Comment by ben_w
1 year ago
> See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive.
> When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry?
For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
It would take a lot to upset the investors, given the overall win rate.
> For this specific example, their stock price went up from "basically bankrupt" to "company is now worth trillions of dollars" in Ive's time.
Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe.
>Presumably plenty of people were employed in that timeframe
Yes, employed to work on Jobs vision with Ive's designs.
Of course. But if you want to get the investors to force a change, the stock price has to go down.
Even if it does go down, that doesn't mean the investors will blame the right person — there's a reason why the English language retains the phrase "scape-goat" — but it has to go down or the investors will say "why would I change this?"
Edit: I originally phrased this as "if you want to get kick-back from the investors", turns out "kick-back" doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
Yeah I knew throwing Ive in there invites a skeptical response, but I really detest that guy's product-degrading mania and attitude.
And while the company obviously still thrived, Ive's intellectually bankrupt (and defective) design got bad enough to embarrass Apple even in the mainstream press. I thought this WSJ article was a brilliant dig: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
I'm not even disagreeing with you, I agree with you that Ive was responsible for many weird and outright bad designs. (IIRC he did the original iMac's hockey puck mouse).
I'm saying the investors caring about $$$ would have less than zero reason to object overall.
And I agree with you on that, until it hurts the bottom line (which, even if it happens, will be hard or impossible to quantify).
There are loads of apologists out there ready to defend bad design, and a (sadly) growing percentage of the population that has never been exposed to GOOD design in many product categories.