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The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death

216 points by uptown 10y ago

schizoidboy 10y ago
I guess this is true of almost all the big companies; nevertheless, it's interesting to see it written explicitly: "tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem"
- cma 10y ago
  " Apple’s year of the cloud – tie all of our products together – make Apple ecosystem even more sticky"
- nogbit 10y ago
  Yup, their end goal. You cant even close your account with apple, there is no facility or function to do so (removing a device and changing the email is NOT closing the account).
- ianai 10y ago
  Did you think a major business goal would go unstated?
- liquidise 10y ago
  > tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple. While it may sound nefarious, it was never a secret agenda, but it was successful because of trust. There was an inherent trust that buying into the Apple walled garden of products was superior to the outside world. Like it or not, Apple delivered on that promise to an almost frustrating capacity. Fast-forward to the present, that trust has been broken. The flailing we see from the Apple community (of which i am one) is because so many of us feel that trust has been broken. I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle. If i bought a new MacBook Pro, i can't plug an iPhone 7 into it, either. The total lack of answers on the desktop side has exceeded concerning. Those of us in the walled garden are seeing the flowers wilt and the maintainers turn a blind eye. But because many of us have built our professional careers on Apple hardware and OS, there is fear of change. What if Ubuntu isn't as good? How will i ship my iOS app, etc. Trust is an important but delicate idea. Once broken, it can takes years to earn back.
  - scarlac 10y ago
    > tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem > > Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple I respectfully disagree. I would argue that the "new" Apple tie their products together and "lock customers into [their] ecosystem" much better than the old. Handoff, Universal Clipboard, iCloud drive/documents/desktop, Maps, Music and more have all been improved a lot in the last 3 years. I'd even admit that I've knowingly (that their goal is to tie me in) chosen Apple services instead of others due to their tighter integration. > I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle. While I agree with you that this is annoying, and I've even made this argument to other, I have to admit that I very rarely connect my iPhone to my mac and only remember doing so to back up, which has been replaced by iCloud backups. This is probably also what Steve was referring to as Inventor's dilemma. They could "do the right thing" and someone else would push wireless or they could do it themselves.
- riprowan 10y ago
  this also can equate to: "lock other products out, preventing future customers from adopting our ecosystem"
creshal 10y ago
> – Strategy: catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications, tethering, speech, …) and leapfrog them (Siri, …) > – Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage) > – way ahead of Apple in cloud services for contacts, calendars, mail Interesting to see how critical Apple internally was (is?) about their competitiveness.
- rqebmm 10y ago
  It's also interesting to see that they knew notifications were crap circa 2011 and _still_ haven't done anything to get ahead of Android.
  - tehaugmenter 10y ago
    Might have something to do with the Patent Google has[0]. [0] https://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247 https://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247
    - otterley 10y ago
      That is an application, not an issued patent. Whether a patent is granted remains to be seen.
bbctol 10y ago
Can someone elaborate on the "Holy War with Google"? I think of Google as encroaching on Apple's standard turf, not the other way around, and Apple hasn't been expanding towards the places Google wants to go. What was Jobs's plan, beyond just "do better than them?" The phrasing implies something grand and specific. EDIT: I forgot that Siri hadn't come out yet; I suppose they did jump ahead of Google, but not with a product good enough to corner the market.
- cma 10y ago
  Maps hadn't come out yet either; Google was their system maps provider.
  - ralusek 10y ago
    Still is if you want good maps.
    - swift 10y ago
      It's hard to believe, I know, but at least for the US, Apple Maps works very well and has won me over. Once the maps functionality became good enough on both, it became a battle of UIs, and I find Apple's iOS 10 Maps UI much easier to use while driving. That said, it's an uneasy win. Google Maps might tempt me back when they ship a speed limit indicator; that's a great feature.
      - glitch003 10y ago
        Google Maps on my Pixel shows the current speed limit. Not sure if they have that on the iOS version yet though.
      - kllrnohj 10y ago
        My experience is the exact opposite of yours and Apple Maps still seems weak. I've only used Apple Maps a couple of times but every time it came up with some rather brain-dead routes for simple local navigation, and this is in the US. By brain-dead I mean things like instead of simply turning left onto the street the destination was off of it went a few blocks past before turning left, which resulted in backtracking. It was bizarre. Google maps had no issues with the same route. My GF uses Apple Maps regularly because Car Play forces her to and she complains it doesn't work that well. She will always use Google Maps instead when she's not using Car Play. Apple Maps seems to be in the "good enough" category still, rather than being actually good.
speedlv 10y ago
"Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices" haha
bshimmin 10y ago
From reading that through, I guess you can't really blame Tim Cook for how low a priority Macs seem to be to Apple nowadays...
- Longhanks 10y ago
  Very disappointing to see the only bullet points concerning the Mac are Mac App Store, Lion and hardware. Fast forward to 2016, the Mac App Store is rotting, hardware gets updated maybe in 1-3 years, and the os is lagging. Makes you wonder what's on their list for the next years, if anything...
  - nogbit 10y ago
    Nothing, more of the same innovators dilemma. Sell your stock and put it elsewhere...though you should of done that end of 2015.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion. Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output. I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market). I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must. This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
