experience that we need". Meanwhile, the company starts to stagnate.
/rant
Not everything needs to be expanded to it's logical extreme. I've worked in a lot of places, and the ideal employer is probably one who is in the middle, and planning on staying there.
The concept of "grow until you've eaten everybody" is sickening, and tiring. Especially for your non-C-suite employees who don't give a fuck about the logo on their shirt. I'm talking of course about most people the second they are no longer within earshot of their boss.
That "momentum, oomph, pizzazz" is not normal all the time. In the words of Mark Meadows, "if everything is sacred; then nothing is sacred." Meaning if you don't prioritize what is truly important, and simply assume that everything is of equally critical importance, then chances are you will fail at many more things than if you focused on the one most important thing.
But companies don't think that way. They see missed anything as missed opportunity. That is rarely the case.
Here's an example; Imagine a machine shop that has 10 customers and 65% on-time delivery. The top 3 customers drive 75% of the businesses revenue. Now lets assume that they are in negotiations with a potential 11th customer who will be their new 5th largest customer.
The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer. And then the rest of the customers will notice that their 65% on time delivery decreases to 55% as a result. Now the 3rd largest customer is quoting their parts elsewhere because they need a second supplier to cover how unreliable your deliveries are.
Do you believe that had the business not taken on the additional customer that they would have "missed a revenue opportunity"? Is that big picture stuff, small picture stuff, or just humans who live in a real world stuff?
I understand where you are coming from, but the archetypes I am describing are just as valid for non-profits. The scrappy person who starts something is different than the person that creates a functioning long term org with structure and delegation. The person who is good at launching from zero has a different set of skills than the person to who takes something that has launched into something that is sustainable.
I am not talking about the growth at all costs mindset. I think we agree, it is the growth at all costs mindset that replaces that builder to creates that stable org with a carpet bagger that has BCE that claims they are going to build the business 2x or more but all they bring in is politics. These are the snake oil salesmen that fail up.
If an org needs to be revitalized, rather than bringing in BCE, they should go back and bring in Founder Energy.
This is an oversimplification. People specialize. There are people in Sales roles, and people in Operations roles. Yes, I absolutely expect the people in Sales roles to pull all their strings to get this customer. Their compensation (including commission) also incentivizes them in that direction. Naturally, closing the sale makes the company look better to its Board and shareholders.
The question is, who is the incompetent guy in Operations who is struggling with 65% on-time delivery? Maybe he's not executing well, maybe he needs to be replaced, especially if OTD slips to 55% and is turning into the weak link in the chain. And where is the executive who is supposed to be overseeing all this, to invest in and buff up Operations so that it will match the momentum of the rest of the company?
Or are they looking for someone who can navigate the legality of extending the American stock option scheme to the new office in El Salvador?
Maybe they want someone who knows how to implement a proper system of financial controls, which they've realised they need after a guy brought himself a canoe with the company's credit card?
I can see a founder wanting to hire people to take care of the growing compliance workload that comes with a growing company.
Maybe they should have kept the canoe guy instead of hiring grown up bean-counters who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The optimum firm size will go down as the cost of communications goes down. Back when messages had to be delivered on horseback, you wanted all your people in one office building.
But now you can send an email in 10 seconds for $0, so it becomes practical to have many spread-out firms cooperating.
Obviously this is not the only factor, but still.
There's another interesting idea in Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind: when many agents with approximately the same processing power cooperate, the higher-level agents must necessarily be out of touch with the details, and will make big policy decisions that look stupid to many of the lower-level agents who have more of the details but less of the big picture. His agents were all part of the same mind, but it seems eerily similar to politics and big-company management.
So maybe startups should try to hire people with startup experience from the same industry since big-picture politicking is less valuable to a startup.
Some anecdotal evidence I've seen of this.
I worked at a large publishing company. One of the VP's had been there some ten years. Seven of those as the second in command as the senior VP. Three different times, they hired an outside CEO, passing him over and each time the CEO left after less than two years, they didn't even consider him. He's still there and its clear they have no desire to promote him to CEO. Even knowing this, he continues to stay there which also has a down stream effect where nobody below will be promoted into his position or a parallel VP position, so by him staying? It just stagnates everything below him. Managers leave because they know there's nowhere to go but laterally or out of the company.
