I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it.
However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings. Google's own Search has always been a limited form of AI on which most humans with access to the Internet have come to depend upon. And it is tough to beat them because they not only have 20 years of accumulated knowledge and talent, but they also have a lot of data on users and haven't been afraid to break users' privacy in order to get that data.
Now say what you will of Tim Cook, but he's nothing like Steve Ballmer, with one big difference being that Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs.
It would also be stupid to try and beat Google on their own turf. It would be like trying to beat Microsoft at Windows or Office, or Amazon at AWS. And for important markets, Apple's secret is that they never had to beat anyone in market share, all they had to do was to take over an important slice of the high-end market, which is something they are really good at.
The Alexa/echo ecosystem.
> However it's tough to beat Google in this space...they also have a lot of data on users...
Agreed, the amount of data is key. This is where Apple will struggle when looking to upgrade Siri/AI capabilities in coming years.
> Tim Cook's Apple is making a stand for privacy and security, which is actually quite rare to witness in this day and age. He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot
Privacy and security (and, secondarily, a full physical keyboard) was Blackberry's key differentiator before they lost to the touchscreen-enabled iPhone app ecosystem.
Now that competitor's offerings are becoming more powerful (hardware) and refined (software), and the smartphone market is close to saturation in advanced economies, Apple needs a non-technical differentiator. Security/privacy is the perfect talking point.
I have no reason to believe that Tim Cook is acting in the interest of users ("a man with principles") while marketing Apple products as private and secure; rather, he is acting in the interest of shareholders, as he should be given that he is the CEO of a public company. Happily, user and shareholder interests seem to be mostly aligned at the moment - Apple can sell more phones if people trust the brand.
If it makes more financial sense in the future to ditch user privacy (in order to get closer with Facebook & Microsoft so as to compete with Google), he probably will. But don't expect to hear an announcement about it until the info is leaked. It's impossible to truly discern the character of a public company's CEO because they are always acting, and tons of things happen within their organizations without their knowledge.
Stop for a moment to imagine what being a homosexual teenager in 1970's Alabama was like. Also it's well known that his career at IBM was torpedoed over a gay "glass ceiling."
Tim Cook is a man who understands that privacy is a human right.
Was it? Blackberry often co-operated to provide governments with access to BBM message content[1][2].
[1]: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/07/10/after-a-lengthy-battle... [2]: https://news.vice.com/article/exclusive-canada-police-obtain...
The talk that Microsoft is irrelevant is a bit hilarious, given that they beat google on revenue and income last year. They have morphed from a company that is front and center to one that provides the infrastructure for the digital side of non-tech business. Microsoft Office is absolutely pervasive, and it's not going anywhere.
Source?
Edit: Sorry, that was lazy of me. Googled: https://mspoweruser.com/cio-surey-finds-microsoft-azure-will...
A bit of a biased source, "mspoweruser".
Read a bit more.. We'll have to see how the offerings change or evolve in the next 5 years.
Edit 2: https://rcpmag.com/articles/2016/08/02/microsoft-behind-aws-... AWS is still > 30% of the overall market, Azure hitting around ~9%.
"Nadella got Microsoft organized around mobile and the cloud (Azure), freed the Office and Azure teams from Windows, killed the phone business and got a major release of Windows out without the usual trauma. And is moving the company into augmented reality and conversational AI. While they’ll likely never regain the market dominance they had in the 20th century, (their business model continues to be extremely profitable) Nadella likely saved Microsoft from irrelevance."
For example, I couldn't actually figure out if Tay.AI was an example of supreme idiocy or supreme hubris. Their repeated botching of Windows 10 auto-updates is not getting much attention because the profits have moved towards the cloud, but that it all the more telling considering that MS had quite a monopoly on the personal computing device market not long back.
Remember, it wasn't like they were caught by surprise at some of these innovations - they did start something called Windows Live Search way back when, they did have some of the world's first smartphones (except they were put together in a way that no one wanted to use), they also had the advantage of large piles of cash to use to acquire, say, a YouTube. After they finally ran out of options, they decide to jump on the open source bandwagon because otherwise there was a very realistic chance that they would have actually gone into a serious downward spiral, particularly in the currency that matters most for tech companies - the mindshare of software developers who actually wish to push the bleeding edge farther.
