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> Does anyone know why this happens? Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what A

• thrashh 5y ago
  I think you’re more explaining what happens than why it happens. Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be. When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to. There’s no replacement for passion.
  • acje 5y ago
    Once an organization has grown to multiple layers of management the people on top will eventually become those who are good at climbing the ladder. How we choose our leaders is IMHO one of the most important problems we yet don’t really understand. It’s partly a function of how we structure our organizations.
    • zpeti 5y ago
      Just trying to play devils advocate, im not sure it’s possible to do it differently. You simply can’t replicate true founder attitudes and mentality and choices with a management with stock options and fiduciary responsibility. Steve Jobs seemed to be very concerned about this and spent a lot of time trying to create an innovative organisation independent of him. What have we got since him? A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone. It’s really depressing but I’m not sure as humanity we can do better really. The entrepreneur is just someone who starts with nothing and creates something. You can only go so far in recreating that in a large organisation.
      • Cyberdog 5y ago
        > A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone. And Swift, and Apple Silicon, and FaceID, and HomePod (which hasn't been a massive success but is at least an attempt at something new), and a return to the Cheese Grater Pro, and massive improvements to Maps, and the perpetual autonomous driving rumors. What am I forgetting? Oh, Apple actually halved App Store rates for smaller developers, inducing the stores on other platforms to do similar. Maybe some of these were on some sort of roadmap that Jobs left behind, but not all of them could have been. The "innovation at Apple died along with Jobs" argument is looking more and more ridiculous as more time passes and Apple continues to innovate.
        • bigyikes 5y ago
          And you can’t talk about the Apple Watch without talking about the other half of its wearables: Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative. And who was talking about wearables before Apple entered the game? Only nerds, pretty much. There is something to be said about Apple repeatedly setting trends in our society. Many will chalk it up to “Apple worship” or whatever, but I think the real answer is that Apple is one of the only tech companies who can innovate in the cultural space.
          • wutbrodo 5y ago
            > Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative. Are airpods innovative? I thought wireless Bluetooth headphones have been around for ages, including ones with better (subjective) aesthetics and sound quality than airpods. This is a sincere question. I'm not familiar enough with airpods to know if they have some novel feature, or pulled off a magic combination of marketing+quality+features that predecessors had not, like the iPhone did.
            • bigyikes 5y ago
              Maybe my Apple fanboyism is showing but I think the Airpods had exactly that magic combination you described. The case with a battery, seamless pairing, great battery life, reasonable EQ, and iconic style made them a smash hit.
  • weego 5y ago
    Why it happens is because you cannot find a genuinely creative person with the drive and motivation needed to keep pushing a juggernaut like Blizard forward who would be willing to drop their own creative vision and adopt the one of the original founders. Who knows what they'll do? When its time to eat plates of shit will they do it? It's far too much risk to put an unknown in that position. Your only option is to send in the corporate fleet because they're predictable. Even if they've failed before they will never surprise or throw out any curve balls to investors and shareholders and that's valued far above the possibility of a new creative spark achieving something.
  • drumhead 5y ago
    Once you've lost the ability to innovate or be original, all you can do is cut costs or raise prices.
  • tokipin 5y ago
    As the company grows the types of people that are attracted and unattracted by the company change, as do those that are accepted and rejected by it. For example, risk averse people are attracted to mature companies, and they don't like risk takers. One of the consequences is that companies become more specialized and lose deep expertise. To put it bluntly, its because they no longer have people with deep expertise, and even when they do they are ignored by management who tend to be less interested and knowledgeable about the subject matter. I don't know of any company that has tried to prevent this. It's a general force that permeates everything, including recruiters, HR, their job postings, etc. So even companies that think they're preventing it probably still walk right into it regardless. Of course, specialization is not necessarily good or bad. In a very competitive environment the company may not have a choice.
• unishark 5y ago
  This is basically the innovator's dilemma. A large market position (not really anything related to monopoly power per se) leads companies to be very risk-averse since they can always make better gains in the short-term by incremental improvements rather than radical changes. Right up until someone disrupts the market and crushes them.
• robinsoh 5y ago
  > They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. I don't follow, even in the air quotes monopoly context. Could you elaborate? I thought anyone can make a game, even that specific type of game and reach a paying audience quickly if it is good. Aren't the game engines for CoD and WoW actually owned by different companies? Eg: Unreal Engine is owned by Epic/Tencent.
  • karatinversion 5y ago
    I guess they have a legal monopoly on their intellectual property? But I do see a lot of sloppy uses of the word monopoly that just seem to be autopilot.
    • regularfry 5y ago
      There was no need for inverted commas in the GGP post. Intellectual property is precisely a government-granted monopoly under specific rules. Nobody else can make a Call of Duty game: they have a monopoly on the market for Call of Duty games.
      • Armisael16 5y ago
        Yeah, but having a monopoly over their own IP isn’t in any way noteworthy. I took the scare quotes to mean that they had pseudo-monopoly in the broader space (WoW -> MMORPG, CoD -> console FPS). I’m not sure I agree with them, but stating that they have a monopoly over their own IPs is so obvious and uninteresting that I find it hard to believe that’s what they were going for.
        • regularfry 5y ago
          It's interesting in the sense that as a consumer of CoD games, you're not getting any innovation from Activision. You're just getting a new bottle every couple of years. Compare that to Apple, where arguably you're not just getting a new bottle: if you're in the ecosystem, you're getting an M1, air pods, a watch, lidar on your phone, the opportunity to spend 3 figures on a "pencil", whatever. Very different approaches.
• meowface 5y ago
  >Steve Jobs said it best. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Isn't this also kind of what Apple has become in the post-Steve Jobs era?
  • danieldk 5y ago
    Apple innovated a lot post-Steve Jobs. The development line of the A CPUs that led to the M1 is definitely not ‘a new bottle every 1-2 years’. The M1 out-innovated Intel, Qualcomm and to a lesser extend AMD. Apple also branched out to other categories with the Apple Watch and AirPods. Apple is most definitely still innovating.
    • kator 5y ago
      While the nerd in me wants to agree with you, aren't all of these just great examples of deeper vertical integration? When I started in computing most major players had their own CPU's, and over time everything converged on mostly Intel with AMD/ARM in there to mix it up. Now we see companies swinging back to the old days where each will have their own CPU's. To me its a return to vertical integration and exposes all of us to a new era of lock-in.
      • Cyberdog 5y ago
        > While the nerd in me wants to agree with you, aren't all of these just great examples of deeper vertical integration? Okay. And? You still need innovation to make something like the M1.
    • meowface 5y ago
      True. That's why I said "kind of". However, I'd argue the CPU change is considered a black box vertical improvement by the vast majority of end users. It's a big innovation, but it's still just an improvement to an existing product. And AirPods aren't really groundbreaking. Apple Watch counts, but is also just a nicer version of something available to people for almost a decade, whereas the iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, and early Macintoshes really offered something very different from anything else you could reasonably get at the time. A modern equivalent would be, say, "just works" AR glasses, or something no one even knew they might want (faster horses vs. cars, etc.). It's a lot to ask for, but that is the reputation they're trying to maintain, and they are worth over $2 trillion.
• xtat 5y ago
  Great answer, and sounds a lot like 2021 FAANG