Comment by gduffy
5 years ago
I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.
Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.
The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.
It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).
But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year).
And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.
We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
It’s the case at all Big Tech companies. Time to break them up. https://paygo.media/p/25171
[ ... or if not that, can I at least get USB-C on my iPhone so I can stop carrying two cables? :’( ]
I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card.
The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical. The Apple Watch still sux IMO, but the way they quickly pivoted toward health surprised me and makes me think they get it.
I think Apple's products are better than ever, on the whole.
I don't think we should "break up" Big Tech just because they are successful. That being said, I do think we need to #AbolishImaginaryProperty laws (#EndCopyrights and #EndPatents), and that will make things much better for everyone (minus some lazy shareholders). Those laws are atrocious in every domain, from bigtech to big pharma, and need to go.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.
> I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole
I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)
> I don’t think we should...
Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.
But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.
You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
> ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
Well as someone who has worked on this issue for 17+ years, and also a successful entrepreneur and product builder at a few of the big dogs, I'm a hard disagree.
ImaginaryProperty laws are the root of all the biggest evil problems in tech. They corrupt everything at the core and a reckoning is coming.
I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
I know that getting investment as a small company in the hardware space would be near impossible without patents, because any investor without a brain would see that the giant in your industry could decide to take your idea, design it faster, manufacture it cheaper and sell it to a wider audience in a fraction of the time.
Very true, but #EndSoftwarePatents can and should be a thing.
I actually take a position that some software maybe should be patentable, but that it's such a tiny percentage of what actually GETS patented that it's likely better to simply prohibit/invalidate all software patents than to allow only certain software patents. The backlog of hundreds of thousands of obviously-bad software patents wouldn't really be able to be individually reviewed by the experts that should be able to invalidate them, and software has copyright and trade secret protections available. That should be good enough for 99.9% of circumstances.
The patent office has clearly proven that they can't be trusted to discern "novelty" in software development, and I don't see that changing any time soon, so time to prohibit the system from applying to software at all. At present it's 100% prohibiting the small inventors from innovating (or allowing a few patent trolls to extorts those who succeed) and 0% allowing small innovators from profiting from their products.
"I didn't read your comment, but you're wrong"
> We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money. I dont understand this need to invest in user hostile tech then demand it not be user hostile any more. It's like you willingly stuck your foot in a bear trap only to walk around in agony while demanding that the government make bear traps less painful. How about not putting your foot into a bear trap?
I know die hard Mac fans who cry endlessly about Apple "fucking up their platform" yet own a shiny new M1 laptop. I don't get it.
I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:
1. Apple is “best of the worst” i.e. the other platforms suck more on a usability basis.
2. It doesn’t matter if only a select few understand the long term impact of trading freedom/competition for shininess – our money is a drop in the bucket compared to regular users who care about usability and have already changed the channel when you talk about anything beyond that.
And so, large companies will roll along with exclusive access to things like TSMC 5nm thanks to capital resources and returns 1000x of any upstart like System76/PinePhone/FairPhone/etc.
Free markets work great, except that monopoly-like things form naturally and suck all of the air out of the room; therefore anti-monopoly laws are one of the very few regulations on capitalism I think we should all support (who wouldn’t benefit? 100 people total?).
There’s probably a way to oust them that isn’t legislation, but it will require coming at them from an angle that doesn’t rely on having access to the world’s largest pile of capital and etc. I.e. entrepreneurs getting real creative and taking huge risks on opportunity cost (it’s easier to build an app and get rich, easier still to pull $500k/year in total comp as a mid level SW engineer at big tech co).
But based on my experience and judgment of the situation, I’d like to see concise and progressive (vs regressive) antitrust/antimonopoly legislation, I think it would be both great for the economy and great for individual citizens.
>Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money.
That just "solves" the problem of undue influence of a $1T or close company for you (if that) not for the industry / society at large.
They can e.g. still stomp/buy/kill companies you do like, influence standards you do use, etc., and even hold captive your friends and others, even if you, yourself don't use their products.
I'm not against Apple (if anything the opposite), but I'm against huge companies with huge power. I'd prefer their several businesses (Mac, iOS, OS, Pro Apps) where independent companies.
The Pro Apps would e.g. then have to fight for their lives, with features, frequent releases, good customer communication, and so on, as opposed to coasting on the $2T padding of the mother company...
