What a remarkable claim by Ellison. Apple is so far ahead of its competition in terms of developing a coherent, secure, flexible, profitable and expandable hardware/software platform that it will take the better part of a decade for competitors to catch up to Apple, even if Apple stands still.
So if Apple's future is 'dismal' then what about the future of 'wanna-be' Apple competitors, like Google and Microsoft? What is a word more dismal than dismal?
Seriously, why do these people think they can see the future so clearly. Somebody could come along that has the skills that Steve Job had. I can't believe he was that unique as a human.
You're right, and you're wrong: yes, there are likely plenty of potential Steve's walking this planet. But no, they will never get hired, because no company, including Apple, would have the guts to do such a gamble. Instead they will hire someone with X years of experience, who has business credentials, an MBA, and generally went through the process that kills every Jobs' like feature in the mind.
Once the person is hired, they'll then send them to the Apple-internal executive training program, in an effort to "instill Jobs' values and thinking" into the hired brain. Maybe that double-brainwash works, time will tell; but it won't ever be the kind of raw creativity Jobs had, because that sort of person won't be hired.
A guy with the background of Jobs (widespread "unfocused" interests, college drop out, smart, creative, socially non-conforming, etc.) is more likely to deliver your pizza than ever having a chance to run a fortune 500 company, unless he founds that company, and that's only possible in entirely new markets or markets without network effects (which create massive barriers of entry as even Jobs at NeXT had to discover). So maybe a guy like that will dominate 3D printing, or dominate an industry with no network effects (e.g. furniture, cooking gear, etc.), but unless US business suddenly becomes risk friendly, don't expect to see someone like that in computing.
That's where he gets it wrong. Jobs never invented shit. He appropriated other's ideas. He took things that either his employees or other companies were working on and then set really high standards on how to do it at Apple. I don't think Steve ever had an original idea - I just think he saw things, imagined how they SHOULD work, then beat his employees until they got it perfect - not just "good enough" like any other company would settle for, but perfect. That's Apple's secret to success. Perfection in presentation. It looks like invention and innovation but it's not. It's just a lot of hard work and nothing more. I think Apple still has a lot of hard workers left.
I have to agree. To draw an exaggerated black and white picture, any decent management team would have a hard time screwing up the current wave of success. I'm also sure that apple employs great people with excellent skills and ideas. However, what's going to be missed is the equal black and white attitude of SJ plus his ability to just make things happen, wrong or right. A recent example is for me the radio and possibly the "iTV" concept where negotiations with content providers drag out it seems to me much longer than I would have expected them to last under SJ leadership. Clear vision and focus and bullying people is what it takes to excel.
Somebody could come along that has the same skills as Steve Jobs had....but it's highly unlikely. There are only a few people in any given century that stand out from the crowd. 50+ years from now and beyond, Steve Jobs will be known as the Edison/Ford/Picaso (all wrapped up in one) of our time.
It's the "all wrapped up in one" thing that made him so outstanding.....and, yes, that unique.
People get over that Jobs personality cult. He didn't walk on water.
I met the guy. He was great, but among 8 billion people and counting, there are plenty of people just as great as he is. Just as there are many other Picasso's, Edison's or Fords. They just didn't happen to be at the right place at the right time, they were born too early or too late, or born into a war zone, or didn't have the connections or supportive parents, no money, opportunity, etc.
Even if you read the celebratory biography of Jobs, and pay some attention, it's clear just how much luck Steve had: there are dozens and dozens of points mentioned (and many unmentioned) where things could have gone ever so slightly differently, and all the genius of Jobs would have ended in a dismal failure.
It's just like all these commencement speeches: Believe in yourself, just go for it, etc. Of course, the people who give these speeches happened to be both talented and lucky enough that this approach worked for them. But the 99% of people who "just go for it" and fall flat and end up in bankruptcy court, they never get to make a commencement speech that says that only a gambler will "just go for it", and that it's a gamble whether to make it big, or end up failing massively.
Can't win the lottery if you don't play, but it's incorrect to say that having the will to win and playing the lottery will lead to a win. The sort of new age psycho babble that claims you'll achieve everything if you want it enough is just crock...
