Remember, everything Apple does, it does to advance the interests of Apple. The company. Not the products, not the departments, not the employees, and definitely not the customers. The same is true of any large org.
The knockout success of iPhone grew the business by magnitudes almost overnight. iPhone Apple, frankly, is too big to be wasting its time now on niche products with limited potential for growth, even if those products are very successful within their own niche. If a product doesn’t fit with the current business strategy and portfolio, it’s out.
It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. And definitely don’t be sentimental. Poor Aperture just got left in the iPhone’s dust.
I think the situation currently is an overcorrection to a vaguely remembered pre-Jobs past.
What does that mean in the context of a huge corporation? From my perspective, $1K in profit is still $1K, even if you're making $100K elsewhere.
Tim Cook certainly has limited time and needs to prioritize, but he also doesn’t need to touch every part of the company. Independently-profitable projects can be spun out into their own teams as needed.
Having said that I think Apple hasn't prioritise their Software Engineering resources well.
When Steve Jobs came to Apple, he made the Mac line “focused” by cutting it down to four models. That had clear benefits: less hardware for the OS to support, better economies of scale in manufacturing, and less wasted retail shelf space.
How does killing Aperture benefit Apple’s other products in that way?
(We don't have to like it, or work at or buy from corporations.)
$100k in profit is not $100k in profit to a company that makes $1B a day: it is a massive operational risk. Not only is the revenue a rounding error, but every product on the docket represents a meaningful sacrifice of agility and exposure to unknowable risk.
One of my smartest mentors once told me (and then reminded me a dozen times) that a company can only have three priorities at any given time. If an initiative does not make the top three cut, it is tabled for the future. Your executive team - and indeed, the entire org - should have those priorities front and center as they make decisions and spend their time. "Does what I'm about to do advance one of the top three priorities?" is a clarifying question.
Every person in an org can have three personal priorities, no more. Every person should be able to confidently tell you what those priorities are. Those priorities should all meaningfully tie back to the company priorities.
My mentor was, some 20 years ago, the in-house corporate counsel for a large telco. Amongst his responsibilities was M&A and foreign expansion. You'd think these would be priorities, but you'd think wrong. His initiatives were consistently tabled, politely but assertively. It was the best thing for the company.
On the flipside, companies and leaders than cannot embrace laser focus on top priorities tend to be slowly dying, even if they don't realize it yet.
In the end, $1B a day is $1B a day to lose, if they don't focus on their top priorities. Frankly, I think it's some combination of branding and charity that they haven't just stopped making computers.
Most geeks know the value of everything and the cost of nowt. Especially those costs measured in risk, be it risk of a code exploit in some mature stable part of the OS that almost nobody uses, or the risk of ceding a trillion-dollar primary market to competitors while preoccupied chasing secondary tails.
Having blown my first startup by sloppy unfocused mismanagement, I can attest to this lesson the hard way.
(And yeah, the only reason Macs still exist is because Apple has to protect the whole productivity ecosystem that puts Apps in its iOS Store. ’Cos the moment it cedes that foundation to a competitor, the whole company is lost.)