It might seem ironic that, given the majority of Ballmer's tenure was spent not just bad mouthing open source, but actively harassing the open source community [1], that the first thing that Ballmer's exit brought was a sudden embrace of open source. In reality though, their chameleon like stance towards open source - embracing it when it suits them while kicking it when it doesn't - was effectively the only possibility for MS to regain its reputation. After all, it is not as if they innovated their way out of that hole. The general contempt directed at MSFT is well earned by this point, and while they are supposedly trying very hard to make amends, one also wonders if the world might already have good Linux desktops by this time if not for Microsoft's active nuisance-making for most of the previous decade. Yes, the companies are merely trying to maximize shareholder profits, but there are lots of times when MS did things which were just cringe-worthy. See this gem from Bill Gates [2]:
"In the same leaked Microsoft internal 'Challenges and Strategy' memo, Gates outlined a solution to the problem: "patenting as much as we can. A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." By 2004 Microsoft was accumulating 3000 patents a year."
And not to mention, the companies which ate away at Microsoft's profits actually came up with genuinely innovative stuff - even today, Bing is no match for Google's search - despite the fact that MS once used to pay people to use Bing (Bing Rewards)? What is MS doing which is similarly innovative? At least with regards to this article, yes, Microsoft is just another software company today which is making a set of the most expedient choices towards profitability.
[1] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/microsofts-ballmer-warns...
[2] http://www.itpro.co.uk/101743/the-open-source-patent-war
This could also affect recruiting, since I assume it is more interesting to be working with AI projects in company like Facebook or Google where you have access to was amounts of customer information.
I do agree there should be a way to trade privacy for services. Some things can be a lot better when they're personalized.
I'd like to see more granularity and control over the transaction, so it's more of a personal data exchange rather than privacy. Right now it seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Privacy first means we can have control over what data is shared. You can still choose to share what you want. That makes it much more of a trade. Right now I don't feel like I'm trading. Right now I feel more like I need to actively guard against people reaching into my "privacy" wallet while I happen to be using services they're offering.
Don't get me wrong: I'm using the services they're providing, and they should be getting something in return. Using Gmail as an example, people think of it as "free email". They're not necessarily aware of the nature -- or extent-- of the exchange. I'm certainly not. I have no idea the extent to which Google is using my data. It doesn't even need to be nefarious. All I'm saying is that I'd like the exchange to be more explicit.
So far we haven't figured out ways of making these kinds of exchanges easy. And I'd much rather see these exchanges happen in the market rather than solely rely on regulations to protect privacy.
I'm sure others have varying opinions on this. If you have an alternate take, please share a comment or a link. Thanks!
Google and Apple have beaten Microsoft at Windows, by offering better options in MacOS, iOS, and Android. Microsoft is trying (and to some extent succeeding) in catching up to AWS with Azure (look who is growing faster). And if you don't think that dominating the mp3 player market, which allowed for the launch of iTunes, directly leading to the iPhone and the App Store, was important, you didn't pay attention closely.
Also, since the iPhone literally created a market and Android took about 2 years to really launch a competitor, it's pretty flawed to argue that they never beat anyone in market share.
Alexa is easily the best voice assistant, at least in terms of actually understanding what is being asked. When it can't help, it's far more often because it can't find a result or because Amazon/the app builder hasn't built Alexa into the product yet (still drives me crazy that asking Alexa to play an HBO show only works with HBO Go, but not HBA Now, for example, but Alexa definitely understands the requests).
It'll be interesting to see if Google overtakes the Echo. I'm not a fan of Google's "no apps" approach.
Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.
> (An) NCPPR representative asked Mr. Cook to commit right then and there to doing only those things that were profitable.
What ensued was the only time I can recall seeing Tim Cook angry, and he categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR's advocacy. He said that there are many things Apple does because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind," he said, "I don't consider the bloody ROI." He said that the same thing about environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas where Apple is a leader.
https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...
And they aren't doing it only in their press releases, but in their products as well. I'd enumerate features of iOS or OS X that have been very well thought out in this regard, but that would make for a blog post.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it's a misapplication of the principle.
They've always done a lot of consumer analytics. Also, Alexa. I think there's also a lot of AI going on in their logistics operations.
There's good money to be made in pushing existing analytics tech undo AI monikers and sell them repackaged.
Do we really know the content of people's characters based solely on what we hear in tech blogs and popular media? Was superior security/privacy/whatever not a selling point for Apple since "lol Mac's don't get viruses"?