CPLX 10y ago
I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc. But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that's probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  Did you miss all the "be better than Google"? He seemed intensely scared of them, to the point where he wanted Apple to focus 100% on beating them. Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers (until this year with the pixel). We are seeing this version of Apple come to fruition; all-in on mobile and consumer software services.
  - cptskippy 10y ago
    Job's fear of Google is justified. He sees the dwindling PC sales and knows that they're not the future. He sees Google as a threat because they don't even bother with PCs, they're a cloud first company and Job's knows that's where Apple needs to go next to avoid losing relevance. It seems pretty obvious today but 6 years ago that was pretty forward thinking.
  - charlesism 10y ago
    I'm sure "scared of them" played some part, but "angry at them" played a larger one. This wasn't too long after Google blind-sided Apple by entering the phone market, which SJ somehow thought was a betrayal. To be fair, they did so while Schmidt was actually still sitting on the board at Apple, which might be what really ticked Steve off.
    - toyg 10y ago
      And they did so with an OS based on a technology, er, "borrowed" from SUN and now owned by his great friend Larry Ellison. Lots of straws on that camel...
basch 10y ago
Nowhere is Apple's rudderlessness more apparent than their cloud "strategy." >– Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage) iCloud is an embarrassment. I can't tell you how many people I have met who dont understand why their phone stops backing up, and that they need to pay $1/m for more space. To absolutely ruin someones ios mobile experience over $12 is inexcusable. iCloud and iTunes backups are completely incompatible. If you attempt to use both you end up with forked independent backups. To check all of your available iCloud restore points, you either need to call Apple Support and confirm the times or wipe a device and get back to the restore screen. Let me repeat that: you need to ERASE YOUR PHONE TO CHECK __IF__ A BACKUP EXISTS. Then there is iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, yet I cant browse through backups in the cloud, I can only do a full restore to a device. Photos has "iCloud Photo Library" "My Photo Stream" "iCloud Photo Sharing" etc. And iCloud has Photo backup in the iCloud section of settings. How many different ways is Apple going to reinvent localstore, sync, cloudbackup, sharing of photos? It's almost starting to feel like its too late for them to catch up to Google Photos. It is a telltale sign of rottenness in Denmark that Google Photos is coming to the rescue to save Apple users FROM a lack of unified iPhoto/iCloud backup+share. My Passbook/Wallet needs to be recreated every time I set up a device? Apple needs three things 1) a visionary. a leader who makes arbitrary design decisions and cuts through committee banality and risk aversion. Someone a tiny bit reckless, ready to make bold decisions that dont have statistics to back them up. A person actually forging a unique strategy path through the untamed cloud wilderness. The current level of cohesiveness and interoperability IS NOT GOOD for a company trying to compete in the 2016 cloud space. Microsoft Teams is Microsoft merging Exchange/Sharepoint/Skype into one interface. Apple should be scared by how independent they have left their software silos. There has been no movement whatsoever. 2) to start spending its cash reserves on acquiring fully fleshed out software companies. Microsoft needed a mobile Mail app? They acquire the team and software and rename it Outlook. Apple needs to seriously evaluate every piece of Office/Productivity software that Google and Microsoft (and Adobe and Facebook) make, and acquire a competitor. And not roll the team into their existing product, but SCRAP their existing product and migrate the data over cleanly. They should look at the best apps in the apps store, that dont have Microsoft and Google competitors, and buy those too, thus making their Office and Productivity suite unique. Buying Adobe might be a good start. Adobe's Marketing Cloud would position Apple in a new market against Salesforce and Microsoft. Buying Hubspot could do similar. Apple could buy THOUSANDS of the companies represented in its app store, and have first party titles like Nintendo. First party development studios are a great way to attract people to your platform, while letting your other services become cross platform. They should be throwing cash at the wall of potential, nurturing unprofitable but useful/addictive products, and hoping they stumble bassackwards into the next Minecraft or Dropbox before it costs billions. Yet the Valve model of make just a platform, no games, seems to be winning out. 3) recognizing that cross platform software is a gateway drug. A lot of people got into Apple stuff because iPods worked with Windows computers. Apple is where it is because iTunes released for windows and was easier and safer than Napster/Kazaa. They need to recognize that they wont convert everyone from Android and offer Android and Windows versions of their cloud software. If they sow and nurture seeds, iOS wont feel foreign in the event a person decides to finally leave Google or Microsoft. Obviously its important that it work Better on iOS/macOS, but people need to get a taste before they convert to a new ecosystem. Gmail works good on every platform, but it works BETTER with Google Assistant. Apple has 18% mobile marketshare, if they want iMessage to become WhatsApp or Messenger, they need to release it elsewhere, otherwise it will always be second best. and a bonus fourth thinking a bit outside the box. 4) recognize Yahoo's place in the cloud world is collapsing and offer refugees an alternative. Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Football. Maybe buy and save Flickr, and turn Flickr into an iCloud Photos Social network for professional photographers. If only they had a good word they could use to name their nonexistant social cloud product instead of the current word salad they are serving up (hint it's iPhoto.) Apple is very poorly positioned against Instagram, Google Photos, and Adobe Cloud. They should put the effort into Photos that they have into Music and Streaming. Pinterest could be another option. Buy OpenFolio and Robinhood, merge them, and create something better than Yahoo Finance ever was. A finance driven social network could be Apple's way of finally becoming social, without being a "meetoo" like Google+ or a flop like Ping. The state of Fantasy Sports is atrocious, ESPN, NFL, and Yahoo all spend time and effort making their apps worse. CBS is a pay platform minimizing its visibility so most people dont know how good it can be. Can you imagine the cash Apple could print if it was loosely affiliated with sports betting? Apple obviously wants to get into content distribution, and after saying they dont want to acquire ATT, maybe they could look at Medium or The Atavist. 