> It is unclear whether the spread-sheeting-loving, consensus-oriented, even-keeled Cook can successfully reshape the cult-like culture that Jobs built. Though Cook has deftly managed the iPhone and iPad product lines, which continue to deliver enormous profits, Apple has yet to launch a major new product under Cook; talk of watches and televisions remains just that.
It bothers me everybody ignores the already announced Mac Pro. It's more niche than an iPhone or iPad but an important one for many Mac users, and the specs and design really push innovation forward on a market that is almost dead (desktops).
Not only that, but the press seems to have a very myopic view on "innovation." It doesn't happen overnight. It was 6 years between the iPod and the iPhone, another 3 before the iPad, and they're still arguably refining both. If Apple still hasn't released something interesting in another 3 years, maybe (maybe) then it'll be worth agonising over.
And I couldn't agree more about the Mac Pro by the way.
Maybe not, but that's how Steve Jobs made it seem. When he was creating the iPod, nobody was looking (except hard core apple geeks) and the bar was low. After the iPod became a huge hit, it still seemed like every year Jobs was introducing some breakthough feature. He was very good at manipulating public perception. Cook isn't as good at it, he started with the bar ridiculously high and everybody is looking now.
I completely agree with everything you and the parent said about innovation and the Mac Pro. But this is a perception issue, through and through, and something Cook is going to have to deal with if he's going to be successful as Jobs's successor.
No, it really wasn't. Did he have some idea the 4S was the direction it would take? Sure. But for God's sake, that phone was released a week and a half after he died. He hadn't been at work very much for a year before that.
The 5's screen form factor hasn't been taken advantage of at all, the new enclosure, while nice, you literally cannot call innovative, LTE isn't innovative, it would've been 4 years ago but last year it was old news. And the lightning connector isn't innovative in a world where it's getting clocked hard by USB 3.0, which was a done-deal standard by the time Lightning was announced.
The 4S, while having a better camera, it wasn't a huge jump, and Siri was software they removed(which had more features) from the 4's app store.
The 4 was the last truly innovative iPhone- no one was talking screen density, and they nailed it. The new camera was a gigantic step up, the front facing camera was as well.
Also, you missed with the iPhone->3G that the App Store came into existence.
As to the iPad, the iPad 2 was commonly referred to the moment it came out as "The iPad that Apple meant to release." because of all of the small, but numerous, improvements. Adding Retina to the 3 is arguably a similar jump, though admittedly I don't have a lot of room to really know, as I don't own one.
The Mac Pro is a significant redesign, but not a new product line.
Apple has often (in recent years) been in a position where significant portions of their revenue are from product categories which did not exist 2 years ago. There is a fear that they will not continue to invent/expand into new categories.
Any new product category didn't exist 1 day ago when it's launched, but we don't expect new product categories every day. In the 15 yars since Jobs re-joined apple to the time he died he's credited with introducing three new product categories: iPods, iPhones and iPads. Arguably iPads are actually just a scaled up iPod Touch and nobody ever lists the touch as a new category. From a technology point of view it was a modest revision of an existing product.
So personally I'd list the new product categories as only two - the iPod and iOS. It's just that iOS' revolutionary impact hasn't completely played out yet. I expect any new 'product categories' to be further extensions of the iOS family into new markets. e.g. Apple TV is an existing product running iOS, but if it grows an app store and games ecosystem, will that make it an entry into a new category?
You're right that the Mac Pro is an existing product line, but it's so radically different from it's predecessors that I do think it has a chance of being used in ways and contexts the old Pro never was. For starters it's tiny. It's agressive use of Thunderbolt is interesting, but also the emphasis on GPU utilisation via CUDA and OpenCL - one of it's GPUs isn't even wired up to be used to drive displays - is a bold move.
I don't know. MP3 players, smartphones and tablets already existed for a while by the time Apple announced it's products. But the products were so successful that they are now credited as having (re)invented the market. I don't see why this can't happen, for instance, with workstations, this market has been stagnant for a while.
Looking at the MacBook Air, and retina MBP, and their success, Apple seems to have done a fair job of reinventing the laptop market. Quite possibly, the desktop will follow.