I'm not saying Tim Cook is bad, I'm just saying how do we know billionaire execs with PR teams and heavy financial incentives to seem good are in fact good? Did this not bite people in the ass with Holmes?
This is a tech industry shibboleth. Internet search is not particularly good for anyone, and it was better for power users when it wasn't much more than web-grep. Google's innovation was to count the links pointing to a page in order to determine its quality, and once Google became dominant, that technique had been gamed enough to be virtually useless. As far as I can tell, the only algorithmic improvements they've had since then have been net negatives for one's ability to search for things that they haven't searched for before, and the only effective improvements have been from manual tweaking to weed out content farms. Every search I make on Google brings up the same 80 companies that choose to spend most of their effort on SEO, but actually have a business (usually selling me something) rather than copying low-quality content. Google's image search has aggressively gotten materially worse. They've gotten so desperate for improvements that they've been systematically dismantling ethical barriers in order to squeeze out a few more dollars.
I have no idea what product establishes Google as significantly ahead of anyone in AI. They're all just a day ahead of some mathematician who has a sudden insight over her first coffee of the morning. In this, Tim Cook isn't missing anything other than a slight increase in the probability that that mathematician will be working at Apple that morning rather at than the University of Arkansas.
IMO, Apple's approach is more honest and has a clear path to profitability. Everyone else is promising the world and not delivering much at all.
It looks like nothing at all, until it suddenly disrupts everything. It's easy to spot with hindsight, but at the time it's not at all clear what's disruptive and what's nothing.
A lot of people are running their AI stacks on aws.
Your response was also short on details with regards to your major point, quoted above.
Meanwhile, here are the points from the article. Like Ballmer, Tim Cook:
- is an executor, not a visionary.
- doubled revenue while also doubling profit for his company.
- announced very few new products.
- has the same kinds of challenges (facing disruption).
- lacks passion for the product.
- takes things personally.
Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
Sure, Gates looked like the archetype nerd any time he presented something. But not was lightyears better than the whole "developers developers developers" dance Ballmer managed to pull.
Sadly the tech media have over the years blended over into lifestyle media. No longer is the computer or phone something to get a job done and that's it, now its a indicator of how you see yourself and how you want others to see you. And that image goes all the way back to the company making them, and the people that are the faces of said company.
I wonder if Ballmer really got bad press outside of geeky circles until relatively late in his career, when hindsight showed that Microsoft was missing out on a lot of new products.
I believe that the hypothesis of the article is that people hated Microsoft because of Ballmer.
He was the face of "bad" Microsoft, the unashamedly anti-competitive win-at-all-costs bully. Gates could win some people back with his nerd-cred and things like the mid-'00s "security push". Ballmer was first and foremost a suit, or rather a suit trying to pretend he's down with the nerds just enough to screw them as soon as they turn around, and his "fuck you" attitude wasn't exactly friendly.
> I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated
Probably because they were accomplishments for Microsoft rather than for the industry as a whole. Apple gets a lot of leeway because the iPhone really made a difference for the industry, not just winning but drawing a path. Microsoft has not really done anything like that since the Win 95 / Office / IE 5 progression.
There are developers that actually do enjoy using Microsoft stacks, even though we also have experience using other systems.
That said, I think Apple it much better positioned than Nokia and much more focused on continual disrupting their own position (ipad to phone to tablet to watch is an interesting morph away from single product). So long as they can keep innovating and dominate the supply chain, I believe they will have some long legs.
To stave off commodification, the said company can pivot into a fashion company where the value is derived from the brand itself. Instead of differentiating by feature, it can differentiate by 'brand value' and encourage repeat-sales by ecnouraging seasonal fashion cycles. "Rose Go^w^wTeal is the color of the season this year. If you don't have a teal device, you're so last year"
He built a watch, which was a "me too" product and answered a question that no one asked. Jobs would never have done this because of the marginal increase in utility that smart watches provides users.
He also wasted company time and resources on trying to build a car, which is completely outside Apple's skill sets (the supply chains and profit margins are radically different). It seemed like he was just trying to do something innovative instead of actually looking at the needs and demands of users inside the computing industry where apple should be focused.
Its unfortunate that Jobs didn't see his lack of product development skills when he made him CEO - Jobs always talked about how product companies falter when marketing/sales/supply chain guys run the company and not product guys.
To design a wireless mouse around the idea of using it while being wired would be a massive design fail. It would compromise the design of the common use case in order to improve the extremely rare use case.
