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I don't want to belittle Apple's success, but managing the turnaround at Apple didn't require the kind of long-term planning and commitment that investments in
by rob74 2y ago
I don't want to belittle Apple's success, but managing the turnaround at Apple didn't require the kind of long-term planning and commitment that investments in semiconductor manufacturing require.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI wouldn't be so sure about that. Apple is a huge hardware machine, and has been, since Day One. They not only have to deal with manufacturing hardware, but also promotion and distribution, which is not for the faint of heart. Most of Intel's work is B2B, while Apple is B2C. Steve Jobs was particularly good at playing The Long Game; something American CEOs generally suck at.
- brookst 2y agoWhile it’s true that hardware was a central part of Apple’s turnaround, it was the comparatively simple and quick hardware of designing boards with off the shelf parts (at the time). That’s actually closer to software than the “hire the bulldozers to break ground for the building that is designed from blueprints to house the highly custom machines designed to make the chips using the fab processes that we’re betting the company on” kind of hardware. At its core, Intel (like TSMC) is more of a manufacturing company than a tech company.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI was thinking more about the long-term planning that Jobs was so known for. He would develop product lines that would take years to break even. Not all were able to make the cut. I worked for a Japanese corporation, and most of their initiatives had decade-long timelines. US companies tend to have 3-month-long timelines (I have no idea why /s).
- lotsofpulp 2y ago> US companies tend to have 3-month-long timelines (I have no idea why /s). I don’t understand this platitude because the largest and most profitable businesses in the world, US tech and pharma companies, have very long timelines. Amazon took 20+ years to literally build infrastructure, the early investors of Facebook were not looking for a 3 month payday, they invested billions for the 10+ year payday. See the HN threads for when Zuckerberg paid for Instagram and WhatsApp, with so many wondering how he would recoup the enormous investment. Apple probably plowed billions into watches AirPods and M processors for years before it saw a return, going so far as to lend money to TSMC for many years with no guarantee of TSMC being able to make the product they wanted. Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo bet, Uber, Nvidia, so many publicly listed businesses have a years long timelines Same for US pharma, it takes decades to get a product to market, with a high chance it never does.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoEvery single example that you gave, had visionaries behind the long-term pushes. Steve Jobs had a lot of failures. It's just that his successes were so successful, that people forget about the duds. These visionaries don't just have plans, they have fiendish plots, that would make a Grand Vizier hang his head in shame. But they move on, and that's when the "quarter-miners" inevitably move in.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoThe formula seems to be “businesses led by people with long term goals + filled with employees capable of executing + luck”. I don’t think “US” is a useful qualifier, publicly listed businesses all over the world have the same short-termism without the right ingredients.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoThe Japanese basically have "long-terminism" baked into their corporate bylaws. The company I worked for, is a pretty "old-fashioned" one, so may no longer be representative of the standard, but it didn't matter who was in charge. All planning was done in 10/5/3/1 year process; with the goals getting "sharper," as you approached zero. It was not particularly conducive to software development, but worked fairly well, for most of the stuff they made.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoApple today is known as a totally unreliable partner when it comes to developing and deploying tech. The OLED factories come to mind.