Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option.
Under Cook Apple:
- Increased profitability and market share massively.
- Created the most successful watch brand in the world.
- Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world.
- Massively increased Mac, iPhone, iPad, install base.
- Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of.
Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious.
Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook.
is
> but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.
Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.
Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.
After having purchased most every iPhone release since launch, with the prior model gifted to family, this year we switched to iPhone-as-a-Service subscription on the Apple Card.
Post shift, Apple moves me out of making a $1300 buying evaluation decision to simply ‘staying current’ for forty bucks a month for the flagship model.
This was available for a while, took a while to break through my sense I should “own” my device each year instead of subscribe to it, but the mental stress of buying new and reselling old, inevitably ending up with some in a drawer (iPhone 6s anyone?) ... the subscription is hassle free for me, recurring revenue for Tim, and shockingly well priced given the convenience.
Imagine what their numbers would look like to Wall Street if he could turn most of their hardware buyers into subscribers...
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/62/environmental-...
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
[1] https://industryeurope.com/5-tech-giants-sued-over-use-of-ch...
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
[1] http://iradvocates.org/sites/iradvocates.org/files/stamped%2...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGL...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6273952017ENGL...
That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.
I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is the fast killer.
It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.
It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.
And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.
It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
I have seen that headline every year since 1984. Every single year.
Though with the size and cash reserves, it's more likely they get "doomed" the way Microsoft was in the last 10 years (still is, perhaps).
Remember when TV and radio repair shops were a thing? RadioShack in the US or Tandy in Europe? Kids these days don’t...
That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed.
The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born.
Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either.
The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it.
The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content.
> Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet.
Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it.
Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
> Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers
While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple.
AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.
[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market.
See also, Apple Watch.
More emotion.
As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
No, customers not being able to look at things with a reasonable sense of perspective and ability to judge things reasonably impartially is to be borne in mind when considering sweeping claims. Somewhat different.
Steve Jobs: We are still Better!
Bill Gates: Does it Matter?
Time will tell.
Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion.
They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work.
"Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac."
We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got without apple catching up.
Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability.
And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem.
Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it.
They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS.
I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well.
> I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s.
You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adoption. Yet Ive left, perhaps due to feeling that Apple has drained itself of ideas and doesn't have any concrete plans in future. FWIW, most of its recent products were envisioned when Jobs was alive.
But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.
Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.
Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.
The issue with Macs for me is not the usability of the OS (apart from the lock in that Apple tried to do), but because of its irreparability. Spilt a few dropfuls water on your PC while using? Tough luck, gotta go to the Apple Care centre and wait till they fix it in a week or more. Meanwhile once I accidentally spilt water on my ThinkPad, I just disconnected everything, left it to dry for a day and voila! All of my data was preserved, no issues at all. Another time, I accidentally dropped the ThinkPad from my desk, yet it still works as good as new. Even if some issue were to happen to it, I can be assured of getting out-of-warranty support anywhere in the world - heck, I've had an old Dell repaired at the bloke's who runs a computer shop in my grandfather's village in rural India.
Another gripe I have is with Mac's updates. People complain about Windows updates, but it just takes an hour or two tops if it's a big one, and can be done on restart. Compare that to Mac - last year, Catalina took more than 10 hours on my Mac. Those are wasted hours of productivity, and it's always the same story with Mac every year.
Gamers who use Windows and devs using Unix seem not to mind.
As an aside, I have almost the same setup as you(just waiting for the 5950x). Probably the most bang for buck setup for devs.
I completely agree that it's still less bad, but look at the language you're using. It's not that MacOS is a great platform, it's just less bad than the other options. It had a great starting position from which it declines. It's a lot worse than it used to be and it continues to decline, so the trend and outcome are clear.
> How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
EXACTLY!
The iPhone is now 14 years old. The iPod lasted 6 years until it got replaced with the iPhone.
Apples great advantage used to be that they competed with themselves. It was the Macintosh Team vs. the Rest of Apple for example. The Macintosh was allowed to completely cannibalise all other Machines, the iPhone was allowed to completely canibalise the iPod, the iMac replaced the Cube and was allowed to completely cannibalise most tower macs.
They didn't create a huge product portfolio trying to balance features so that they all sell equally well, crippling some for the survival of others (e.g. where's the iPad Pro with XCode, or a MacBook with LTE). They tried to make the best product that would revolutionise the markets, even if it would kill their other products. Because the Products were front and center, not the profits.
