Even before President Trump’s tariffs threatened to upend Apple’s manufacturing business in China, the company’s struggle to make new products was leading some people inside its lavish Silicon Valley headquarters to wonder whether the company had somehow lost its magic.
It has been a decade since the releases of Apple’s most recent commercial successes: the Apple Watch and AirPods. Its services like Apple TV+ and Fitness+, which it introduced in 2019, lag behind rivals in subscriptions. Half of its sales still come from the iPhone, an 18-year-old product that is incrementally improved nearly every year.
Perhaps Elon was inspired by Apple’s limited product strategy?
If it ain’t broke; don’t fix it.
I must be a record breaking Mac user. I remember porting a database from an Apple /// to my first Mac, over 40 years ago.° I was an Apple reseller at the time. When I finally bought a Smart phone (on arriving in Madrid in April 8, 2019) I could not find a good reason to pay the exorbitant iPhone price. I’ve been an Oppo user since then. BTW my biggest complaint about Mac these days is that it has been iPhoned!
The Captain
° I recorded the names, telephone numbers, and ZIP codes of all the high tech ads I found. This data pointed out the biggest technology centers in the USA. Silicon Valley, Boston Route 128, Redmond WA, Austin TX. Part of my battle plan to conquer… Oh well…
Is he still, really, engaged in Tesla, or has he lost interest in Tesla, and moved on, as I have suggested before?
I remember when messrs Hewlett and Packard had to come out of retirement, and clean up the mess “JCs” had made of HP, twice. I didn’t understand that, when Jobs came back to Apple, to clean up after Sculley, Amelio, and Spindler. The guy was gifted, vs the typical “JC”, who only thinks he is uniquely gifted. I remember thinking, the day Jobs died, that the wheels were going to start coming off the company.
Elon Musk is one of the few people who can juggle half a dozen companies in different fields at the same time. Maybe more important, he has the knack to hire the best and to fire the ones that don’t shape up. Anyone who thinks that one man can run the whole show is way off track.
About Jobs, he screwed up big time when he hired the guy from PepsiCo International. Jobs screwed up big time when he went up against IBM in the business market. That’s not how disruption happens. Apple/Mac had a fantastic market all to itself in the artistic market. Jobs screwed up big time when he went with optical storage at NeXT. During his ten years or so in exile Jobs finally learned how to manage and his UNIX OS that he brought to Apple was terrific. All his sins were forgiven, and rightly so.
PepsiCo International bought my uncle’s food factory in Caracas. Around that time I met a gorgeous gal at a casino in Curaçao. She happened to be the daughter of the production manager at my uncle’s food factory. He told me horror stories of how PepsiCo ran the business, he said, “With you uncle I made marmalade. With PepsiCo I make reports.” The company went broke. The inept marketing guru John Sculley ran PepsiCo International and Steve Jobs hired him to run Apple, “Do you want to sell sugar water the rest of your life?”
One of the best “pitches” I’ve ever heard was the pitch Steve Jobs made to then Pepsi executive John Sculley in an effort to convince him to lead Apple. This is what Jobs said: “Do you want to sell sugar water the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Steve Jobs and Creativity
Steve Jobs is associated with a long list of “insanely great” products none of which he invented (as far as I know). He is being called a visionary along with many other accolades. What is a visionary? Just how does this “vision” thing work?
There have been a great many creative and inventive people in history but most have not told us how they did it. Isaac Newton gave a hint when he said: “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Jared Diamond, who has studied human evolution, says that opportunity, not necessity, is the mother of invention. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says:
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
BTW, Steve Jobs did not invent the Apple computer, the other Steve did. Steve Jobs did a good job packaging it for mass consumption.
I have heard a few of the stories. Like Xerox had no interest in the GUI that PARC developed, so they nearly gave it away to Apple. Gates recognized the value of the GUI too…another founder guy, rather than a “JC”.
Parents in the 50s had no originality. The world abounds in Steves from that era: Steve Jobs (born 1955), Steve Woz (born 1950), Steve Ballmer (born 1956). One day, I was sitting at a table in the lunch room in high school, and I was one of six Steves, sitting at that table. If Gates (born 1955) was not a “III”, he would probably be a “Steve” too.
Everything I see says Jobs got it from PARC. Seldon patented a road vehicle powered by an Otto cycle engine, but he wasn’t the one that really made the thing work.
Trump exempted all smartphones and Apple was being bid up on Friday with high volume. It looks like the crook told all of his buddies what he was going to do this weekend. This is the crooked administration ever.
It’s true. But Xerox worked on earlier developments. Xerox PARC was a terrific research lab but Xerox never understood how to take advantage of it. Xerox management was stuck in the copy rut. It’s how disruption happens. Sclerotic management. I remember avoiding former Xerox managers. Xerox was a blemish on their CV.
As I have said, “ossified” management. Like the pump seal company married to a forty year old seal design, when competitors are producing more cost-effective designs, that work just as well. Like Radio Shack, married to it’s late 1960s business model, ignoring that the “fair trade” laws had been repealed, and the competitive landscape had changed.
One day, at work, a coworker was holding a postage stamp, and puzzling about the man pictured on it. Tom said words to the effect “he must have done something, but I don’t know what”. I looked at the stamp, and recognized the name, but it took a moment to connect it to what he did (when you get older there is more in the mental Rolodex, so it takes longer to thumb through it). The neuron finally fired. I said “he invented the Xerox copier”. Tom said “what? then why don’t they call them Carlson machines?” I explained that what Carlson did was automate a known photographic process, “xerography”, so derived “Xerox” from the name of the process. He then licensed the Haloid Company to make the machines. Tom was still skeptical. Meanwhile Bill, who shared the pod with me, turned to his computer, pulled up a web browser, looked up Carlson, turned to Tom, and said “he’s right”.