Back to Jobs: he was unique, just as every other human being is unique. But he wasn't irreplaceable just like no other human being is irreplaceable. There are plenty of people like him, the question is, do we foster a culture in which people like him can succeed, or do we foster a culture that demands conformity.
Let's face it: what company will hire anyone (except maybe for the shipping department to fill boxes) who talks about his LSD trips and is a college drop out?
A guy like that maybe has a chance running a local ad agency or starting a custom furniture shop, and he'll be lucky to get off the ground and make more than just to live.
We at NeXT were very pissed off at Isaacson's Biography of Steve. He dicked over NeXT and PIXAR as if they were brief interludes. Without NeXT Apple is history.
NeXT deserves the credit they are due. They are like the Garfunkel of Steve Job's History, or perhaps the Ringo Starr in his Star.
Wrong, to stick with your analogy: they are the John Lennon in that equation, while Apple is the sugary McCartney that appeals to the girls, Lennon/NeXT is where the substance came from.
Steve didn't invent shit. He was a great manager, who said yes or no and the products hinged on it. Anyone else can do it too, with the right head on their shoulders.
Of course, Ellison is ignoring the fact that none of Apple's competitors have Steve Jobs either, so I guess the entire tech sector is supposed to be doomed?
Being ousted for being who you are abruptly, and knowing your end is near and setting the company up to succeed without you are two different things.
Plus, Larry, you know who else already saw what Apple is like without Steve? Their current leadership.
Steve Jobs himself said his greatest invention was Apple, not its products.
Apple is full of talented people in a business structured like no other. It became, and will remain, one of the most successful companies precisely because they don't do what everyone else thinks they should.
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
Actually for a while, Apple was doing quite well. I worked for a reseller right around the time Jobs left, I saw a lot of increased sales of Apple products. I will agree that Apple would have been a LOT better had they spit out OS X a lot sooner, but Apple was spitting out decent products in their day, with a few mistakes along the way, but Jobs & Co. (Tim Cook, and many others that are still there) were part of the rebirth of the company. Their sales didn't really plummet until just after Windows 95 came out, since no one really used anything prior to Windows other than DOS. When Windows NT came out, Mac sales started to dwindle, but at one point Apple had around 25% market share from what I remember, even without Jobs.
I remember back in the mid to late 80's when there were sanctions on shipping computers with a certain spec to countries like Russia. in the mid to late 80's, it wasn't common place for homes to have computers. but nowadays, it's not uncommon for families to own many computers, one for each member of the family. Back then, a lot of families didn't even have one.
When I was going to college in the 80's and part of the 90's, most students didn't own a computer, they used the college computers, which weren't always the latest and greatest. Nowadays, you don't go to college without one.. Now students should not only have a computer, but a tablet as well. The same thing with cell phones. It wasn't that long ago when people didn't own a Cell phone, now even homeless people have them and now many own more than one. I see some carry two phones around, one that's supplied by the company they work for and one they use for personal use.
I personally don't think Apple is doomed, I think it has passed it's peak, though, unless Steve's hinted at solution to the living room TV 'problem' is actually still in the works. In defence of Cook, people trot out several recent Apple products like the iPad mini, iPhone 5 and iOS 7 and Mac Pro, but these are all derivative and are just evidence of Apples momentum.
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: are all derivatives of each other, best summed up under the category iOS (which aside from touch GUI is a derivative of OS X aka NeXTSTEP), and OS X is just a rebranded NeXTSTEP.
So under Jobs tenure at Apple/NeXT/Apple, these are the ground breaking products:
Apple ][, Lisa/Mac, NeXT, iPod-classic, iOS touch GUI
So you look at 5 game changers. Not more. Jobs was a great spin-meister and could make every derivative product look like it was something fundamentally new, maybe a talent Cook lacks, but to expect that Apple should have every year or every couple of years a game changer, that's expecting something not even Jobs delivered, much less any other company.
The standards by which Apple, it's current management team, and even Jobs post-mortem are judged are like an inverse of the RDF that Jobs projected during his lifetime. Maybe an odd instance of historic justice, but certainly nothing that resembles accurate perception of reality.
