And that day was sometime in the early nineties. Fortunately their descent from that peak was reversed before too late.
I wonder if there's a better way we could structure this?
'Marketing department' doesn't mean the advertisers that have nothing to do with anything else any more then 'engineers' doesn't mean techies in the back room that have never seen a user and only work when you can tell them exactly what to do. That's just what they seem like when they don't do a great job.
Deciding not to have any competitor below the 30-40th price percentile. Deciding to always have a coherent product line. The decision to focus on users wiling to pay outright for things instead of focusing on companies. These are all marketing decisions more then they are engineering ones.
Hmm. It seems that I've never been in a company that had even a good marketing department! (Until now.)
The types of companies that get discussed on HN are usually the kind where both marketing & engineering are important enough to do a lot of damage and important enough for everyone to have an opinion about them.
You can top that up with the fact that the stuff that usually gets praise or abuse (eg product development) can often be claimed or pawned off by both engineering and marketing.
Who is responsible for the ipod nano video camera thing? Engineers?
Sometimes things are obvious. Google has awesome marketing, but the original dynamite was creating the awesome search engine and the momentum caused by gmail & maps & such. Facebook is, as far as I can tell, a marketing achievement. In both cases it was important that the non dominant factor didn't mess things, but it was a hurdle.
Apple or MSFT? You could argue both or neither. If you wanted to teach how to be like them, the classes would probably be called things like 'strategy' or 'leadership.' I'm not sure that any department has a monopoly here.