"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."
Yeah - I didn't want to invoke the Ghost of Steve but ... why stop with your storefront? Why not start slapping Candy Crush Saga stickers on the front of iPhones?
But unlike other products, this advertising will provide zero value to Apple customers. We already pay full price for our gear. We pay for Apple One. Unlike most other companies where advertising offsets the sticker price of things, advertising at Apple does not benefit us in any way.
For me, being free of advertising is a key benefit of participating in the Apple ecosystem, and one that I assign a significant financial value to. I absolutely hate it.
Apple is still better than the competition in many ways but cracks started appearing. This quote from Steve Jobs is spot on at this time when Apple has become so big that they can't focus on creating a good product anymore because the money is too good. I don't wish to see this but I'm wondering if things were to go the bad direction for Apple, how long would the inertia of good apple of Steve Jobs vision would last. Probably something like a decade if not more...
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."
-Steve Jobs