4b) There is a HUGE gap in the world in the Banking/Payment industry. Venmo and Facebook are making payment social. SplitWise could be a great foot in that door. Mint Bills (Check) and the defunct manilla were great cloud bill backups and calendars. Mint and Personal Capital are meta-bank managers that let you see across all your accounts. OpenFolio lets me see all my investments with different companies. Intuit (TurboTax and Mint) have a market cap of 4 billion, buy them. tldr: Flickr+OpenFolio+Medium+Adobe, and suddenly Apple could be giving Facebook and Google some fair competition, albeit with a lot less AI. Probably let Adobe run the "cloud strategy" part of the company tho.
cryptozeus 10y ago
" Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma)" What apple is going through right now !!!
- codazoda 10y ago
  Innovating or holding on? They don't seem to be holding on in the case of "Dongle Gate". They switched to the new stuff early and are letting everyone else catch up. In a couple years USB-C will be on almost everything and we won't need dongles anymore. Seems really similar to how the early macs had only usb.
jack9 10y ago
> PC as hub for all your digital assets Whatever this means. TB of data with the PC at the center is dumb.
- usaphp 10y ago
  Depends on a user I guess, I can't fill my 500gb drive even by half
  - lurkinggrue 10y ago
    And I have 8.2 TB of data on my desktop.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  But it's historically accurate. You kept your photos, videos, music on your PC and moved them to and from your devices (music/video player, phone, e-reader). 2010 (date written) was only a few years after Dropbox became popular, and before it and similar products were more heavily integrated into apps.
- madenine 10y ago
  I think some formatting got lost. The context: – we invented Digital Hub concept – PC as hub for all your digital assets – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, ... Train of thought seems to be, "Appled invented the digital hub, with the PC at the center for all your contacts, calendars...etc - That's moving to the cloud" Hence why its under the topic "2011: Year of the Cloud"
revelation 10y ago
I wonder what his opinion would be on Tablet sales spectacularly crashing. Surely it's not just bad execution.
- j2bax 10y ago
  I wonder how much phablets have caused this. When I got my iPhone 6 Plus, I very quickly saw no need for my iPad Mini anymore. Fast forward a few years and I decided to pick up an iPad Air 2 (along with a keyboard) because I find it to be a superior around the office and on the airplane note taking device than my 15" MacBook Pro.
macca321 10y ago
No mention of facebook.
- akhatri_aus 10y ago
  Facebook wasnt making money then yet & people were still skeptical.
drieddust 10y ago
Seems like he ran out of ideas and was ready for a settle life milking the cash cow.
- barrkel 10y ago
  How on earth did you get that out of the email? It is aggressively oriented towards turning Apple into a cloud-first company. That's the key consequence of reorienting your product line into connected clients. The next logical strategic move based on this email is to move pro apps to the cloud, connected to Apple client hardware in ways only Apple can unify. Key is "Post-PC". Where does that leave content creation, a key Apple demographic and one that is ill-served by client devices? It has to move to the cloud. I'm not an Apple fan - I don't like how they lock down their systems - but I can see how this strategy makes more sense and skates where the puck is going to be, not where it is now. The only questions are timing and execution. Apple has been lacking on the latter (for cloud), and always on the leading edge of the former.
  - drieddust 10y ago
    Did you read my comment? These were good business ideas but none of them can be called revolutionary. Definitely does not match with Steve Jobs' larger than life image.
    - barrkel 10y ago
      Do you think the iPod was revolutionary? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the Macbook Air? Since when has Apple ever been revolutionary post Macintosh 128K (and even that's arguable)? They've been on the leading edge of trends, or at least were when Jobs was around. He moved computing devices away from geekery and towards fashion. He identified how intimate and personal phones were, and turned them into status symbols, with fetishized design. He saw where trends were intersecting, ran ahead and planted really solid benchmark objects at just the right time. The clear trend that Jobs was onto next was cloud-everything, which is still happening, just slowly. And Apple is executing poorly there, even as they wind down the creative capabilities of their hardware.
denzil_correa 10y ago
Personally, I think this was an insightful comment > – Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet Basically, he accepts that Apple lags behind in technology but Apple can "make things work". Technology alone is not enough - you need a healthy marriage of technology and humanities.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Nothing new with Apple, the last time they were a early adopter was with the original Mac. Since then they have been latecomer to existing markets, but made a big splash about their entry via their inside track with MSM (a track that exist as a legacy of that Mac).
  - mercer 10y ago
    I'd say that's selling Apple short. I have no particular love for them, especially at this moment, but they make a big splash because they (still?) manage to do things right in all the ways that I (and apparently others) care about.
- equalarrow 10y ago
  But now it looks like Microsoft is figuring it out. Azure is doing great, the Surface Pro got more love than the MBPro, and Microsoft is actually courting developers with VS. Google? They prob have the best AI, but I'm sorta skeptical that the Pixel is gonna work for them. They've never been able to brand and command like Apple has in this regard. For cloud though, they destroy Apple still.
heisenbit 10y ago
It strikes me that this is a very feature oriented list. These are the main product themes and these are the features to be driven forward. What I really would like to see the equivalent process for coming up with the themes and the discussion around customers and where they were going. Maybe such a thing exists in Apple and that would be great for them. Maybe too much relied on Steve intuiting and translating it to executable battle plans. The proof will be in the pudding (code name for iPhone 10).