More recently, I worked at a huge health care company. One of the senior directors recruited me to join a new AI team he was standing up to do various projects with some emerging AI tools. I felt honored he would seek me out. Turns out, this was his gamble to get promoted into a VP position that he had coveted since being a director for the last five years. Our team kicked ass for about a year, but apparently, it wasn't enough. During our afternoon team meeting, he just announced out of the blue that Friday (it was Wednesday) would be his last day and our manager would be taking over the team after he left. He pulled me into his office a few hours later and explained what had happened. He said his boss (a VP) had told him last month that no matter what our team accomplished, he wouldn't be getting his VP spot at this company. If he really wanted to be a VP, he would have to leave the company since herself and several other VP's, didn't see him as "VP material" which is crazy if you knew what the guy did in his tenure at the company. Unironically, he joined an AI startup as one of two of their VP's. He was there for three years and they got acquired for $300M of which he got a good chunk of.
Microsoft's revitalization occurred only after Steve Ballmer was ousted and Satya Nadella pushed out much of the old guard who were set in their ways.
Sure, Jobs was such a unique visionary and it was inevitable that things would change after his death, but I still find folks tend to minimize his missteps (the Cube, antenna-gate), while somehow shitting on Cook despite Cook managing the giant ship that is Apple extremely well for nearly 15 years.
Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.
> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.
> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.
I am absolutely sure they do. The problem is taste. And they are as you said not product people. A high bar for quality expectation. If we remember 50% of people cant taste the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi, while some others could taste which Coca Cola they were manufactured.
And that is what Steve has been saying, you need to care about the product way beyond normal people do. And have the energy to try and push things forward.
The expectation are exceptionally high because we compared it to Steve Jobs era. But even if we lower the standard modern Apple is still not good enough as it is.
To quote Steve Jobs. Stop chasing the bottle line which is what Tim Cook is doing, and start making sure your Top line is done correctly.
You are giving Cook way too much credit. The only thing he did was enrich Apple even more. Pretty much everything Apple has done is a continuation of what existed before or some side project pushed by another exec at Apple. The only thing he pushed for personally is a failure (Vision Pro, its technologically good but that's irrelevant) when it was clear that this is not a product that can be very successful or useful at any price (his arrogance is so big that he somehow thought Meta was just not good, and it's not fundamentally of problem of having nice use cases).
Cook has managed to not destroy or waste Jobs legacy but that's the best thing you can say about him. I don't think just making money is a worthwhile objective for a company, otherwise might as well just do finance, less moving parts, easier profits.
Inb4 someone complains that they're an MBA and not so bad. I'm talking about the guys that don't know or care about tech at all. The guys that just wanna be a big executive like they saw on TV.
The same sorta people that were in my 101s at uni who "heard programming was a good job" but didn't otherwise have any interest in tech
These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".
[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"
There is definitely a stupid game where people don't tell it like it is, but in my experience it's because people don't want to deal with HR at all, and so don't do or say anything that might bring a tut-tut from HR. Because people in HR are beyond annoying...
And HR fears a wrongful-termination lawsuit, not a defamation lawsuit.
This is all in the US, though. The UK has quite different libel laws and so maybe lawsuits are more common there.
Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.
It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.
Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical
Katie Cotton passed away in 2023. She left in 2013/2014. I think that is quite some time after Apple.
Global smartphone sales are 74% Android and 22% iOS. They were only "winning" in this regard until 2012
Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.
Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.
It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go?
I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie;
"Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."
Funny how the latest Macbook brought back the Magsafe connector, HDMI port, and SD card port. Apparently the people in the real world have rediscovered priorities that Ive's design had made them forget
> “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will,” one of Apple’s top executives reportedly said.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...
I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.
I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.
I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.
If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.
In the end I really think it is a non-issue. The shape still sucks though.
Maybe without this flaw they would use it.
But for a small or medium flaw, you'd expect a bunch of people that complain but keep using it. Only a really big flaw would prevent users entirely and find no complaints among the people that keep using the product. I find it hard to believe it's that big of a flaw. It seems much more likely that the people that started off against the charging decided after trying it that they didn't care very much.
If any other component fails the mouse becomes e-waste so that's not exactly novel.
And 50% of the original long lasting battery capacity would be fine here.
The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision.
I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)
If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way better than tethering yourself with a cable.
I've used a Magic Mouse daily for work for years and it's literally never been an issue once.
First, I definitely know what I want from my computer.
Second, flipping my mouse over and being forced to stop using it is an objectively worse experience than plugging it in for charging while using.
I have an MX Master 3 which is also wireless and charges with a cord. While it's charging, I definitely have a degraded experience relative to the wireless one, so I unplug as soon as I can (I sometimes don't even wait for the full charge!) to go back to the better experience. Never once have I considered keeping it connected indefinitely.
So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer. My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too? Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
If the user has a worse experience, that's a lose/lose situation. Of course they should care about things that affect the experience.
> My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too?
A cable doesn't impact a keyboard because it's not moving.
> Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?
The chance of a phone being left plugged in forever is minimal to begin with, and the hassle of not being able to use it while it charges would be much larger.
