At Apple, Tim Cook leads a quiet cultural revolution
reuters.com
reuters.com
It bothers me everybody ignores the already announced Mac Pro. It's more niche than an iPhone or iPad but an important one for many Mac users, and the specs and design really push innovation forward on a market that is almost dead (desktops).
The push to mandate unlimited data with every iPhone (and make that data plan $20 with 200 SMS) was critical to the iPhone's success - for me, coming from the Palm platform, it was simply amazing, while one the road, to go to the App Store, download an app, and in seconds be using it. Wouldn't be possible for most if they had to have a conversation with AT&T for 30m to add a data plan prior to doing the above.
Also, the innovation with the iPad to allow you to sign up for the 3G anytime pre-paid was incredible.
12 Xeon cores on air.. do you think servers liquid cool these chips? Of course they cool them with air, that's how they're designed to be cooled.
I am impressed they crammed it all into a package that's only 10inches tall - but this is completely at the expense of modularity and expandability. You can't easily throw a new hard drive or GPU in this new configuration.
(The problem with talking about innovation is that the goalposts are so easily moved.)
Apple has often (in recent years) been in a position where significant portions of their revenue are from product categories which did not exist 2 years ago. There is a fear that they will not continue to invent/expand into new categories.
These are incremental, not reinventing. These are successes, but they shouldn't be held up as reinventing when they aren't.
...Well at least it's not as bad as the XView cmdtool.
So personally I'd list the new product categories as only two - the iPod and iOS. It's just that iOS' revolutionary impact hasn't completely played out yet. I expect any new 'product categories' to be further extensions of the iOS family into new markets. e.g. Apple TV is an existing product running iOS, but if it grows an app store and games ecosystem, will that make it an entry into a new category?
You're right that the Mac Pro is an existing product line, but it's so radically different from it's predecessors that I do think it has a chance of being used in ways and contexts the old Pro never was. For starters it's tiny. It's agressive use of Thunderbolt is interesting, but also the emphasis on GPU utilisation via CUDA and OpenCL - one of it's GPUs isn't even wired up to be used to drive displays - is a bold move.
Plus this whole inventing new categories things is silly, you'd have to go back a long way for Apple to have created a category, they excel at being more refined than existing players.
And I couldn't agree more about the Mac Pro by the way.
iPhone -> iPhone 3G: Addition of 3G, GPS. enclosure became plastic.
iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS: Video camera
iPhone 3G -> iPhone 4: Retina, significantly improved camera, new enclosure, addition of front facing camera
iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S: Siri, better camera
iPhone 4S -> iPhone 5: New screen form factor, significantly improved enclosure, lightning connector, LTE
iPad -> iPad 2: thinner and lighter, cameras
iPad 2 -> iPad 3: LTE, Retina
iPad 3 -> iPad 4: lightning connector
I don't see any significant decline in diff quality over time.
edited for correctness
The 4S, while having a better camera, it wasn't a huge jump, and Siri was software they removed(which had more features) from the 4's app store.
The 4 was the last truly innovative iPhone- no one was talking screen density, and they nailed it. The new camera was a gigantic step up, the front facing camera was as well.
Also, you missed with the iPhone->3G that the App Store came into existence.
As to the iPad, the iPad 2 was commonly referred to the moment it came out as "The iPad that Apple meant to release." because of all of the small, but numerous, improvements. Adding Retina to the 3 is arguably a similar jump, though admittedly I don't have a lot of room to really know, as I don't own one.
Maybe not, but that's how Steve Jobs made it seem. When he was creating the iPod, nobody was looking (except hard core apple geeks) and the bar was low. After the iPod became a huge hit, it still seemed like every year Jobs was introducing some breakthough feature. He was very good at manipulating public perception. Cook isn't as good at it, he started with the bar ridiculously high and everybody is looking now.
I completely agree with everything you and the parent said about innovation and the Mac Pro. But this is a perception issue, through and through, and something Cook is going to have to deal with if he's going to be successful as Jobs's successor.
Jobs would have run Apple singlehandedly if he could, that's why he left behind such a huge vacuum to fill. Product roadmaps being what they are I think we'll see the real 'new, post Jobs Apple' in another year or so for the first time.
It's not about shipping crap occasionally, that could just as easily be attributed to trying things and failing and every big company has a long list of such failures. It's no different than running an incubator only then in-house and with a single unified brand and possibly synergistic effects. It's all about daring, trying to push the envelope and taking risks.
Just ask vulture capitalist Carl Icahn, who tweeted this a few minutes ago.
Or because having someone else do that will be more valuable for the product or the organization as a whole. I recently delegated something that I wanted to do that I could probably do fairly quickly, but realized that it was good to share that particular task with a team member so he could improve his skills that way.
Jobs' bi-monthly iPhone software meeting, in which he would go through
every planned features [sic] of the company's flagship product, is
gone.