achairapart 10y ago
> – 2011 Strategy: ship iPad 2 with amazing hardware and software before our competitors even catch up with our current model Typical Apple process here: Ship a base model (MVP?) to test the market, then ship the full featured one on next iteration. Also, this is why you should always wait at least for revision 2 before buy every new Apple product. The new Macbook touchbar thing could fall under this, too.
- dictum 10y ago
  The iPad 3 was an extreme version of that, having been superseded by the iPad 4 in only 7 months. Never used an iPad 3, but I have a feeling the silicon wasn't quite ready for a display resolution of 2048x1536.
  - jonny_eh 10y ago
    I thought the iPad 3 (aka "The New iPad") was great. I used it for a few years before upgrading to the iPad Air 2. I thought the short 7 month cycle was to change the annual launch period of new iPads, and to get it on lightning.
  - wincy 10y ago
    I owned the iPad 3 for a few months, luckily I sold it off before the new one came out. It was pretty janky, games had a lot of problems, and I'm sure if I had it today it would be in a drawer somewhere. The iPad 4 on the other hand is still running like a champ with iOS 10 and we still use it today.
oliv__ 10y ago
I wonder what -[CONFIDENTIAL] stands for.
- hajile 10y ago
  It's on a need to know basis and you don't need to know. Apple considers it a relevant secret today, so it's redacted.
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  I'm guessing Apple Watch.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Perhaps a product still in development today.
meesterdude 10y ago
> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem I know they've done this, and i know they've done this on purpose; but to read it bare like that is a bit too much for me, especially as I think more and more about the benefits of leaving their ecosystem, and weighing against the downsides.
- eridius 10y ago
  Everybody tries to do this, but few companies have such a comprehensive ecosystem as Apple. Do note that what you've quoted is not in any way malicious. It's just saying "make all of our products work really great together, so that way someone who uses one of them is much more likely to buy into the rest of the ecosystem". This is a bit different than saying "make it difficult for customers to leave our ecosystem", which would be the malicious approach.
  - segf4ult 10y ago
    While Apple may not intentionally keep you from leaving their platform, a side effect of their tight integration is that it's harder to leave. Take the Apple Watch for example. Without an iPhone, the Apple Watch goes from a smartwatch to only being able to tell the time. Sure, you could own an Android phone and an Apple Watch, but you wouldn't get any of the benefits of the Apple Watch, which further ties customers to the iPhone.
    - eridius 10y ago
      True, but the Apple Watch is in most ways just an iPhone accessory, and you could make this same argument about any iPhone accessory (though other accessories typically aren't as expensive as the Apple Watch is).
      - kevb 10y ago
        But Apple entered the smart watch market by making an iPhone accessory. Whereas when they entered the smart phone market they made a phone for everyone, not just Mac users. On the other hand IIRC the original iPod required a Mac and they opened that up later.
brianzelip 10y ago
"further lock customers in" is so bloodcurdlingly disgusting.
- nodesocket 10y ago
  Ummmmm this is business 101. Does "product-stickiness" make you feel less disgusted?
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
The post-PC era sure was looking like a big deal in 2009-2010 but now its clear that mobile has over-saturated the market and old fashioned laptops and desktops weren't actually being replaced, people just stopped buying replacements as frequently. Are we post-PC? If so, I'm not seeing it. In fact, Q2 2016 PC sales are slightly up and ipad sales down in a bizarre turnaround. The year-over-year decline is still there, but mostly because a 5-6 year old desktop or laptop is perfectly usable still, while a 2-3 year old phone or tablet is ready for the garbage heap.
cloudjacker 10y ago
its nice to see that they weren't completely delusional about being behind android very refreshing to see - at the top - their distortion field is just marketing unfortunately for that list, they never caught up to android in terms of notifications, something Steve Jobs explicitly called out in 2010, wow.
putzdown 10y ago
What, pray, is ET <et@group.apple.com>?
- brandon272 10y ago
  Executive Team
- jcsvyu789jh 10y ago
  ExecutiveTeam?
happytrails 10y ago
The cult of Steve Jobs is getting a resurgence on Hacker News?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cooper12 10y ago
  It's always been popular. Every time Apple makes an announcement there's a flood of "Steve Jobs never would have let this happen".
- Steko 10y ago
  Play the HN Steve Jobs drinking game: Take a drink if comment claims Tim Cook is no Jobs/visionary. Take a drink if comment mentions going nuclear on Google. Take a drink if comment mentions his cancer would have been fine if he didn't follow Eastern/New Age quackery. Take a drink if comment mentions he wasn't a great philanthropist, make it a double if they go straight to accusing him of being a "sociopath".
1_2__3 10y ago
Surprised nobody mentioned the "average age" comment.
edditoria 10y ago
Talking about the "Digital Hub concept", I heard that from a Microsoft guy in 2005(?) introducing the concept of Microsoft Home Server. We were considering anything to cooperate (actually, it is only in marketing way). However, I was afraid that web 2.0 was the true future. Home user didn't need a home server product. I love Mac, no doubt. But I do think Microsoft create a lot of great concepts and do test it on market. Apple is not the first eveb on consumer market (remember the WinCE products and XP Tablet Edition?) In my opinion, Microsoft is pioneer of electronic products. Although they often made their final products "unusable", I would hear about what they "are going to do". It is worth to project the future. p.s. sorry about bad English
NicoJuicy 10y ago
– tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem This is why i never used Apple. At least i can use Android with pretty much everything. And don't get me started about stuff like iTunes for Windows... Also: Apple TV 2- David Moody, Jeff Robbin – Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices I think Chromecast pretty much nailed it. On the rest, i'm pretty much impressed how simple he outlined it all.

