From an outsider, it doesn't appear to me that Google is data driven, or at least they haven't ingrained it in their culture universally.
I can't imagine data lead them to believe they needed the 4 or 5 messaging apps they had at one point with the mix of hangouts, allo, duo, etc.
The quality of the companies products then stagnate or rot, as the product people are always in a rush to meet the requests of upper management - who of which have no idea what it takes to make a good product. So everyone's being micromanaged to meet stupid metrics - rather than the outcome - a good product.
As so it's not so much about micromanagement, as so much as having the best decision makers throughout the company. But none of this matters much when you're big, or have a monopoly...
For Jobs-era Apple, your incentive is to make something Jobs liked and the only reason that worked was because Jobs had great taste (subjective ofc) and a strong vision of what he wanted.
Amazon is very very focused on outcomes and that's what incentives a lot of decisions. Being data-driven is a tool to understand and measure the outcomes and inform decisions.
Google from the outside may be data-driven but data-driven to do what?
Jobs wanted to make a great phone, amazon wants to be your everything store, Google wanted to organize the world's information but the company has far exceeded that original goal and it's not clear what they want to do now.
That's what we keep seeing products that seem to exist for their own sake in many companies imo and those products struggle to find footing and die with no learnings.
Interesting point, particularly in light of their history of starting up products only to kill them off 2-5 years later. One could say they are data-driven to sell ads, but that's almost overly broad and makes it hard to explain niches like self-driving cars.
Sometimes they hit a big opportunity like Gmail and it grows like crazy, but a lot of the time there's actually no market for their product, or the technology is nowhere near ready to work at scale. This leads to a lot of canceled projects.
Apple products were visually-distinctive, but I wouldn't call them beautiful; they were relatively easy to use, though I wouldn't call them intuitive. But because they passed the bar in those two respects - in other words, because Apple products were not ugly nor difficult to use, and therefore not completely repellant on their face - the way was opened for Jobs to execute his coup de grace: positioning (through advertisement, third-party association, and pricing) the iMac, iPod, and eventually iPhone as markers of one's own affluence and taste. Everything else coalesces around that kernel of desirability, whether it's warranted or not. The "unifying sense of taste" of the products themselves is an illusion; what matters is that everyone agrees that Apple is the premium choice, in a society where premium (not necessarily fit) is of utmost importance.
This is why Apple stores and support are so crucial. Every generation of Apple product has a competitor that's more elegant, better-performing, more durable and reliable, better integrated within its own ecosystem, etc. But, again, what Jobs understood was that humanity always trumps engineering in the way our social and cultural hierarchies are constructed. Concierge and community are more desirable - more premium - when problems inevitably arise or UX inevitably fails. They maintain the illusion of usability when usability itself breaks down.
Jobs was just really good at playing people.
Just the fact that Apple actually provides software updates for devices for years longer than their competitors seems to disprove at least part of this statement. Their investment in retail stores and customer service is laudable, but to say the iPad has any competition in any of the metrics mentioned above is not true.
>Apple actually provides software updates for devices for years longer than their competitors
This is also debatable. The nature of Apple's sandbox means that it's much harder to find third-party support. A nominal official upgrade that effectively bricks your older device doesn't compare favorably to a PC or phone that can have FOSS replacements installed that actually increase performance.
Apple is the only company that has nailed the premium computer. Why?
I think you're right that platform lock-in is one factor. I think the other factor is that Apple uses their own proprietary operating system. They have control all the way down to the hardware level and that gives them an advantage. When I close a MacBook it goes to sleep. When I close a premium Windows laptop there is a fairly high chance it's going to overheat in my bag. This is of course an issue that can be fixed but its only one of many smaller things that make up the whole product. Because Apple consistently gets enough of them right people look past the smaller flaws and see a polished product in a way that is not often seen in consumer electronics.
Not quite. In fact, the premium media player space is essentially the only one that still exists. They're mostly Android-based devices with high-quality DACs for the playback of lossless, high-bitrate music files.
>Secondly just because Samsung Andriod phones or Dell XPS laptops are nominally premium doesn't mean they are on par with Apple in terms of how they are perceived by consumers.
I disagree. Microsoft's Surface line is also seen as premium, and Lenovo's Thinkpad line is still considered to offer top performance for business and enterprise customers. In phones, Apple is not unassailable in the US, and outside it, deals with heavy competition from Samsung and Chinese brands.
>I think the other factor is that Apple uses their own proprietary operating system.
You sound like a fanboy.
I'm not a fanboy, I have plenty of qualms with Apple. For example they run their new MacBooks so hot that they are constantly throttling. The lack of 32 bit support on Catalina is a pain in the ass and Apple won't let anyone else repair their machines which is BS. I personally use an Android because iPhones are way overpriced but I have a MacBook because I need it for work (React Native). I'm not arguing that Apple is the best I'm arguing that they have a brand image that is well above the competition in a way that you don't see in other markets.
Isn't it hard to generalize like this? Consider Apple under Jobs: arguably Apple succeeded because of Jobs micromanagement because Jobs had (to quote Bill Gates) "great taste". Without that unifying sense of taste, you get something like Google, which is quite data-driven, and which doesn't have any unifying personality.
Although, in a way it feels funny drawing general conclusions from observations of unicorns which are, by definition, extremely rare and unique. It feels akin to cargo-culting.