That image symbolizes Apple to me too. For me it represents how many seemingly poor decisions made by Apple often turn out to be less severe than they initially appeared—many even reasonable.
That approach would not have yielded the iPod, iPhone, or Music Store.
The market moved away from computers, not Tim. PC sales are imploding, that whole market is a shell of what it used to be.
A desktop computer is not an essential piece of kit any more, and even a laptop is a luxury. Many people survive almost exclusively on their phone or tablet, they have little to no need for an actual computer.
IBM divested itself of desktop computers, HP's flirted with the idea for over a decade, and Dell had to undergo a huge restructuring just to survive. Every single PC manufacturer is getting pounded by dwindling sales.
So yeah, he's a bozo.
My experience with large corporations is that they naturally produce mediocrity. The ownership of the final product or service is too diluted, with too many people involved, pulling in too many conflicting directions. They employ people who individually know what "good" means and what should be done in an ideal world. But that knowledge and common sense gets lost with the bureaucracy and the scale of the organisation.
So unless you get someone at the top who will force the company to still achieve something great for their customers, you will end up with an MBA style manager who will make decisions based on options provided by his teams and get products designed based on specs from the top rather than trying to make something great.
A great example is Windows 8. I heard Sinofsky had already been sacked by the time he walked on stage to introduce Windows 8. Microsoft knew it was a shit OS, and decided to push it nevertheless. I have seen this happening so many times in other contexts.
But tablets are another example. Microsoft knew that tablets would be a big thing well before the introduction of the ipad. In fact I remember a pre-ipad interview of Ballmer where he was deploring that the Windows tablets never took off. The problem was that windows-based tablets were too mediocre to create a market.
But Apple is moving in that direction too now. The user experience is deteriorating with every iteration of iOS. I can't think that someone at Apple thinks it's a good user experience to nag their users with all of their services (Apply Pay, iCloud, Apple Music, etc) over and over, with multiple buttons to click to opt out. That will ultimately bite them too. Not overnight, but over 10 years like with Microsoft. Not Tim Cook's fault. That's what large corporations do.
This argument would be a lot stronger had Microsoft not begun making such major improvements as soon as Ballmer was replaced with Nadella.
I think large corps fail to grasp industry pivots - and they keep doing 'more of same' - failing to take risks on new, emerging concepts.
Part of this is 'baked in' - large, incumbent entities have more to lose than to gain by innovation.
Protecting MS monopoly is easier than taking the risk of heading in a new direction that does not pan out. Very, very few companies can do it well.
Amazon did a great job with AWS - but that was a spin-off of something they already used internally, so it had at least one 'satisfied real world customer' in a way.
Also - consider Apple without the iPhone. They just would not be what they are. The iPhone was a rare win, and it had a lot to do with leap-frogging BlackBerry - who created the market demand for data services. Were it not for BB making ridiculous amounts of surplus profits, Jobs would have not been able to justify to himself a $200M investment in the iPhone. Of course - MS should have seen this and acted more aggressively on creating a better experience - they missed it.
In the end I think Cook came up through the ranks of Ops, and is a trusted maintainer of the system. Ballmer is a loud, boorish Trump-like figure who I don't think was very liked.
There's your mistake - next to i-devices, the Mac is simply not a big product line. It's something they need to have around for ecosystem developers, and something of a brand exercise in other sectors. Nothing more.
Apple will be fine either way in the short term. Hell, they have enough cash saved up to run their company for many years even if they make zero income. But their brand reputation is starting to get tarnished when their ecosystems don't get supported. In the long run, having people wondering how frequently the ecosystems they buy into will be supported is a concern.
For example:
Apple has devalued the PRO moniker under Tim Cook's guidance.
By trying to ram it's Mobile OS into a PRO product (iPad PRO). I mean the UI grid is still 4 x 5 on a massive 12 inch display. Nobody noticed it feels more like Fisher Price? And the iPad "PRO" apps are all dumbed down, feature limited versions of actual pro desktop apps.
Then, by stagnating a once well regarded PRO product, the Macbook PRO, they further eroded the PRO moniker. Did they delay significant updates to the Macbook PRO to see if existing users would eventually give the iPad PRO a try first? Or did they simply want to drive Desktop OS marketshare back to Windows?