216 points by uptown 10y ago

I guess this is true of almost all the big companies; nevertheless, it's interesting to see it written explicitly: "tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem"

cma 10y ago
" Apple’s year of the cloud – tie all of our products together – make Apple ecosystem even more sticky"
nogbit 10y ago
Yup, their end goal. You cant even close your account with apple, there is no facility or function to do so (removing a device and changing the email is NOT closing the account).
ianai 10y ago
Did you think a major business goal would go unstated?
liquidise 10y ago
> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple. While it may sound nefarious, it was never a secret agenda, but it was successful because of trust. There was an inherent trust that buying into the Apple walled garden of products was superior to the outside world. Like it or not, Apple delivered on that promise to an almost frustrating capacity. Fast-forward to the present, that trust has been broken. The flailing we see from the Apple community (of which i am one) is because so many of us feel that trust has been broken. I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle. If i bought a new MacBook Pro, i can't plug an iPhone 7 into it, either. The total lack of answers on the desktop side has exceeded concerning. Those of us in the walled garden are seeing the flowers wilt and the maintainers turn a blind eye. But because many of us have built our professional careers on Apple hardware and OS, there is fear of change. What if Ubuntu isn't as good? How will i ship my iOS app, etc. Trust is an important but delicate idea. Once broken, it can takes years to earn back.
- scarlac 10y ago
  > tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem > > Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple I respectfully disagree. I would argue that the "new" Apple tie their products together and "lock customers into [their] ecosystem" much better than the old. Handoff, Universal Clipboard, iCloud drive/documents/desktop, Maps, Music and more have all been improved a lot in the last 3 years. I'd even admit that I've knowingly (that their goal is to tie me in) chosen Apple services instead of others due to their tighter integration. > I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle. While I agree with you that this is annoying, and I've even made this argument to other, I have to admit that I very rarely connect my iPhone to my mac and only remember doing so to back up, which has been replaced by iCloud backups. This is probably also what Steve was referring to as Inventor's dilemma. They could "do the right thing" and someone else would push wireless or they could do it themselves.
riprowan 10y ago
this also can equate to: "lock other products out, preventing future customers from adopting our ecosystem"

creshal 10y ago

> – Strategy: catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications, tethering, speech, …) and leapfrog them (Siri, …) > – Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage) > – way ahead of Apple in cloud services for contacts, calendars, mail Interesting to see how critical Apple internally was (is?) about their competitiveness.

rqebmm 10y ago
It's also interesting to see that they knew notifications were crap circa 2011 and _still_ haven't done anything to get ahead of Android.
- tehaugmenter 10y ago
  Might have something to do with the Patent Google has[0]. [0] https://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247 https://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247
  - otterley 10y ago
    That is an application, not an issued patent. Whether a patent is granted remains to be seen.

bbctol 10y ago

Can someone elaborate on the "Holy War with Google"? I think of Google as encroaching on Apple's standard turf, not the other way around, and Apple hasn't been expanding towards the places Google wants to go. What was Jobs's plan, beyond just "do better than them?" The phrasing implies something grand and specific. EDIT: I forgot that Siri hadn't come out yet; I suppose they did jump ahead of Google, but not with a product good enough to corner the market.

cma 10y ago
Maps hadn't come out yet either; Google was their system maps provider.
- ralusek 10y ago
  Still is if you want good maps.
  - swift 10y ago
    It's hard to believe, I know, but at least for the US, Apple Maps works very well and has won me over. Once the maps functionality became good enough on both, it became a battle of UIs, and I find Apple's iOS 10 Maps UI much easier to use while driving. That said, it's an uneasy win. Google Maps might tempt me back when they ship a speed limit indicator; that's a great feature.
    - glitch003 10y ago
      Google Maps on my Pixel shows the current speed limit. Not sure if they have that on the iOS version yet though.
    - kllrnohj 10y ago
      My experience is the exact opposite of yours and Apple Maps still seems weak. I've only used Apple Maps a couple of times but every time it came up with some rather brain-dead routes for simple local navigation, and this is in the US. By brain-dead I mean things like instead of simply turning left onto the street the destination was off of it went a few blocks past before turning left, which resulted in backtracking. It was bizarre. Google maps had no issues with the same route. My GF uses Apple Maps regularly because Car Play forces her to and she complains it doesn't work that well. She will always use Google Maps instead when she's not using Car Play. Apple Maps seems to be in the "good enough" category still, rather than being actually good.

speedlv 10y ago

"Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices" haha

bshimmin 10y ago

From reading that through, I guess you can't really blame Tim Cook for how low a priority Macs seem to be to Apple nowadays...

Longhanks 10y ago
Very disappointing to see the only bullet points concerning the Mac are Mac App Store, Lion and hardware. Fast forward to 2016, the Mac App Store is rotting, hardware gets updated maybe in 1-3 years, and the os is lagging. Makes you wonder what's on their list for the next years, if anything...
- nogbit 10y ago
  Nothing, more of the same innovators dilemma. Sell your stock and put it elsewhere...though you should of done that end of 2015.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion. Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output. I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market). I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must. This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

CPLX 10y ago

I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc. But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that's probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.