Apple didn't necessarily invent new categories, they offered revolutionary products in existing categories. Even back from the start. Mac (obseletes CLI) iMac, iPod, iPhone
If only Apple would make the Terminal.app user interface not suck donkey balls. How about a way to resize the property window profile title scrolling list width so it doesn't clip every title after the first few characters and make them extremely difficult to identify and edit, and stop wasting so much of the width on a huge useless icon instead of the title? Is it so hard to make the whole dialog resizable? Didn't Apple invent a way to do that a few years back? Oh and maybe a fucking border around the window edge so overlapping windows don't all merge together? And a way to drag a window with only one tab (which collapses to zero tabs) into another window with only one tab to make one window with two tabs? And figure out why emacs gets confused about the screen width/wrapping and corrupts the display? Maybe fix a few critical usability bugs before wasting time on bullshit like transparency and background images?
...Well at least it's not as bad as the XView cmdtool.
Apple will continue to expand into new categories it thinks will do well. They're traditionally concerned with a product either being the market leader in terms of quality, rather than being the inventor of a category.
Plus this whole inventing new categories things is silly, you'd have to go back a long way for Apple to have created a category, they excel at being more refined than existing players.
I wouldn't really say it pushed innovation forward. It's a mac with heavy specs. The only thing innovative about it is the enclosure -- which, while novel, isn't terribly noteworthy.
I have to disagree. There's a couple of things that drive innovation, like the storage on PCI-Ex bus, and the fact they cram 12 Xeon cores and 2 high-end GPUs in a can and still manage to air cool it. The fact there's a good amount of high-end specs in a totally new form factor is what makes it interesting for me.
PCIe storage has been available for PCs for quite some time.
12 Xeon cores on air.. do you think servers liquid cool these chips? Of course they cool them with air, that's how they're designed to be cooled.
I am impressed they crammed it all into a package that's only 10inches tall - but this is completely at the expense of modularity and expandability. You can't easily throw a new hard drive or GPU in this new configuration.
You can make the argument that Apple's biggest triumphs haven't been hardware innovations but commercial and usability ones. People aren't necessarily concerned that Tim Cook can't make a better desktop, but that he can't concieve products that leapfrog entire markets and industries like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad did.
Some of the biggest innovations that Apple made, IMHO, were pricing related.
The push to mandate unlimited data with every iPhone (and make that data plan $20 with 200 SMS) was critical to the iPhone's success - for me, coming from the Palm platform, it was simply amazing, while one the road, to go to the App Store, download an app, and in seconds be using it. Wouldn't be possible for most if they had to have a conversation with AT&T for 30m to add a data plan prior to doing the above.
Also, the innovation with the iPad to allow you to sign up for the 3G anytime pre-paid was incredible.
The reason people ignore the Mac Pro is because it doesn't move the needle revenue/profit wise. At this point, all of Mac barely moves the needle. The Mac Pro is a tiny niche product that is cool and very much needed, just for a very small subset of people.
Delegation is not about doing the stuff you don't want to do but reluctantly handing off stuff you want to do to others because that is a more effective use of your time.
Jobs would have run Apple singlehandedly if he could, that's why he left behind such a huge vacuum to fill. Product roadmaps being what they are I think we'll see the real 'new, post Jobs Apple' in another year or so for the first time.
It's not about shipping crap occasionally, that could just as easily be attributed to trying things and failing and every big company has a long list of such failures. It's no different than running an incubator only then in-house and with a single unified brand and possibly synergistic effects. It's all about daring, trying to push the envelope and taking risks.
Delegation is not about doing the stuff you don't want to do but reluctantly handing off stuff you want to do to others because that is a more effective use of your time
Or because having someone else do that will be more valuable for the product or the organization as a whole. I recently delegated something that I wanted to do that I could probably do fairly quickly, but realized that it was good to share that particular task with a team member so he could improve his skills that way.
Icahn is an asshole, I wouldn't trust a word he says unless the other party confirmed it. Keep the Dell case in mind when you look at anything Icahn says or does. He's got money but 0 scruples.
Jobs' bi-monthly iPhone software meeting, in which he would go through
every planned features [sic] of the company's flagship product, is
gone.
Judging by the current iOS development version, this is a regrettable change that will come to haunt them. Things like the new color schemes would probably not have gone through if there was any executive interest in the look of the new software.
Tim Cook's greatest strength is his realization of, and comfort with, the fact that he is not Steve Jobs. Why doesn't he have bi-monthly feature reviews? Because he wouldn't have as much to contribute as Jobs. He doesn't have the product intuition and he knows it.
What was unique about Steve Jobs was that he could perform so many different roles within the company. He could convince anyone he needed to join the company, he could ascertain just what kinds of products were likely to be successful, and he could get on stage and sell the living daylights out of the products his company had built. These roles are necessarily going to be performed worse when separated into different executives, just like a basketball player who can play great offense and defense is worth a lot more to a team than ten great offensive players and ten great defensive players.