If you make a wireless peripheral and everyone keeps using it while plugged in, the solution is not to force them to use it wirelessly. The solution is to make the wireless experience actually better so the user voluntarily chooses to use it.
A user has to be thinking about something to make a choice. Depending on the user to think about all these little aspects degrades the experience all by itself.
I've never been bothered by a cable sticking out of my mouse.
The reliability would not be affected since it moves data wirelessly. The data will never go over the charging cable so your reasons for keeping it plugged in don't make sense.
If your starting premise is "the user wants to use the mouse and have a good experience", you can see how a designer can get from there to a feature that causes/encourages an unplug. Even if you disagree, they're not going backwards.
I'm not; I'm crediting the activity of marketing.
It's an engineering blind spot to think utility = adoption. Emacs is more powerful than MS Word; which one has more users? Which one has an organization dedicated to going around and pointing out how and where it is useful?
It's when you have utility + marketing that you get something like the computer revolution.
Reminds me of Zoolander haha. Either that or what you describe is Stockholm syndrome.
A port on the side is harmless. In an alternate world, it would have become the design zeitgeist and a port under would've seemed just as preposterous as it actually is.
But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.
(I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)
Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.
There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.
That said I hated everuthing about ios 7 from a usability standpoint.
For example, I have the exact opposite view of the forcing out of Scott Forstall, which after reading what I think are fairly accurate descriptions of what went down was absolutely the right thing to do IMO. Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch, which is an absolutely toxic trait in leadership (side note, when you're at that level it doesn't matter if the failure was "your fault", you still need to take responsibility for what happened, identify the root cause and make changes to reduce the possibility of it happening in the future). I am not an iPhone user, but every time the issue of Apple Maps comes ups, people say they love using it and that it's improved leaps and bounds over the years since Forstall was forced out.
Own up for what? Has anyone from Apple own up to Apple Intelligence or other design failures? Even in antenna gate Steve Jobs was defending it as holding it wrong. The firing of Scott was simply a power play. No one expected Maps to be perfect on first try. And it took Apple another 8-10 years before it was useable. But the Map Fiasco, if you could call it that. Was brown out of proportion with zero damage control from PR. A company that perhaps has the best PR department in history of cooperate America. If people are not reading between the line, Apple wanted him out, and very publicly.
>(the article talks about the "Top 100" alone)
Top 100, if that is indeed what it is has also completely changed. It used to be the 100 people Steve Jobs hand picked that if the company failed who he would recruit again for the next venture. And it is nothing "Top". You could be an engineer or doing some other lower level work but still included in the 100.
Now from that article Top 100 becomes management level meetings.
The epic failure that was the launch of de-google’d Apple Maps. Apparently Tim didn’t like putting his signature on the apology letter apologizing to customers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130110043350/http://www.apple....
Think you've dunked too far into the McKinsey kool-aid here.
But the best companies/teams I've worked at realized that some mistakes are inevitable, and they had a culture that quickly remedied those mistakes, learned from them, and moved on. The worst companies either (a) had "analysis paralysis" issues or (b) made lots of the same mistakes over and over and refused to learn.
Yeah I wonder about Federighi. He doesn't seem to catch much criticism from the Apple pundits—I assume because he's one of the few SVPs that seems like a real human in interviews and videos and not a stilted robot like the rest of them. But Apple's software, and macOS in particular, seems to be rotting from the inside out. Changes ship and everyone says "boy this is a step backwards, I hope they iterate quickly" and then it sits, almost entirely unchanged, for years on end. e.g. new Settings in macOS, Stage Manager on the iPad.
With how much the hardware team has been knocking it out of the park since the ARM transition it's really starting to feel like the software is the weak link. This rumoured massive redesign this year has me feeling very anxious.
Android caught on, and now feels smoother than iOS. And that is with iOS animation tuned off.
I'm told he has the superpower of memory. Someone told me they had an eng review with him on a year prior, which ended with action items for the team to fix XYZ. Then a full year they had another review, and Craig came in and right away asked, "Did XYZ get done?"
I've never understood the love for Eddy Cue. Apple pundits all seem to love him. Personally, I am really unimpressed by everything he's done. My understanding is he's been really good at negotiating big contracts.
I just don't think his execution or vision are exciting and, as you are hinting at, I don't think his moral compass points in the right direction. That said, despite some early pushback, my understanding is that Schiller was ultimately on-board with holding to the 30% cut.
I wonder if there’s some interesting server-side technology culture story here and how it trickles down to the way services operate for consumers on the client side. Just pure speculation.
- The complete removal of spontaneity of the shopping experience. You wander over to look at a laptop and decide you want to buy it. Asking a employee is disagreeable as most have a ear bud in their ear receiving instructions or messages from who knows what, they hurriedly ask if you made an appointment or placed the order online and then rush away and sometimes return.
