3 ms·

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.

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.