jbob2000 10y ago
Did you miss all the "be better than Google"? He seemed intensely scared of them, to the point where he wanted Apple to focus 100% on beating them. Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers (until this year with the pixel). We are seeing this version of Apple come to fruition; all-in on mobile and consumer software services.
- cptskippy 10y ago
  Job's fear of Google is justified. He sees the dwindling PC sales and knows that they're not the future. He sees Google as a threat because they don't even bother with PCs, they're a cloud first company and Job's knows that's where Apple needs to go next to avoid losing relevance. It seems pretty obvious today but 6 years ago that was pretty forward thinking.
- charlesism 10y ago
  I'm sure "scared of them" played some part, but "angry at them" played a larger one. This wasn't too long after Google blind-sided Apple by entering the phone market, which SJ somehow thought was a betrayal. To be fair, they did so while Schmidt was actually still sitting on the board at Apple, which might be what really ticked Steve off.
  - toyg 10y ago
    And they did so with an OS based on a technology, er, "borrowed" from SUN and now owned by his great friend Larry Ellison. Lots of straws on that camel...

basch 10y ago

Nowhere is Apple's rudderlessness more apparent than their cloud "strategy." >– Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage) iCloud is an embarrassment. I can't tell you how many people I have met who dont understand why their phone stops backing up, and that they need to pay $1/m for more space. To absolutely ruin someones ios mobile experience over $12 is inexcusable. iCloud and iTunes backups are completely incompatible. If you attempt to use both you end up with forked independent backups. To check all of your available iCloud restore points, you either need to call Apple Support and confirm the times or wipe a device and get back to the restore screen. Let me repeat that: you need to ERASE YOUR PHONE TO CHECK __IF__ A BACKUP EXISTS. Then there is iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, yet I cant browse through backups in the cloud, I can only do a full restore to a device. Photos has "iCloud Photo Library" "My Photo Stream" "iCloud Photo Sharing" etc. And iCloud has Photo backup in the iCloud section of settings. How many different ways is Apple going to reinvent localstore, sync, cloudbackup, sharing of photos? It's almost starting to feel like its too late for them to catch up to Google Photos. It is a telltale sign of rottenness in Denmark that Google Photos is coming to the rescue to save Apple users FROM a lack of unified iPhoto/iCloud backup+share. My Passbook/Wallet needs to be recreated every time I set up a device? Apple needs three things 1) a visionary. a leader who makes arbitrary design decisions and cuts through committee banality and risk aversion. Someone a tiny bit reckless, ready to make bold decisions that dont have statistics to back them up. A person actually forging a unique strategy path through the untamed cloud wilderness. The current level of cohesiveness and interoperability IS NOT GOOD for a company trying to compete in the 2016 cloud space. Microsoft Teams is Microsoft merging Exchange/Sharepoint/Skype into one interface. Apple should be scared by how independent they have left their software silos. There has been no movement whatsoever. 2) to start spending its cash reserves on acquiring fully fleshed out software companies. Microsoft needed a mobile Mail app? They acquire the team and software and rename it Outlook. Apple needs to seriously evaluate every piece of Office/Productivity software that Google and Microsoft (and Adobe and Facebook) make, and acquire a competitor. And not roll the team into their existing product, but SCRAP their existing product and migrate the data over cleanly. They should look at the best apps in the apps store, that dont have Microsoft and Google competitors, and buy those too, thus making their Office and Productivity suite unique. Buying Adobe might be a good start. Adobe's Marketing Cloud would position Apple in a new market against Salesforce and Microsoft. Buying Hubspot could do similar. Apple could buy THOUSANDS of the companies represented in its app store, and have first party titles like Nintendo. First party development studios are a great way to attract people to your platform, while letting your other services become cross platform. They should be throwing cash at the wall of potential, nurturing unprofitable but useful/addictive products, and hoping they stumble bassackwards into the next Minecraft or Dropbox before it costs billions. Yet the Valve model of make just a platform, no games, seems to be winning out. 3) recognizing that cross platform software is a gateway drug. A lot of people got into Apple stuff because iPods worked with Windows computers. Apple is where it is because iTunes released for windows and was easier and safer than Napster/Kazaa. They need to recognize that they wont convert everyone from Android and offer Android and Windows versions of their cloud software. If they sow and nurture seeds, iOS wont feel foreign in the event a person decides to finally leave Google or Microsoft. Obviously its important that it work Better on iOS/macOS, but people need to get a taste before they convert to a new ecosystem. Gmail works good on every platform, but it works BETTER with Google Assistant. Apple has 18% mobile marketshare, if they want iMessage to become WhatsApp or Messenger, they need to release it elsewhere, otherwise it will always be second best. and a bonus fourth thinking a bit outside the box. 4) recognize Yahoo's place in the cloud world is collapsing and offer refugees an alternative. Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Football. Maybe buy and save Flickr, and turn Flickr into an iCloud Photos Social network for professional photographers. If only they had a good word they could use to name their nonexistant social cloud product instead of the current word salad they are serving up (hint it's iPhoto.) Apple is very poorly positioned against Instagram, Google Photos, and Adobe Cloud. They should put the effort into Photos that they have into Music and Streaming. Pinterest could be another option. Buy OpenFolio and Robinhood, merge them, and create something better than Yahoo Finance ever was. A finance driven social network could be Apple's way of finally becoming social, without being a "meetoo" like Google+ or a flop like Ping. The state of Fantasy Sports is atrocious, ESPN, NFL, and Yahoo all spend time and effort making their apps worse. CBS is a pay platform minimizing its visibility so most people dont know how good it can be. Can you imagine the cash Apple could print if it was loosely affiliated with sports betting? Apple obviously wants to get into content distribution, and after saying they dont want to acquire ATT, maybe they could look at Medium or The Atavist. 4b) There is a HUGE gap in the world in the Banking/Payment industry. Venmo and Facebook are making payment social. SplitWise could be a great foot in that door. Mint Bills (Check) and the defunct manilla were great cloud bill backups and calendars. Mint and Personal Capital are meta-bank managers that let you see across all your accounts. OpenFolio lets me see all my investments with different companies. Intuit (TurboTax and Mint) have a market cap of 4 billion, buy them. tldr: Flickr+OpenFolio+Medium+Adobe, and suddenly Apple could be giving Facebook and Google some fair competition, albeit with a lot less AI. Probably let Adobe run the "cloud strategy" part of the company tho.