- Such a heavy emphasis on online booking for every conceivable issue. If you want a genius bar appointment you are angrily told you need an appointment and such an appointment is only available days or weeks away and at a inconvenient time for someone with a 9-5 schedule(Tuesday at 2pm work?).
- Last years accessories are gone. Try finding a iphone case that was made for a phone you bough 7 months ago and an employee looks at you like you are trying to buy a model T - (Wait you are looking for a iphone 15 case, wow thats a really old model, I don't think we have anything for that anymore).
- Insane levels of crowds, I can't think of the last time I saw a apple store open in the past 6-7 years that didn't have crowds inside the store like disneyland with service dogs, screaming kids and grumpy boomers yelling about how to transfer their grandkids photos from a phone to computer, just a terrible experience to deal with.
I bought the first iphone in 2007 and have had a model for almost every two years and have been going to the apple stores since then, and the past few years have seen a huge drop in customer experience due to alot of the issuses I listed above.
Compared to? All taxes mean fewer transactions – and purchases that never happen don’t generate revenue. This is not easily measurable. Most SaaS or similar services probably go through other devices or email to handle transactions.
Apples payments and subscriptions are excellent products but how much goes through there of say revenue for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix? Is that even supported? As an iOS user, I would never dream of trusting that the IAP prices are a good deal, and especially if I want to support the company I would sign up on their website.
I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.
The users aren't the issue, the developers are. Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS in order to get users into their dark patterns where you have to call to unsubscribe; can you imagine what shady game developers would do?
Just to clarify, you are referring to companies, not necessarily their developers.
> Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS
No they don’t? I just check their app listing and you can use Apples own IAP. In either case, NYT can have reputable reporting while still being complete slimes when it comes to subscriptions. And even so, it strengthens the argument that Apple and other subscription aggregators deliver value (relatively - our CC centric payment world is abysmally bad), meaning users are willing to pay, meaning merchants are willing to use it to get sales they couldn’t otherwise.
> can you imagine what shady game developers would do?
If what, they could do whatever they wanted? Apple (or any other curator) could still police against fraud and misleading consumers. What does that have to do with the 30% tax?
That is the thing about the whole 30%. It is not flexible, stringent and does not adopt to market. Even Tax by state have more flexility than they do.
And I have been saying this since 2013 but every time I get downvoted to oblivion for it. If Apple had move their Game into a Separate Store. They would have kept 75% to 80% of their App Store revenue at 30% cut. They could then charge 10% on top of all subscription and 15% for downloads. Once you include all the payment processing fees, fraud and additional services and value Apple offers the 10% extra meant for example Netflix actually earns more from an Apple's sign up. That create incentives for other companies to work with this Model. While Apple would still keep ~90% of their current App Store revenue. And I assume without much of the backlash and regulation that they had to fight and costing them hundreds of millions in operation, PR and brand damages.
You get promoted and go up because of your peer coworker group's support, which creates a strong incentive to not rock the boat and go against sacred cows that work well enough. The person who succeeds in big company post a hypergrowth phase is a very different person than one who made the hypergrowth happen.
Evidently, he is very good at increasing share value though.
What year was that?
Given what we know about Apple's hardware platform direction, on hindsight, it seemed like a good strategy. Note: I am talking about the team merging, not merging macOS and iOS themselves.
So many folks will tell you “I learned so much from my previous failure and without that I never would’ve succeeded blah blah blah.” I personally believe in that sentiment a bit, but just wondering if anyone’s aware of a well-known case where that’s happened.
If someone is successful their past is viewed differently. I doubt you’d “failed up” success stories because anyone who had great success would have their previous failures lost to history.
This isn't intended to be overly critical. It aligns with the old adage, "If you want it, ask for it."
It's often mismatch between how people sell themselves vs what they have done.
a director at google might oversell himself and land at a vp role at a public co what's much less smaller, than swing back at another faang as a vp.
It's hard to judge someone's skills/capabilities for a job role externally vs while on the job.
So you have "proxies".
How big of an org s/he managed is often an indicator of some sort of success, but it's a terrible one, for example.
I'm pretty sure that who you are friends with matters much more for failing upwards. Who you know is very overvalued in today's business climate unfortunately
Your post-secondary really only has influence because it somewhat influences who you wind up being connected to
DEI stuff like race and sex... Might matter sometimes. It shouldn't be controversial to say that companies in general take that into account more nowadays than in the past.
It's not a secret that if a company in 2025 has a very white male executive team, then a board of directors has some incentive to try and hire women and minorities into the executive team when they can to balance that out
But they could never tank the company, run unsuccessful or soon to fail projects and get a golden parachute or be promoted for it. They just got fired.