And what about the slim Macbook with a fancy new port (USB-C) that's still not available on any other Macbook, even 1.5+ years later!!!? Yes, that's exactly how you devalue the PRO moniker. By releasing new, cutting edge tech on your consumer products first. And then wait years before adding that tech to your PRO line (I know, the new Macbook PRO is rumoured to ONLY have USB-C ... sigh).
Don't even get started on the Mac PRO. Ya, that ridiculously underpowered, overpriced PRO computer that you forgot about, that looks like a NYC subway trash can. https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+subway+trash+can&tbm=isc... Talk about an awesome PRO design.
Talk about losing focus.
Eerily similar to later stage Ballmer Microsoft.
So we're getting one next week - but why not sooner? That was one of the takeaways from this article. Pace of innovation has slowed under Tim Cook.
And even that is not necessarily true anymore. The iMac tends to beat it on many tasks now. At this point, people buy it because they really want to bring their own monitor, or they just can't imagine an iMac could be faster, or they are one of the few people doing something the Mac Pro is still better at.
Being in the right place at the right time.
It is a delightful bit of luck that Steve Jobs made it back to Apple. That scenario could have been way different where Apple bought BeOS, and Steve Jobs didn't return to Apple.
If Jobs isn't at Apple, he doesn't have the opportunity or resources to make his vision for the iMac, iBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, or iPad a real thing. In fact, he probably wouldn't have had the reason to envision any of the things at NEXT.
Also, you could argue that Jobs being at Apple when ARM got good enough for mass market smart gadgets at scale played into it too. If the tech isn't quite there, it doesn't look as interesting at all.
Without the right tech being available, Apple stalls out at the iMac and Power Mac and so on and is a profitable computer vendor, but not the most valuable company in the world.
So, Tim Cook might not be as visionary, but it might also be a poor time for anyone to be CEO as the opportunities shifted.
There is a very clear through-line connecting all the Jobsian products: an aggressively streamlined approach to features, a fascination with high-quality materials and novel industrial processes, and an aesthetic sensibility derived from Bauhaus/Functionalism/Dieter Rams. All these elements are just as present in his misses (Lisa, the original Mac, the NeXT Cube, the G4 Cube) as in his hits (iMac, iPod, iPhone).
What separates his age of mostly misses from his age of mostly hits isn't any change in his design philosophy; it's the passage of time. His misses mostly came early, his hits late.
What this implies to me is that his later success wasn't due to him changing, so much as the world changing around him. In 1984 and 1990 and 1995, he was trying to sell objects d'art into a computing market that was dominated by business/enterprise purchasers, who didn't care if the machines they bought were ugly as sin as long as they were functional and interoperable and cheap. By 2005 the market for tech had shifted away from those buyers into the consumer market, where the priorities were completely different, more like those of the fashion business than of the tech business of old.
Suddenly the Jobsian approach stopped being a liability and started being an asset. But that's not because he learned how to aim better, it's because the targets moved so that they were all neatly lined up in front of him.
http://aurelieherbelot.net/pears/ http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-r...
come out of Google for the simple reason they are busy playing empire defense all the while the need for a centralized search engine reduces.
Search will be the key thing Google does, but they are strategically building product lines(conversation UI) so that they don't miss out on how people search for stuff.
Jobs did make sure Apple has no power to ever get rid of Ive for any reason, ensuring him an unbreakable tenure. However, to me, it's far more obvious that he will never take on the CEO role because I think he's prepping to retire from Apple in the next few years as there's a reason we've been seeing less and less of him over the past few years, with his strong desire to move back to England with his family and so on.
The only two people that's more obvious to me is Williams and Schiller but I don't think Cook is going to be gone for another decade.
So maybe this is just regression toward the mean and hasn't that much to do with whoever is the CEO.
In other words, every very successful company is bound to be less successful later. Nothing really exciting about this.
If he were alive and well, I think so. With the exception of iPad (which wasn't subpar by industry standards but certainly signaled a descent into mediocrity for Apple, and which I would attribute to Jobs' slowly disengaging with the company due to his health issues), Jobs was on an unbelievable streak between his return in the late 90s and about 2009/2010. In the span of about 10 years, his company did several outstanding feats in holistic hardware/software design, and it can't be a coincidence that the man was then largely healthy and in command.
I do think that would have probably continued until the mid to latter part of this decade had he continued in better health.
Another one is a new lock screen on iOS 10, sometimes the fingerprint does not work or the finger is dirty and i know I want to unlock it with a pin, before I used to be able to just swipe right away and type the pin, now it won't let me and I have to repeatatly press the home button until it figures out that the fingerprint won't work and it has to show me the pin enter screen.