cryptozeus 10y ago

" Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma)" What apple is going through right now !!!

codazoda 10y ago
Innovating or holding on? They don't seem to be holding on in the case of "Dongle Gate". They switched to the new stuff early and are letting everyone else catch up. In a couple years USB-C will be on almost everything and we won't need dongles anymore. Seems really similar to how the early macs had only usb.

jack9 10y ago

> PC as hub for all your digital assets Whatever this means. TB of data with the PC at the center is dumb.

usaphp 10y ago
Depends on a user I guess, I can't fill my 500gb drive even by half
- lurkinggrue 10y ago
  And I have 8.2 TB of data on my desktop.
Jtsummers 10y ago
But it's historically accurate. You kept your photos, videos, music on your PC and moved them to and from your devices (music/video player, phone, e-reader). 2010 (date written) was only a few years after Dropbox became popular, and before it and similar products were more heavily integrated into apps.
madenine 10y ago
I think some formatting got lost. The context: – we invented Digital Hub concept – PC as hub for all your digital assets – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, ... Train of thought seems to be, "Appled invented the digital hub, with the PC at the center for all your contacts, calendars...etc - That's moving to the cloud" Hence why its under the topic "2011: Year of the Cloud"

revelation 10y ago

I wonder what his opinion would be on Tablet sales spectacularly crashing. Surely it's not just bad execution.

j2bax 10y ago
I wonder how much phablets have caused this. When I got my iPhone 6 Plus, I very quickly saw no need for my iPad Mini anymore. Fast forward a few years and I decided to pick up an iPad Air 2 (along with a keyboard) because I find it to be a superior around the office and on the airplane note taking device than my 15" MacBook Pro.

macca321 10y ago

No mention of facebook.

akhatri_aus 10y ago
Facebook wasnt making money then yet & people were still skeptical.

drieddust 10y ago

Seems like he ran out of ideas and was ready for a settle life milking the cash cow.

barrkel 10y ago
How on earth did you get that out of the email? It is aggressively oriented towards turning Apple into a cloud-first company. That's the key consequence of reorienting your product line into connected clients. The next logical strategic move based on this email is to move pro apps to the cloud, connected to Apple client hardware in ways only Apple can unify. Key is "Post-PC". Where does that leave content creation, a key Apple demographic and one that is ill-served by client devices? It has to move to the cloud. I'm not an Apple fan - I don't like how they lock down their systems - but I can see how this strategy makes more sense and skates where the puck is going to be, not where it is now. The only questions are timing and execution. Apple has been lacking on the latter (for cloud), and always on the leading edge of the former.
- drieddust 10y ago
  Did you read my comment? These were good business ideas but none of them can be called revolutionary. Definitely does not match with Steve Jobs' larger than life image.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    Do you think the iPod was revolutionary? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the Macbook Air? Since when has Apple ever been revolutionary post Macintosh 128K (and even that's arguable)? They've been on the leading edge of trends, or at least were when Jobs was around. He moved computing devices away from geekery and towards fashion. He identified how intimate and personal phones were, and turned them into status symbols, with fetishized design. He saw where trends were intersecting, ran ahead and planted really solid benchmark objects at just the right time. The clear trend that Jobs was onto next was cloud-everything, which is still happening, just slowly. And Apple is executing poorly there, even as they wind down the creative capabilities of their hardware.

denzil_correa 10y ago

Personally, I think this was an insightful comment > – Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet Basically, he accepts that Apple lags behind in technology but Apple can "make things work". Technology alone is not enough - you need a healthy marriage of technology and humanities.

digi_owl 10y ago
Nothing new with Apple, the last time they were a early adopter was with the original Mac. Since then they have been latecomer to existing markets, but made a big splash about their entry via their inside track with MSM (a track that exist as a legacy of that Mac).
- mercer 10y ago
  I'd say that's selling Apple short. I have no particular love for them, especially at this moment, but they make a big splash because they (still?) manage to do things right in all the ways that I (and apparently others) care about.
equalarrow 10y ago
But now it looks like Microsoft is figuring it out. Azure is doing great, the Surface Pro got more love than the MBPro, and Microsoft is actually courting developers with VS. Google? They prob have the best AI, but I'm sorta skeptical that the Pixel is gonna work for them. They've never been able to brand and command like Apple has in this regard. For cloud though, they destroy Apple still.

heisenbit 10y ago

It strikes me that this is a very feature oriented list. These are the main product themes and these are the features to be driven forward. What I really would like to see the equivalent process for coming up with the themes and the discussion around customers and where they were going. Maybe such a thing exists in Apple and that would be great for them. Maybe too much relied on Steve intuiting and translating it to executable battle plans. The proof will be in the pudding (code name for iPhone 10).

achairapart 10y ago

> – 2011 Strategy: ship iPad 2 with amazing hardware and software before our competitors even catch up with our current model Typical Apple process here: Ship a base model (MVP?) to test the market, then ship the full featured one on next iteration. Also, this is why you should always wait at least for revision 2 before buy every new Apple product. The new Macbook touchbar thing could fall under this, too.