As Bill Gates said, the (old) Apple model only works if you have a Steve Jobs. The new Apple can't function like the old Apple any more than a car can function without a steering wheel. The best thing Cook can do is transition the company to a more traditional management structure. Will the company be worse off than before? Of course, but it's the best they can do under the circumstances.
Bill Gates's comment makes sense to me. Apple already achieved the improbable. It seems like a natural time to refocus. They could take steps to make the mobile platforms easier to develop for. They've built an empire, and holding it for the long term requires building relationships and long-term thinking.
The rapid rise of Android strikes me as a significant long-term threat. Apple created a new product category and then allowed a competitor to sweep up the majority of the market, at least in terms of volume. Android is still probably an inferior product, but there are a lot of companies behind it. Android also makes life somewhat easier for developers. I think Apple ought to take this very seriously.
The threat from Android to iPhone probably looks bigger than it actually is. Per study that just came out [1], iPhone users are much more loyal than Android users: 24% of Android users plan to switch vs. 9% of iPhone users. If this persists, Android users will over time "leak over" to iPhone.
I, personally, am not that pleased with my Android phone. The present trend might be in Apple's favor, but, presumably, Apple will have to keep executing well to maintain that momentum.
> Will the company be worse off than before? Of course, but it's the best they can do under the circumstances.
Exactly--but that doesn't mean "Apple is doomed" either, which is the angle a lot of people seem to take.
Apple with Steve Jobs (2nd time around) was the most innovative, profitable, and successful company in the entire world. Apple without Steve Jobs is likely to be one of the most innovative, profitable, and successful companies. (Still pretty darn good.)
Ehh, I think the whole iOS7 UI thing is overblown.
Anecdotally we've been installing it on non-dev (tester) devices internally to help thrash our app pre-iOS7. The results have been very positive - people love the new design in general.
Even those of us on the dev team who've had it for a while have mostly gotten over the annoying bits that bothered us at first.
I really like the automatic updates, yesterday I went to look at a picture and out of no where the "photos" app was radically different, but in a good way.
I think you answered your own question. Dev builds change to fix oversights in design and logic. Not that much has changed with the over all design theme of iOS 7. Over all most of the design implemented is here to say.
The comment I was replying to (IIRC; seeing as how it's now-deleted) explicitly claimed they weren't just disagreeing with the stylistic choices in iOS, but were taking issue with specific broken sorts of things (yellow text on white backgrounds) and then asserted that Apple seemingly didn't even recognize these things as broken.
My question was how could that poster assert such a thing when Apple was indeed fixing exactly those sorts of things.
So, yes, I answered it myself, because it was rhetorical. But, no, it had nothing to do with whatever you seem to think it had to do with.
Who's to say there isn't "interest"? Some people like the new look, maybe Cook does too.
Don't confuse process with results. Jobs' Apple produced great products because Jobs had great taste that aligned well with the market (and, to be honest, because he was the vortex of a feedback loop of praise), not because he had a "bi-monthly iPhone software meeting".
I'm not even talking about subjective things like tastes in icon styles. I'm talking about absolutely quantifiable missteps, such as bright-yellow symbols on a white paper background.
"If Steve were still around..." has been said so many times that it's a cliche. Steve shipped lots of crap [quantifiable crap, even]; I'm sure Apple will continue to ship lots of crap in the future. Doesn't mean they're doomed or even that quality has gone down.
Yeah; I very much admire Steve's drive and vision, but he was still responsible for brushed metal, corinthian leather, and all the rest. Not to mention (arguable) design missteps like that awful aspect ratio iPod Nano. So let's keep things in perspective here...
I didn't mean to sound like that. From where I'm standing (and it's OK if this opinion isn't common), iOS and to a lesser degree OS X show outward signs of the internal struggles at Apple. There are some things that should have been caught, or that at least would have been more likely to be vetoed. It's a very feature/product-driven company, high-level oversight is expected but seems to be missing in places.
To use another example, with the new iCloud apps (especially iOS backports like Notes and its ilk) on OS X, because there is no save button there is no way to tell if the document has actually been committed to storage or not. If you close the app, the document might be on the cloud somewhere, but it's just as likely to be trapped on a Mac's harddrive that has just been put to sleep. Not a good experience.
