zlacker

It was put best by Steve Jobs:

“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.

>>wpm+(OP)
It's probably happening to ape right now as well. They haven't released interesting new hardware product like in more than 5 years. Apple vision is interesting but market validated not worth the money they asking.

Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.

>>wpm+(OP)
It's happening at Apple right now. The hand picked successor to Steve was the one who could keep the ship running smoothly, not the one who pushed back with new radical product directions.

>>pzo+j9
Putting aside its success, wouldn't you consider the Apple Vision Pro as something pretty interesting from a hardware perspective?

>>ivanbo+9n
You can go to any point in Apple’s history and you’ll find people saying the exact same sentence: they haven’t innovated anything in 5 years.

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.

>>dagmx+vs
It's also easy to point to the failures as evidence, but both innovative and boring companies have failures...it's just that innovative cos have the occasional success that makes up for the rest.

(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)

>>dluan+Ma
I don't disagree with you, but I'd argue the Apple Vision is (was) in that vein (and predictably unsuccessful). I'm also glad they're not charging ahead with AI at the rate everyone else seems to be.

I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.

>>dagmx+vs
Another innovation is their line of M-series chips. I'm typing this on an M1 Max and this is by far the best combination of industrial design and physical hardware that I have used over the past 20 years. I've had it for four years, three new generations of chips have come out since then and this thing chews through anything I throw at it.

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.

>>dluan+Ma
Maybe there's no revolutionary hardware left to invent except the next smartphone that will actually be a chip in your brain.

>>conrad+CS
The iPhone was essentially enabled by (a) broadly deployed cellular networks, (b) touchscreens, (c) power efficient mobile chips, (d) battery technology.

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?

>>ethbr1+BO1
Better glass as well. The old plastic touchscreen looked abysmal compared to the smooth glass screen.