dictum 10y ago
The iPad 3 was an extreme version of that, having been superseded by the iPad 4 in only 7 months. Never used an iPad 3, but I have a feeling the silicon wasn't quite ready for a display resolution of 2048x1536.
- jonny_eh 10y ago
  I thought the iPad 3 (aka "The New iPad") was great. I used it for a few years before upgrading to the iPad Air 2. I thought the short 7 month cycle was to change the annual launch period of new iPads, and to get it on lightning.
- wincy 10y ago
  I owned the iPad 3 for a few months, luckily I sold it off before the new one came out. It was pretty janky, games had a lot of problems, and I'm sure if I had it today it would be in a drawer somewhere. The iPad 4 on the other hand is still running like a champ with iOS 10 and we still use it today.

oliv__ 10y ago

I wonder what -[CONFIDENTIAL] stands for.

hajile 10y ago
It's on a need to know basis and you don't need to know. Apple considers it a relevant secret today, so it's redacted.
wodenokoto 10y ago
I'm guessing Apple Watch.
nodesocket 10y ago
Perhaps a product still in development today.

meesterdude 10y ago

> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem I know they've done this, and i know they've done this on purpose; but to read it bare like that is a bit too much for me, especially as I think more and more about the benefits of leaving their ecosystem, and weighing against the downsides.

eridius 10y ago
Everybody tries to do this, but few companies have such a comprehensive ecosystem as Apple. Do note that what you've quoted is not in any way malicious. It's just saying "make all of our products work really great together, so that way someone who uses one of them is much more likely to buy into the rest of the ecosystem". This is a bit different than saying "make it difficult for customers to leave our ecosystem", which would be the malicious approach.
- segf4ult 10y ago
  While Apple may not intentionally keep you from leaving their platform, a side effect of their tight integration is that it's harder to leave. Take the Apple Watch for example. Without an iPhone, the Apple Watch goes from a smartwatch to only being able to tell the time. Sure, you could own an Android phone and an Apple Watch, but you wouldn't get any of the benefits of the Apple Watch, which further ties customers to the iPhone.
  - eridius 10y ago
    True, but the Apple Watch is in most ways just an iPhone accessory, and you could make this same argument about any iPhone accessory (though other accessories typically aren't as expensive as the Apple Watch is).
    - kevb 10y ago
      But Apple entered the smart watch market by making an iPhone accessory. Whereas when they entered the smart phone market they made a phone for everyone, not just Mac users. On the other hand IIRC the original iPod required a Mac and they opened that up later.

brianzelip 10y ago

"further lock customers in" is so bloodcurdlingly disgusting.

nodesocket 10y ago
Ummmmm this is business 101. Does "product-stickiness" make you feel less disgusted?

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

The post-PC era sure was looking like a big deal in 2009-2010 but now its clear that mobile has over-saturated the market and old fashioned laptops and desktops weren't actually being replaced, people just stopped buying replacements as frequently. Are we post-PC? If so, I'm not seeing it. In fact, Q2 2016 PC sales are slightly up and ipad sales down in a bizarre turnaround. The year-over-year decline is still there, but mostly because a 5-6 year old desktop or laptop is perfectly usable still, while a 2-3 year old phone or tablet is ready for the garbage heap.

cloudjacker 10y ago

its nice to see that they weren't completely delusional about being behind android very refreshing to see - at the top - their distortion field is just marketing unfortunately for that list, they never caught up to android in terms of notifications, something Steve Jobs explicitly called out in 2010, wow.

putzdown 10y ago

What, pray, is ET <et@group.apple.com>?

brandon272 10y ago
Executive Team
jcsvyu789jh 10y ago
ExecutiveTeam?

happytrails 10y ago

The cult of Steve Jobs is getting a resurgence on Hacker News?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cooper12 10y ago
It's always been popular. Every time Apple makes an announcement there's a flood of "Steve Jobs never would have let this happen".
Steko 10y ago
Play the HN Steve Jobs drinking game: Take a drink if comment claims Tim Cook is no Jobs/visionary. Take a drink if comment mentions going nuclear on Google. Take a drink if comment mentions his cancer would have been fine if he didn't follow Eastern/New Age quackery. Take a drink if comment mentions he wasn't a great philanthropist, make it a double if they go straight to accusing him of being a "sociopath".

1_2__3 10y ago

Surprised nobody mentioned the "average age" comment.

edditoria 10y ago

Talking about the "Digital Hub concept", I heard that from a Microsoft guy in 2005(?) introducing the concept of Microsoft Home Server. We were considering anything to cooperate (actually, it is only in marketing way). However, I was afraid that web 2.0 was the true future. Home user didn't need a home server product. I love Mac, no doubt. But I do think Microsoft create a lot of great concepts and do test it on market. Apple is not the first eveb on consumer market (remember the WinCE products and XP Tablet Edition?) In my opinion, Microsoft is pioneer of electronic products. Although they often made their final products "unusable", I would hear about what they "are going to do". It is worth to project the future. p.s. sorry about bad English

NicoJuicy 10y ago

– tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem This is why i never used Apple. At least i can use Android with pretty much everything. And don't get me started about stuff like iTunes for Windows... Also: Apple TV 2- David Moody, Jeff Robbin – Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices I think Chromecast pretty much nailed it. On the rest, i'm pretty much impressed how simple he outlined it all.