If Apple releases a significant new product every 5 years or so, it's perfectly on track to keeping up with its past record.
The best response at this point is it is impossible to predict. But I can promise you Steve wouldn't have let those iOS 7 home screen icons out the door. Not that Jobs was perfect or always right; he most certainly was not.
So you knew Jobs? Anyone who says "Steve wouldn't do..." is full of it.
You're right, and you're wrong: yes, there are likely plenty of potential Steve's walking this planet. But no, they will never get hired, because no company, including Apple, would have the guts to do such a gamble. Instead they will hire someone with X years of experience, who has business credentials, an MBA, and generally went through the process that kills every Jobs' like feature in the mind.
Once the person is hired, they'll then send them to the Apple-internal executive training program, in an effort to "instill Jobs' values and thinking" into the hired brain. Maybe that double-brainwash works, time will tell; but it won't ever be the kind of raw creativity Jobs had, because that sort of person won't be hired.
A guy with the background of Jobs (widespread "unfocused" interests, college drop out, smart, creative, socially non-conforming, etc.) is more likely to deliver your pizza than ever having a chance to run a fortune 500 company, unless he founds that company, and that's only possible in entirely new markets or markets without network effects (which create massive barriers of entry as even Jobs at NeXT had to discover). So maybe a guy like that will dominate 3D printing, or dominate an industry with no network effects (e.g. furniture, cooking gear, etc.), but unless US business suddenly becomes risk friendly, don't expect to see someone like that in computing.
Either you're very bitter or just clueless. Apple has a design department. You don't need an MBA for that.
Steve didn't invent shit. He was a great manager, who said yes or no and the products hinged on it. Anyone else can do it too, with the right head on their shoulders.
Actually, he is listed on several patents, so saying that Steve didn't invent shit as you put it is being ignorant. He also had vision of what he wanted and would direct the engineers to create it, which is what typically happens. Ballmer doesn't invent anything since he never really did anything other than marketing. But in the beginning of Apple, Jobs was actually part of the design process where he would send Woz memos of changes he wanted to be made. I saw one of those memos and in those days, it actually was technically oriented. He may not have the strengths of being a hardware/software engineer, but he did have a lot of say so in how products were designed. He just didn't have the background as a design engineer, but he STILL was the visionary of and was still involved with a lot of what turns out to be the final product.
Actually, in the beginning, he was a horrible manager. He was good at marketing, but he was the one that led the Macintosh team, while Woz still piddled around with the Apple II product line.
Okay so Jobs brought us the new age of tablets and touch screen smartphones and nice UX design.
What has Tim Cook done? iPad mini is still a tablet by the way, so it still falls under Jobs.
Uhm... how about building one of the best supply chains on the planet? Apple's piles of cash and ability to actually manufacture and sell millions of iDevices in a very short amount of time is all Tim Cook's doing. Without Cook Apple wouldn't have nearly the amount of cash that they do, and the press would be all over Apple's inability to meet demand. It's not like Tim Cook walked in from another company after Jobs passed away. Go read up on him and learn for yourself.
It's not the CEO's job description to invent or even refine the products they sell. A CEO can do that, but the job is to run the company. Tim Cook is doing a bang up job of that.
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: are all derivatives of each other, best summed up under the category iOS (which aside from touch GUI is a derivative of OS X aka NeXTSTEP), and OS X is just a rebranded NeXTSTEP.
So under Jobs tenure at Apple/NeXT/Apple, these are the ground breaking products:
Apple ][, Lisa/Mac, NeXT, iPod-classic, iOS touch GUI
So you look at 5 game changers. Not more. Jobs was a great spin-meister and could make every derivative product look like it was something fundamentally new, maybe a talent Cook lacks, but to expect that Apple should have every year or every couple of years a game changer, that's expecting something not even Jobs delivered, much less any other company.
The standards by which Apple, it's current management team, and even Jobs post-mortem are judged are like an inverse of the RDF that Jobs projected during his lifetime. Maybe an odd instance of historic justice, but certainly nothing that resembles accurate perception of reality.
If Apple releases a significant new product every 5 years or so, it's perfectly on track to keeping up with its past record.