Don't confuse process with results. Jobs' Apple produced great products because Jobs had great taste that aligned well with the market (and, to be honest, because he was the vortex of a feedback loop of praise), not because he had a "bi-monthly iPhone software meeting".
To use another example, with the new iCloud apps (especially iOS backports like Notes and its ilk) on OS X, because there is no save button there is no way to tell if the document has actually been committed to storage or not. If you close the app, the document might be on the cloud somewhere, but it's just as likely to be trapped on a Mac's harddrive that has just been put to sleep. Not a good experience.
Right clicking on the document title will give you the nested hierarchy of where it's saved. If its saved to iCloud right clicking shows 'iCloud'.
Unsaved program files are saved in ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iWork.program; it isn't a particularly magical or a trap.
Erm, that's not what I meant and I suspect you know that. I didn't assert it was "a magical [something]" or anything, just bad UI. Open Notes, edit a document, close it, go away, expect it to be synced on your iPad: fail. And no normal user will do CMD-S, that was the whole point of them abolishing explicit document saving.
Also, I would hope that "sending an email and closing the browser window", one day, will work like "sending an email and quitting the mail app" works today.
Edit: details on Power Nap - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5394
Apple is a hot topic these days, and many want to be a critic about the smallest things, followed by generalizing these thoughts into an "Apple is circling the drain" type of argument. Apple has never been perfect.
Edit: typo
Anecdotally we've been installing it on non-dev (tester) devices internally to help thrash our app pre-iOS7. The results have been very positive - people love the new design in general.
Even those of us on the dev team who've had it for a while have mostly gotten over the annoying bits that bothered us at first.
What was unique about Steve Jobs was that he could perform so many different roles within the company. He could convince anyone he needed to join the company, he could ascertain just what kinds of products were likely to be successful, and he could get on stage and sell the living daylights out of the products his company had built. These roles are necessarily going to be performed worse when separated into different executives, just like a basketball player who can play great offense and defense is worth a lot more to a team than ten great offensive players and ten great defensive players.
As Bill Gates said, the (old) Apple model only works if you have a Steve Jobs. The new Apple can't function like the old Apple any more than a car can function without a steering wheel. The best thing Cook can do is transition the company to a more traditional management structure. Will the company be worse off than before? Of course, but it's the best they can do under the circumstances.
The rapid rise of Android strikes me as a significant long-term threat. Apple created a new product category and then allowed a competitor to sweep up the majority of the market, at least in terms of volume. Android is still probably an inferior product, but there are a lot of companies behind it. Android also makes life somewhat easier for developers. I think Apple ought to take this very seriously.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/iphone-and...
Exactly--but that doesn't mean "Apple is doomed" either, which is the angle a lot of people seem to take.
Apple with Steve Jobs (2nd time around) was the most innovative, profitable, and successful company in the entire world. Apple without Steve Jobs is likely to be one of the most innovative, profitable, and successful companies. (Still pretty darn good.)
Regardless of how the rest of us might judge all this, Apple now has something of a problem. Decompressing from a previous abusive situation involves certain stages of recovery [3]. Even if, regardless of if, one began with the view that this was "abuse for the best all possible purposes" or how much one identified with the success of one's abuser [4]. In similar fashion to the problems faced by the liberalizing Stalinist regimes, Tim Cook may find that his liberalizing "tweaks" open flood gates that he will have trouble controlling [5].
[1] http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field [3] https://1in6.org/men/get-information/online-readings/recover... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall
[0] If you know what I mean
"He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much."
I believe it is something Cook and other CEOs follow too. Find a person to do the things that you don't want to focus on as much.
If No.2's job is to do things No. 1 doesn't want to do, No. 1's job is to find No. 2's who wants to do the job No. 1 doesn't want to do and give that person autonomy.
I agree Cook not leading planned feature meeting but he should have someone who wants to lead that meeting and be responsible for driving that part of the business.
It's still not clear to me, after being an Apple user and fan since the beginning and after reading Steve Job's biography, how much innovation Steve really brought to Apple. What I mean is: was Steve really the one who gave the initial impulse for some of the most innovative products we have seen so far (i.e. iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.)? In this case, I think that Apple is doomed.
If, on the contrary, Steve was the quality checker, the one pushing everyone else to do better, I think that the current Apple's executive team can properly replace this role and do good at Apple.
Does the extremity of the quality checking turn into something qualitatively different? That seems to be a rather subjective judgement, hence why you had the back-and-forth.
It does say that Cook's personal style is different from Jobs (duh), that he's made some changes to the exec team (we knew that), and that there's conflicting anecdotal evidence about how employees are reacting to these changes... whatever they are.
All in all, I don't see a revolution in any of this.
I hope that's just a typo and not evidence that the writer doesn't know what a spreadsheet is.