Might be little things but it's what used to separate Apple from the crowd, I don't want them to lose focus on those. And don't get me started on the new OS X, which makes my maxed out 2014 rMBP look like slow PC from 2000.
When I place the wrong finger on my touchID and press the home button once, it shows me the pin entry to get into the phone. No multiple presses, nothing. First bad read, shows the pin entry.
[1] - https://www.evernote.com/l/ABV1fPm7JnBO76pqevjy990uALmIK39uZ...
[2] - https://www.evernote.com/l/ABVer15u9rhODaV3U5QafcRx8eVu3HVq6...
As for the touch ID - try double clicking the home button with a finger that has no touch ID, it does not show a PIN entering screen. I used to double tap all the time before to quicker unlock the phone and swipe to enter a pin, now its' quite annoying and not as fast.
One of the attributes that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appeared to share (I have never met either) was a massive amount of trust/faith to run their respective companies (eventually).
I imagine that this must translate to the board room where they were provided the freedom to pursue avenues that a newly promoted CEO would just not be allowed to do.
The author praises Steve Ballmer and Tim Cook for their ability to drive short term growth, but had they failed to do so they may have been replaced by someone more willing to focus on these returns. Eventually as disruption occurs the share holders start to prioritize facing these new challenges.
The author also mentions Disney, which is a company that was sliding into obscurity until Bob Iger took over. As a newly promoted CEO he executed his vision and put Disney right back on top. I can't imagine Disney's board was particularly forward thinking back then.
But I still feel that it must be harder than having carte blanche with the organisation. Maybe I over estimate the different levels of freedom provided to different CEOs.
Or maybe the ability to generate this freedom/trust/faith is one of the skills that ultimately helps define a successful CEO.
These are the people who obsess over flaws in how work is done rather than the work itself. Which has it's place in larger companies but even there it really needs to be balanced, much more in favour of outward work.
Being a front-end dev I've had to work with many 'product managers' who spent a big chunk of their time on the process stuff and most of the product ideas were just shots in the dark without backing it up with data or experience, or otherwise entirely reactionary to local customer issues or the bosses moods, rather than with a strong vision or focusing on high level trends in customer behaviour. Largely, I believe, because they spent a lot of their finite resources focusing on the wrong things (internal optimization rather than external, ie talking to customers, value prop).
There are many many traps that startups can fall into and this is a big one. Especially when companies get VC and start adding non-core team members, then feel the need to bring in managers.
Chromebooks are fantastic products but I grew up in the Microsoft dominated 90's and hated it. It feels like Apple's almost trying to make itself obsolete in markets it once owned. Competition please!
This: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-27/aetna-to-...
Is not about selling more watches and phones. And Aetna alone has 23 million members.
The question is not whether Tim is the right guy for innovation but whether he has put the right guy into the place. John Ivy certainly continues to play a big role but has/is/will there be another internal leader emerging?
> About Steve (Blank)
> After 21 years in 8 high technology companies, I retired in 1999. I co-founded my last company, E.piphany, in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.
> Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.
Though, there's something fabulously pretentious about writing an opinion piece and then concluding it with a "Lessons Learned" section.
For any company, a charismatic dominant CEO leaving causes instability a board would be foolish not to try and stabilise things at the company before moving on again. A CEO does not act in isolation even though this article paints it like that and takes guidance from their board.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/17/apples-new-japan-r...
Being compared to Ballmer is a compliment in my view.
Ballmer and Cook have made extreme amounts of money for their shareholders. Major super truckloads of money. That's what businesses do.
The meta narrative of disruption is marketing, but somehow everyone keeps talking about it like its real.
Even weirder is the emotional responses from some of the other commenters about cloud providers? It's like they are sports teams or something. Just like sports teams they have nothing to do with you, really. It's just a brand that somehow you identify with.
(You could carry the sports team metaphor a lot further...tax abatements to build datacenters/arenas...but let's leave it there...)
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-fir...
That AI capability could have been Apples.
Instead of concentrating on user experience as a whole, they concentrated on "look and feel" of devices, along with UI.
Those are all good things. But having an iPhone with a useful AI would be a killer.
Instead, Google is pushing hard in this area. And will likely do well. Because they're a data analysis company. Not a "pretty picture" company.