Erm, that's not what I meant and I suspect you know that. I didn't assert it was "a magical [something]" or anything, just bad UI. Open Notes, edit a document, close it, go away, expect it to be synced on your iPad: fail. And no normal user will do CMD-S, that was the whole point of them abolishing explicit document saving.
Notes are synced without you needing to do anything. If you close the application before a sync is polled (within 5sec after you stop editing as far as I can tell) why would you expect it to sync? That's like sending an email and closing the browser while it's posting the data and then being mad it didn't send.
"Sending an email" is something the user initiates. "Syncing to iCloud" is something the OS initiates.
Also, I would hope that "sending an email and closing the browser window", one day, will work like "sending an email and quitting the mail app" works today.
Power Nap is meant to do this - keep stuff syncing, backing up, etc regardless of lid state. Now, whether it's smart enough to flush any synchronizations that are still in progress when the lid is closed or you have to wait a few minutes until it half-wakes-up and does its thing, I'm not sure. Also, I believe by default it's off when a power supply isn't attached.
Pulling out one example of what may be a poor user experience and then generalizing that the sum of these subjective things is "sign of the internal struggles at Apple" is reaching a bit.
Apple is a hot topic these days, and many want to be a critic about the smallest things, followed by generalizing these thoughts into an "Apple is circling the drain" type of argument. Apple has never been perfect.
As I recall, Apple's fan would quite unapologetically acknowledge that Apple ran on fear of abuse by Jobs [1]. The story was that Jobs was a unique genius capable of running things that way and deserving to run things that way. The magical results were worth it. Just being near the "reality distortion field" was its own reward [2].
Regardless of how the rest of us might judge all this, Apple now has something of a problem. Decompressing from a previous abusive situation involves certain stages of recovery [3]. Even if, regardless of if, one began with the view that this was "abuse for the best all possible purposes" or how much one identified with the success of one's abuser [4]. In similar fashion to the problems faced by the liberalizing Stalinist regimes, Tim Cook may find that his liberalizing "tweaks" open flood gates that he will have trouble controlling [5].
I found this statement in the article to be the key of managing.
"He basically explained nicely that my job was to do the things that Mark (Zuckerberg) did not want to focus on as much."
I believe it is something Cook and other CEOs follow too. Find a person to do the things that you don't want to focus on as much.
If No.2's job is to do things No. 1 doesn't want to do, No. 1's job is to find No. 2's who wants to do the job No. 1 doesn't want to do and give that person autonomy.
I agree Cook not leading planned feature meeting but he should have someone who wants to lead that meeting and be responsible for driving that part of the business.
I like Tim's style and I think he needs some time to get adjusted to his role.
It's still not clear to me, after being an Apple user and fan since the beginning and after reading Steve Job's biography, how much innovation Steve really brought to Apple. What I mean is: was Steve really the one who gave the initial impulse for some of the most innovative products we have seen so far (i.e. iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.)? In this case, I think that Apple is doomed.
If, on the contrary, Steve was the quality checker, the one pushing everyone else to do better, I think that the current Apple's executive team can properly replace this role and do good at Apple.
Motivating a huge organization like Apple to produce brilliant consumer electronics products consistently is probably much, much harder than you think, else every one of Apple's competitors would have hired execs to do that for them.
No one else claims they had the 'vision' for the iPod/iPad/iPhone while at the same time everyone credits Steve so he must have been more than a quality checker.
Is that really a qualitative difference though? Clearly, MP3 players had been around before the iPod. What set the iPod apart was much better design. This is, in a sense, a matter of quality checking, but to an extreme extent.
Does the extremity of the quality checking turn into something qualitatively different? That seems to be a rather subjective judgement, hence why you had the back-and-forth.
I don't think that is what set it apart. It was probably having a software program (iTunes), that could work with your hardware and manage your library. Not sure when they introduced the shop.
Given that most of Apple's products were implementations of ideas from Engelbart's lab and Xerox PARC, and that those ideas still have a lot of running room, I'm not too worried for Apple.
I wish the article lived up to the headline. What cultural changes have occurred? The article doesn't say.
It does say that Cook's personal style is different from Jobs (duh), that he's made some changes to the exec team (we knew that), and that there's conflicting anecdotal evidence about how employees are reacting to these changes... whatever they are.
All in all, I don't see a revolution in any of this.
It bothers me everybody ignores the already announced Mac Pro. It's more niche than an iPhone or iPad but an important one for many Mac users, and the specs and design really push innovation forward on a market that is almost dead (desktops).