Maybe this prioritization of a lot of new features is them making up for introducing a new product direction?
EDIT: oops, found Apple Homepod, maybe they're not marketing it well? Anyone here that uses it? My friends are apple lovers, buying nee iphones and macbook pro and havent heard of it either.
It is definitely the best speaker around, multiple reviews say the sound quality is amazing. However, we are in a golden age of ML and the Siri on HomePod is a joke when compared to Alexa and Google Assistant. Apple's culture of secrecy has left them woefully behind in the AI race (where researchers love to publish).
I agree with you that Apple does not really know where to go next. Awesome AR glasses that actually sell and do amazing things? An amazing smart home assistant that can run your home, but is handleable with simple within the Apple eco-system? I don't think Apple has done anything that bold in recent years and will struggle like you say.
Unless Apple secretly is doing something truly "Wow" and they're just quiet about it. Otherwise, I believe Tim Cook will earn more and more comparisons to Steve Ballmer: Great for sales/stock price, missed out on a game changing era of technology.
This has nothing to do with secrecy or lack of user data or lack of algorithms knowledge. What is missing in Siri is lack of high quality gold data sets -- this is often curated by hoards of phds and other domain experts. It takes time to do the curation and Google is ahead of the pack. Amazon has done a great job opening up the eco system to third parties.
The worst thing is the manager/ product owner/ tyrannical architect is a actually a nice bloke. but he is absolutely terrible at insulating devs from his stressors, which has a massive knock-on effect on his team. Recently he took leave for around 4 weeks and it was like night and day! we self organised: minimised new features and maximise time spent addressing technical debt built-up over 2 years. I was enjoying work again, and it had a almost skunkwork-like feel to it.
then he returned, then i handed in my notice.
And yet it still happens.
(insert image of me banging my head on the desk)
I do think project managers are needed for this large scale software though. So I'm wondering, what is the best way a project manager should manage development of Apple's software?
Mature projects are also supposed to have an increasing percentage of the time spent on them dedicated towards maintenance / upgrades / fixes / upkeep. A PMO that can't convince upper management of this is a weak PMO.
