At Microsoft, the head of Xbox marketing reports to the head of Xbox and the head of Azure marketing reports to the head of Azure.
At Apple, there is no divisions, every Apple marketer is responsible for the success of every Apple product and reports to the head of Apple marketing. But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time.
This is an enormous constraint but it's also foundational to Apple mythos because it allowed them to kill the iPod. Divisional orgs have an enormously hard time with disruptive innovation because it upends the power structures of those with the most power. At Apple, there wasn't any person with the title "Head of iPod" whose job would have been in danger if the iPhone overtook the iPod. This was the reason Apple and pretty much only Apple have ever aggressively obsoleted their very best selling product and emerged even stronger out the other side.
You can argue the merits of functional vs divisional all day long and many have but none of those arguments will gain any traction inside of Apple. Apple will remain functional until the day it dies because functional is what allowed Apple to kill the iPod.
Just to clarify: every public product line. If Apple is working on autonomous vehicles, there's no way that every (or even most) employees at Apple know about it.
Ridiculous. Apple has an incredible amount of secrecy across its different departments. Functional orgs don't require the hoi polloi to know everything, as long as mgmt does.
In 18th-century, "trade companies" (V.O.C., British East India Company, etc.) are strong enough to own a country.
Also, effectively, in the twentieth century, post-antitrust. Hence, why we have the term “banana republic”.
And why should I trust them with an iPhone or car then, when the simpliest products were run into the ground.
Swift is a huge and thankless work totally invisible to the userbase and heavily targeted to improve development on Mac/iOS.
You just can’t brush it off to fit your narrative.
Jesus, calm the hell down.
It’s okay to have complaints about aspects of Apple’s products, but this wild exaggeration isn’t doing anybody any favours.