Cook isn't nearly as charismatic as Jobs. I see Cook as a manager not a visionary, but the visionary tasks is more left up to Jony, Craig and other managers in charge of the product lines they have. Which isn't a bad thing, I just wish Cook would become a little more comfortable when he does presentations, but there aren't many that can easily slide into the position of taking Job's place from a charisma point of view.
You're right, and you're wrong: yes, there are likely plenty of potential Steve's walking this planet. But no, they will never get hired, because no company, including Apple, would have the guts to do such a gamble. Instead they will hire someone with X years of experience, who has business credentials, an MBA, and generally went through the process that kills every Jobs' like feature in the mind.
Once the person is hired, they'll then send them to the Apple-internal executive training program, in an effort to "instill Jobs' values and thinking" into the hired brain. Maybe that double-brainwash works, time will tell; but it won't ever be the kind of raw creativity Jobs had, because that sort of person won't be hired.
A guy with the background of Jobs (widespread "unfocused" interests, college drop out, smart, creative, socially non-conforming, etc.) is more likely to deliver your pizza than ever having a chance to run a fortune 500 company, unless he founds that company, and that's only possible in entirely new markets or markets without network effects (which create massive barriers of entry as even Jobs at NeXT had to discover). So maybe a guy like that will dominate 3D printing, or dominate an industry with no network effects (e.g. furniture, cooking gear, etc.), but unless US business suddenly becomes risk friendly, don't expect to see someone like that in computing.
Either you're very bitter or just clueless. Apple has a design department. You don't need an MBA for that.
I'm neither. I'm just being realistic. The design department doesn't matter, because we're talking about a guy running the company, i.e. a Steve Jobs replacement, not about some minion working below Jonny Ives.
Second, even Jonny Ives has a proper college degree (i.e. not a drop out like Steve), and certainly isn't vocal about his drug experiences as Jobs was.
As far as business school goes: been there, done that, was bored and disgusted by it and then studied CompSci and AI (using my own NeXT at a time when it was close to impossible to get one). Watched my friends who went to BS become more boring and less creative as each year of their career went by. Couldn't say the same thing about my more creative friends (musicians, designers, chefs...)
The only thing the BS guys are good at, is using their "authority" to piss on every piece of good design that comes along their way and destroy it. "My kids think green would look better", "My wife thinks there should be a line here", "I think that's too big and bold"...
The burden of proof is on the side making the claim. One should not be allowed to make unproven statements and demand the other side to "prove him wrong."
The burden of proof is on the future, if it's anywhere. Ellison's claim is impossible to prove or disprove at present, as it's a prediction about the future. We'll see.
Despite all the vitriol in this thread, I have some sympathy for his prediction. If Tim Cook, Jony Ive, et al. were visionaries on the level of Jobs, why were they working for Jobs rather than founding their own companies? But who knows. Maybe Jobs found the right people.
Comments
So if Apple's future is 'dismal' then what about the future of 'wanna-be' Apple competitors, like Google and Microsoft? What is a word more dismal than dismal?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Constable Odo
Seriously, why do these people think they can see the future so clearly. Somebody could come along that has the skills that Steve Job had. I can't believe he was that unique as a human.
You're right, and you're wrong: yes, there are likely plenty of potential Steve's walking this planet. But no, they will never get hired, because no company, including Apple, would have the guts to do such a gamble. Instead they will hire someone with X years of experience, who has business credentials, an MBA, and generally went through the process that kills every Jobs' like feature in the mind.
Once the person is hired, they'll then send them to the Apple-internal executive training program, in an effort to "instill Jobs' values and thinking" into the hired brain. Maybe that double-brainwash works, time will tell; but it won't ever be the kind of raw creativity Jobs had, because that sort of person won't be hired.
A guy with the background of Jobs (widespread "unfocused" interests, college drop out, smart, creative, socially non-conforming, etc.) is more likely to deliver your pizza than ever having a chance to run a fortune 500 company, unless he founds that company, and that's only possible in entirely new markets or markets without network effects (which create massive barriers of entry as even Jobs at NeXT had to discover). So maybe a guy like that will dominate 3D printing, or dominate an industry with no network effects (e.g. furniture, cooking gear, etc.), but unless US business suddenly becomes risk friendly, don't expect to see someone like that in computing.
That's where he gets it wrong. Jobs never invented shit. He appropriated other's ideas. He took things that either his employees or other companies were working on and then set really high standards on how to do it at Apple. I don't think Steve ever had an original idea - I just think he saw things, imagined how they SHOULD work, then beat his employees until they got it perfect - not just "good enough" like any other company would settle for, but perfect. That's Apple's secret to success. Perfection in presentation. It looks like invention and innovation but it's not. It's just a lot of hard work and nothing more. I think Apple still has a lot of hard workers left.
I'm also sure that apple employs great people with excellent skills and ideas. However, what's going to be missed is the equal black and white attitude of SJ plus his ability to just make things happen, wrong or right.
A recent example is for me the radio and possibly the "iTV" concept where negotiations with content providers drag out it seems to me much longer than I would have expected them to last under SJ leadership. Clear vision and focus and bullying people is what it takes to excel.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dickprinter
Somebody could come along that has the same skills as Steve Jobs had....but it's highly unlikely. There are only a few people in any given century that stand out from the crowd. 50+ years from now and beyond, Steve Jobs will be known as the Edison/Ford/Picaso (all wrapped up in one) of our time.
It's the "all wrapped up in one" thing that made him so outstanding.....and, yes, that unique.
People get over that Jobs personality cult. He didn't walk on water.
I met the guy. He was great, but among 8 billion people and counting, there are plenty of people just as great as he is. Just as there are many other Picasso's, Edison's or Fords. They just didn't happen to be at the right place at the right time, they were born too early or too late, or born into a war zone, or didn't have the connections or supportive parents, no money, opportunity, etc.
Even if you read the celebratory biography of Jobs, and pay some attention, it's clear just how much luck Steve had: there are dozens and dozens of points mentioned (and many unmentioned) where things could have gone ever so slightly differently, and all the genius of Jobs would have ended in a dismal failure.
It's just like all these commencement speeches: Believe in yourself, just go for it, etc. Of course, the people who give these speeches happened to be both talented and lucky enough that this approach worked for them. But the 99% of people who "just go for it" and fall flat and end up in bankruptcy court, they never get to make a commencement speech that says that only a gambler will "just go for it", and that it's a gamble whether to make it big, or end up failing massively.
Can't win the lottery if you don't play, but it's incorrect to say that having the will to win and playing the lottery will lead to a win. The sort of new age psycho babble that claims you'll achieve everything if you want it enough is just crock...
Back to Jobs: he was unique, just as every other human being is unique. But he wasn't irreplaceable just like no other human being is irreplaceable. There are plenty of people like him, the question is, do we foster a culture in which people like him can succeed, or do we foster a culture that demands conformity.
Let's face it: what company will hire anyone (except maybe for the shipping department to fill boxes) who talks about his LSD trips and is a college drop out?
A guy like that maybe has a chance running a local ad agency or starting a custom furniture shop, and he'll be lucky to get off the ground and make more than just to live.
Quote:
Originally Posted by William Brown
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
We at NeXT were very pissed off at Isaacson's Biography of Steve. He dicked over NeXT and PIXAR as if they were brief interludes. Without NeXT Apple is history.
NeXT deserves the credit they are due. They are like the Garfunkel of Steve Job's History, or perhaps the Ringo Starr in his Star.
Wrong, to stick with your analogy: they are the John Lennon in that equation, while Apple is the sugary McCartney that appeals to the girls, Lennon/NeXT is where the substance came from.
Steve Jobs himself said his greatest invention was Apple, not its products.
Apple is full of talented people in a business structured like no other. It became, and will remain, one of the most successful companies precisely because they don't do what everyone else thinks they should.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
Actually for a while, Apple was doing quite well. I worked for a reseller right around the time Jobs left, I saw a lot of increased sales of Apple products. I will agree that Apple would have been a LOT better had they spit out OS X a lot sooner, but Apple was spitting out decent products in their day, with a few mistakes along the way, but Jobs & Co. (Tim Cook, and many others that are still there) were part of the rebirth of the company. Their sales didn't really plummet until just after Windows 95 came out, since no one really used anything prior to Windows other than DOS. When Windows NT came out, Mac sales started to dwindle, but at one point Apple had around 25% market share from what I remember, even without Jobs.
I remember back in the mid to late 80's when there were sanctions on shipping computers with a certain spec to countries like Russia. in the mid to late 80's, it wasn't common place for homes to have computers. but nowadays, it's not uncommon for families to own many computers, one for each member of the family. Back then, a lot of families didn't even have one.
When I was going to college in the 80's and part of the 90's, most students didn't own a computer, they used the college computers, which weren't always the latest and greatest. Nowadays, you don't go to college without one.. Now students should not only have a computer, but a tablet as well. The same thing with cell phones. It wasn't that long ago when people didn't own a Cell phone, now even homeless people have them and now many own more than one. I see some carry two phones around, one that's supplied by the company they work for and one they use for personal use.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cnocbui
I personally don't think Apple is doomed, I think it has passed it's peak, though, unless Steve's hinted at solution to the living room TV 'problem' is actually still in the works. In defence of Cook, people trot out several recent Apple products like the iPad mini, iPhone 5 and iOS 7 and Mac Pro, but these are all derivative and are just evidence of Apples momentum.
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: are all derivatives of each other, best summed up under the category iOS (which aside from touch GUI is a derivative of OS X aka NeXTSTEP), and OS X is just a rebranded NeXTSTEP.
So under Jobs tenure at Apple/NeXT/Apple, these are the ground breaking products:
Apple ][, Lisa/Mac, NeXT, iPod-classic, iOS touch GUI
So you look at 5 game changers. Not more. Jobs was a great spin-meister and could make every derivative product look like it was something fundamentally new, maybe a talent Cook lacks, but to expect that Apple should have every year or every couple of years a game changer, that's expecting something not even Jobs delivered, much less any other company.
The standards by which Apple, it's current management team, and even Jobs post-mortem are judged are like an inverse of the RDF that Jobs projected during his lifetime. Maybe an odd instance of historic justice, but certainly nothing that resembles accurate perception of reality.
If Apple releases a significant new product every 5 years or so, it's perfectly on track to keeping up with its past record.
So you knew Jobs? Anyone who says "Steve wouldn't do..." is full of it.
Either you're very bitter or just clueless. Apple has a design department. You don't need an MBA for that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pmz
Steve didn't invent shit. He was a great manager, who said yes or no and the products hinged on it. Anyone else can do it too, with the right head on their shoulders.
Actually, he is listed on several patents, so saying that Steve didn't invent shit as you put it is being ignorant. He also had vision of what he wanted and would direct the engineers to create it, which is what typically happens. Ballmer doesn't invent anything since he never really did anything other than marketing. But in the beginning of Apple, Jobs was actually part of the design process where he would send Woz memos of changes he wanted to be made. I saw one of those memos and in those days, it actually was technically oriented. He may not have the strengths of being a hardware/software engineer, but he did have a lot of say so in how products were designed. He just didn't have the background as a design engineer, but he STILL was the visionary of and was still involved with a lot of what turns out to be the final product.
Actually, in the beginning, he was a horrible manager. He was good at marketing, but he was the one that led the Macintosh team, while Woz still piddled around with the Apple II product line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrrodriguez
Okay so Jobs brought us the new age of tablets and touch screen smartphones and nice UX design.
What has Tim Cook done? iPad mini is still a tablet by the way, so it still falls under Jobs.
Uhm... how about building one of the best supply chains on the planet? Apple's piles of cash and ability to actually manufacture and sell millions of iDevices in a very short amount of time is all Tim Cook's doing. Without Cook Apple wouldn't have nearly the amount of cash that they do, and the press would be all over Apple's inability to meet demand. It's not like Tim Cook walked in from another company after Jobs passed away. Go read up on him and learn for yourself.
It's not the CEO's job description to invent or even refine the products they sell. A CEO can do that, but the job is to run the company. Tim Cook is doing a bang up job of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rcfa
iPhone, iPad, iPod touch: are all derivatives of each other, best summed up under the category iOS (which aside from touch GUI is a derivative of OS X aka NeXTSTEP), and OS X is just a rebranded NeXTSTEP.
So under Jobs tenure at Apple/NeXT/Apple, these are the ground breaking products:
Apple ][, Lisa/Mac, NeXT, iPod-classic, iOS touch GUI
So you look at 5 game changers. Not more. Jobs was a great spin-meister and could make every derivative product look like it was something fundamentally new, maybe a talent Cook lacks, but to expect that Apple should have every year or every couple of years a game changer, that's expecting something not even Jobs delivered, much less any other company.
The standards by which Apple, it's current management team, and even Jobs post-mortem are judged are like an inverse of the RDF that Jobs projected during his lifetime. Maybe an odd instance of historic justice, but certainly nothing that resembles accurate perception of reality.
If Apple releases a significant new product every 5 years or so, it's perfectly on track to keeping up with its past record.
Cook isn't nearly as charismatic as Jobs. I see Cook as a manager not a visionary, but the visionary tasks is more left up to Jony, Craig and other managers in charge of the product lines they have. Which isn't a bad thing, I just wish Cook would become a little more comfortable when he does presentations, but there aren't many that can easily slide into the position of taking Job's place from a charisma point of view.
Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by rcfa
You're right, and you're wrong: yes, there are likely plenty of potential Steve's walking this planet. But no, they will never get hired, because no company, including Apple, would have the guts to do such a gamble. Instead they will hire someone with X years of experience, who has business credentials, an MBA, and generally went through the process that kills every Jobs' like feature in the mind.
Once the person is hired, they'll then send them to the Apple-internal executive training program, in an effort to "instill Jobs' values and thinking" into the hired brain. Maybe that double-brainwash works, time will tell; but it won't ever be the kind of raw creativity Jobs had, because that sort of person won't be hired.
A guy with the background of Jobs (widespread "unfocused" interests, college drop out, smart, creative, socially non-conforming, etc.) is more likely to deliver your pizza than ever having a chance to run a fortune 500 company, unless he founds that company, and that's only possible in entirely new markets or markets without network effects (which create massive barriers of entry as even Jobs at NeXT had to discover). So maybe a guy like that will dominate 3D printing, or dominate an industry with no network effects (e.g. furniture, cooking gear, etc.), but unless US business suddenly becomes risk friendly, don't expect to see someone like that in computing.
Either you're very bitter or just clueless. Apple has a design department. You don't need an MBA for that.
I'm neither. I'm just being realistic. The design department doesn't matter, because we're talking about a guy running the company, i.e. a Steve Jobs replacement, not about some minion working below Jonny Ives.
Second, even Jonny Ives has a proper college degree (i.e. not a drop out like Steve), and certainly isn't vocal about his drug experiences as Jobs was.
As far as business school goes: been there, done that, was bored and disgusted by it and then studied CompSci and AI (using my own NeXT at a time when it was close to impossible to get one). Watched my friends who went to BS become more boring and less creative as each year of their career went by. Couldn't say the same thing about my more creative friends (musicians, designers, chefs...)
The only thing the BS guys are good at, is using their "authority" to piss on every piece of good design that comes along their way and destroy it. "My kids think green would look better", "My wife thinks there should be a line here", "I think that's too big and bold"...
It's a company. They do cool stuff.
World's not pinned on Apple living or dying, guys.
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Originally Posted by David Andersen
In contrast, Oracle could only get better with Ellison gone. Their product quality is absolutely terrible.
I'd still exchange my position with his. More millions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton
The burden of proof is on the side making the claim. One should not be allowed to make unproven statements and demand the other side to "prove him wrong."
The burden of proof is on the future, if it's anywhere. Ellison's claim is impossible to prove or disprove at present, as it's a prediction about the future. We'll see.
Despite all the vitriol in this thread, I have some sympathy for his prediction. If Tim Cook, Jony Ive, et al. were visionaries on the level of Jobs, why were they working for Jobs rather than founding their own companies? But who knows. Maybe Jobs found the right people.