Apple buys a company every month, sometimes two. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178792 This isn't a case of voting with your wallet because there's no one left to vote for.
I tend to use open platforms so I would likely not notice. Most of the businesses listed in the bbc article are of no consequence to me. Their only real weapon would be to outlaw ip or control access to the internet.
Of course I cant completely avoid behemoths as I use Android with Google services. But my only google "lock in" as of now is photo storage and gmail. I have only a hand full of apps on my phone. I do not use social media. That's really it.
There is a whole beautiful world outside of the digital prison.
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Whenever I go to AirDrop something from my Mac to my phone there's a 50/50 chance one of the devices shows up or doesn't show up.
I can't seem to figure out what factors influence the dice roll.
This has been true since the release of AirDrop, across multiple different Macs and iPhones, across multiple OS versions.
AirDrop seems to depend on the moon phase and the tides.
I often wonder how no exec at Apple has experienced this and told someone to just. solve. it.
I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...
Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!
Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.
interesting to hear -- I had an airdrop failure like you describe the other day, and it was very surprising to me as I'd never seen it happen before. I use airdrop pretty much every single day and it's almost flawless for me.
I experience this almost every time I use airdrop. Last week I was helping my wife airdrop something from her phone to mac. I had to reset both Wifi and bluetooth on both phone and mac before the device showed up.
For the first part I think you're probably right, their all powerful absolute advocate for user experience above all else has gone and isn't about to be replaced. I don't think that's an existential threat to the company, even now who else does any of this stuff better? But it is a problem.
>...domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating...
Where the heck does that come from? Apple coming up with the first 64-bit mobile processor didn't stop anyone else doing it, and the M1 isn't stopping anyone else developing fast efficient ARM processors. In fact it's pretty obvious its pushing their competitors into upping their game.
As for breaking up the company, OMG no, a thousand times no. It would destroy everything good about them. The only people it would benefit are their competitors. The last thing we need is enforced mediocrity. Who else is going to come up with FaceID, M1, Neural Engine, W1, T2 and goodness knows what else. Breaking up the company isn't going to make such tech more ubiquitous.
Well, it might for the existing stuff but it's going to cut off the pipeline cold. It's only their scale and commitment to huge investments and far forward looking technological bets that make these things possible. How is a divided company going to manage the close collaboration and integrated design of hardware and software at every level if they're in separate companies? It would crush out the distinctive features that make Apple what it is.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.
As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.
Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.
It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.
I’m constantly reading that phone technology has hit a plateau, it’s commodified, everyone else will catch up to Apple any day now and their competitive edge will disappear. That’s been the story since the day the iPhone was announced.
Apples competitors actually believe this and have done for over a decade. Were Samsung or Huawei ever going to put that much investment into advanced tech? No because they are constantly being told by analysts that they don’t need to.
All those small tech startups Apple keeps buying with advanced Flash memory controllers, new optics, advanced sensors, AI optimised processing hardware. Nobody else in the consumer space sees the value in that, they’re all chasing the lowest common denominator. The idea that Vivo would be investing in tech startups and pushing technological boundaries if only Apple hadn’t beaten them to it is pure fantasy. The nearest any of those companies get to innovation is stupid gimmicks like built in projectors and edge screens.
Breaking up a company vertically can’t work. You wouldn’t end up with 5 smaller Apples. You’d end up with an OS business, a chip business, an applications business, a Mac business and a mobile device business. Everything good about Apple would die on the butcher’s block when it was carved up.
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While I dont fully agree with breaking them up, I do think your comment pretty much sums up all the comment I had on Apple over the past 4-5 years.
Apple will continue to make technically superior hardware. But the user experience department, what ( Steve Jobs's ) Apple used to stand for is no longer there ( Or at least less of it ). That is everything from Hardware like Touch Bar, Keyboard, Trackpad, USB-C, Software UI complexity and Services like App Store, Apple ID and Payment issues. No one is saying the User Experience is crap lets fix this. Instead in every single case it took some revenue drops in numbers, customer satisfaction drop ( Apple has not reported any Mac user satisfaction number for 2 years now ), or straight bad press before they even begin to look into it.
Which is why the lag time from Mac Pro was so bad. It took them 3-4 years to admit a mistake. Before making changes that has a lead time of another 2 years.
But having said all them, even at their current level of inefficiency, they are still so far ahead of Google and Microsoft from a product level perspective that there is zero chance both of those company could catch up to Apple within this decade.