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I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM
by ortusdux 4y ago
I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
- oblio 4y agoCreatives also destroy companies. See NeXT or whatever the weird letter casing was.
- hosh 4y agoArguably, NeXT lives on in Apple.
- mortenjorck 4y agoIt's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
- behnamoh 4y agoApple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
- mvhooten 4y agoConsidering airpods alone are a massive company. I think Apple will be ok. https://jonahlupton.medium.com/what-is-airpods-was-a-company-a6c1cd75b8bf#:~:text=%24175%2B%20billion%20market%20cap%20would,largest%20company%20in%20the%20U.S https://jonahlupton.medium.com/what-is-airpods-was-a-company....
- hosh 4y agoThat is what I see too. The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard). AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.
- indymike 4y agoI’m not much of an Apple fan… but… Apple’s move to make the M series chips and the recent generation (13) of iPhones have been fantastic.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoJust because you don't see any Apple skunkworks VR/AR headsets getting left in a motel room [1] and they don't report how much they are investing in that new product line (rumored to be more in total than Meta's 10B/y) - you should not underestimate the potential for immersive spatial computing to do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the iPod. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/12/dont-leave-your-meta-quest-pro-prototype-in-your-hotel-room/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/12/dont-leave-your-meta-quest...
- pell 4y agoWhere do you see signs of their decline at the moment?
- samatman 4y ago"NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million" is a great quip.
- alwillis 4y agoAt the time, Apple employees talked about the acquisition while the NeXT guys talked about the merger.
- jjoonathan 4y agoDo the UI classes still start with "NS" for NextStep?
- mistrial9 4y agothis is true, to be fair .. anyone remember "Xaos Tools" (video effects), Audion or when Marc Cantor became so personally offensive that the business people paid him to leave? it is true.. end of innocence stories here
- alwillis 4y agoIronically when Apple acquired NeXT, it was essentially a reverse take over, since almost every significant executive and technical position of the merged company was from NeXT. It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today. Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
- hosh 4y agoI think BeOS was a serious contender as the next generation MacOS. But BeOS didn't have Steve Jobs. Buying NeXT meant bringing Jobs back at the helm of Apple. It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence. It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
- Temporary_31337 4y agoBtw. Newton wasn’t too bad for it’s time. It had handwriting recognition etc
- artificial 4y agoReminds me of the Simpsons when the Newton is used to make a note to beat up Martin and the hand writing recognition is slightly off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M
- easrng 4y agoreal (https://youtu.be/mhMQeJ5Qmp0?t=356 https://youtu.be/mhMQeJ5Qmp0?t=356)
- lelandfe 4y agoThe kind of creatives we're talking about, kind of by definition, do things differently (not to ape Apple's old slogan too much). That's AKA risk, and, yes, sometimes it will lead to ruin. But it's also the only way to move the area forward.
- revscat 4y agoTo echo the sibling comments, this is incorrect. NeXT lives on today in every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and every other Apple device. When Apple bought NeXT they used it as a foundation for OS X, which went on to power every device Apple makes or has made.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoOh the company/team that created the operating system for the iPhone, yeah I've heard of them.
- TheCondor 4y agoMS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this. I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.
- hcurtiss 4y agoOffice on the web actually does this really well now. The desktop app is a little more glitchy, but Google doesn't even have one of those. I really like tracked changes in Word on the web. Microsoft has come a real long way in the last three years.
- 8jy89hui 4y agoDoes this include products like Word Online? Because that product is awful. The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online. I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.
- behnamoh 4y agoI won't touch any web app because I'm perfectly fine using my Vimium shortcuts that I don't need them to interfere with a web app that could have been just a native app...
- rvba 4y agoCompletely different experience for me. The desktop app is solid (although latest patches made it unstable + the visual change is just not good), but the collaboration tools are horrible to use. You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).
- ROTMetro 4y agoIt's a great quote for what has happened to the USA in almost every single area, industry, government, education, religious thought, political thought.
- citizenpaul 4y agoI recently found out MARS yes the candy company has become the largest owner of Veterinarian offices in the USA. It really is palpable how everything is on a runaway train and we can all see it yet are powerless to stop it.
- somishere 4y agoAlso cat food. They invest in a reef conservation technique too, and named a reef in Indo - where they were trialing said technique - after one of their catfood brands. The logo says "more coral today, more fish tomorrow" and there's a picture of a cat. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johannaread/2021/05/05/the-sheba-hope-reef-brings-hope-to-coral-reefs-everywhere-you-can-help-too/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/johannaread/2021/05/05/the-sheb...
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoSomebody ought to tell their marketing department cats can't survive on fish.
- loonster 4y agoSo a spilled bag of M&Ms makes them money twice.
- d0gsg0w00f 4y agoThis is darker than the chocolate in the M&Ms.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThat’s a pretty low bar though.
- _8j50 4y agoThere is a lesson to be had there for sure. It all started when they bought Macromedia. Happens to many if the greats, look at Cisco,IBM, AT&T they all have that happen to them after which the only way decision makers know how to make great products is to buy other companies. There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.
- jorvi 4y agoFrom 2015-2019 I found this quote massively ironic as it seemed Apple had fallen prey to the same thing. They were trying to sell Gimpbooks with 2 ports and unreliable keyboards for a €1700 base price, and iPhones that were milquetoast iterations of past one's kept creeping up €75-150 per year. Their sales growth was cratering. People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.
- 6510 4y agoThe seiko story pops to mind: > ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently.... https://www.beyondthedial.com/post/seiko-history-daini-suwa-fact-and-fiction/ https://www.beyondthedial.com/post/seiko-history-daini-suwa-...
- wellbehaved 4y agoThis is mere hand-wringing; Steve Jobs never cared to consider the aspects of our political system that leads to this, on the contrary, he positively exploited them for his own gain, e.g. patents and his app store tyranny. Steve Jobs is among the worst people to talk about this kind of neo-feudalism.
- epolanski 4y agoAccording to your logic he's one of the best to speak about it.
- wellbehaved 4y agoThat'd be your troll logic not mine. According to my logic, he has no moral right to speak about it.
- indymike 4y agoLogic and moral right are incongruent concepts.
- wellbehaved 4y agoSays you? Present your proof.
- indymike 4y agoNo.
- brightball 4y agoWas that quote from a book?
- AareyBaba 4y agoFrom an interview about why Xerox failed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM