The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.
“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is 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 who 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.”
I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
Almost always exactly that number. Almost always dismissing any product in that period because they’re not normalized yet, and then once they’re normalized then they’re boring and not considered.
It is impossible for Apple to be considered innovative by their standards.
(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)
I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.
A ground-breaking, industry-changing innovation like the iPhone is like lightning in a bottle. It would be insane to think Apple can capture lightning every 5 years like clockwork.
The issue is that engineering leadership failed to execute on the process technology roadmap.
The iWatch or iPad are probably better examples, as their technological prerequisites existed for quite a while before Apple packed them.
And I’d point out that they’re all fundamentally different physical interfacing methods.
Apple’s last non-physical major products were iTunes (more of a legal / licensing product than a technical one) and the App Store (basically driven by iPhone deployment and lock-in).
Has Apple ever released a groundbreaking non-physical/interface product? MacOS? Final Cut Pro?
But if you look at the past CEOs, Intel had Krzanich (fab guy), Swan (CFO guy who didn't even want the job but they couldn't find anyone else), and Gelsinger (design guy and Grove disciple) in 11 years. I'll even throw in Jim Keller, not a CEO but still The Chip God, who left in frustration after two years.
What's the one common problem that all of them had despite all their different backgrounds? Getting relevant nodes to market and scaling them up. Their foundry efforts (v1 and v2) have been disastrous. The CEOs or MBAs perhaps were a friction, but they aren't the root cause. Technology Development has been the center of power that the fabs and products revolved around for decades.