If apple was still apple, we wouldn't have Macbooks anymore. We'd all use iPad Pros with proper software and keyboards that can balance them on your laps.
We probably wouldn't use iPhones either, we'd simply have Airpods, an appleWatch, and an optional larger screen that you slide into your shirt pocket or your wallet, or carry as a pocket mirror. Doing 90% of interactions through Siri (which is also 8 years old now, ancient by computer standards, still worse than what it used to be, because apple wants to save money on compute).
Why would Ive leave if he had the power to shape that future.
Neither of these extremes are healthy attitudes. It's a company, making machines. That's all there is to it.
That's something Nadella hasn't even managed, let alone Ballmer.
More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.
Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.
Nadella is a great CEO.
Cook is a great CEO.
They've both done a good job running their respective companies. Which is better is endlessly debatable.
Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear
People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy.
It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.
https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/
I don't think you can characterize that as a business failure.
Google has only one cash cow. They don't know how to develop products and how to win customers. I feel like products at Google get developed when someone has a bright idea, and then as soon as they get promoted they go do other stuff, and the business isn't really about nurturing a new product. All they care about is their big ads cash cow, with which nothing can compare.
LOL, I agree. Ballmer at least came across as a strong leader, if wrong-headed at times. Sundar just comes across as a weakling yes-man trying to please all the sides.
I couldn't / can't get my work calendars to work on google home, but I can get my work calendars to work on Alexa - let that sink in! Been a top complaint for years - they just don't care - it's really all about the new stuff.
Apple - a lot of nice features that solve problems I had usually on new releases.
If you don’t live on the coasts, and you want to invest in a stack that will keep you employed indefinitely and wherever you go, you pick dotnet hands down, and I say this as someone who hasn’t written a line of dotnet code
They have a widely used desktop operating system, a top-3 public cloud, they make their own laptops and other hardware, they make multiple widely used programming languages, they have one of the most widely used databases, they have a well regarded research division ... the list goes on
The scope of tech that MSFT works on is as big as anyone, and is what they primarily make their money from ... so why wouldn't anyone think it's "big tech"?
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft on SQL, but I am not in management nor do I speak in any capacity for Microsoft.
and so it's not seen ad big tech, even if it's used by more people.
maybe it's also because MS tech talks don't really make no1 on HN.
Loud people do not always reflect reality very well :)
They have sustainable business models in several segments, and even though they aren't on the cutting edge of pop culture, they're doing well.
One thing about Microsoft, their tooling just seems more polished and things tend to just work.
I'd be surprised if a lot of start ups don't start using c# since it's now open source and more platform agnostic.
Surprisingly the phone was loved. What wasnt loved was the one desktop everywhere so when they tried to push 'Metro' to the PC, tablet and phone it struggled. But the tiled phone interface was good, and a lot of people liked it.
I really think Ballmer and Cook are manifestations of the same person. Mac OS quality is the worst it's been in probably a decade+? Hardware design for the laptops have been under massive scrutiny. Cook brought the Watch to the table which is a massive success. Their services business plan is just a money grab like their approach to accessories. But Apple isn't innovating much, they have been cashing in in recent years (besides the watch imo, maybe airpods but Id personally disagree)
Though I think the biggest problem there is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was one more event in a fairly long list of Microsoft technologies and APIs that were shipped to much fanfare, and then abandoned shortly after release. It made it hard to feel comfortable trying any Microsoft tech that wasn't at least a fewy years old. Including mobile APIs. Which, given what happened with Windows Phone 8, did not turn out to be an overabundance of caution.
The problem hurt more than Windows Phone, too. A lot of people got sick of having the rug repeatedly yanked out from under them, and started developing on non-Microsoft tech stacks. Which then removed a lot of the need to run Windows Server, and things sort of snowballed.
Despite all his infamous ranting about the importance of keeping developers happy early on, the Ballmer years turned out to be the era when Microsoft perfected the art of alienating developers.
Oh, and they decided to only target the high end of the market, instead of a full range, so they lost the low end market that was selling a lot of phones in poorer nations.
/rant of a dedicated windows phone enthusiast.
At least firefox lets me put the urlbar at the bottom now! And Android picked up dark mode from WP as well.
They were also a couple years late, as for android and iphone had considerable market share.
I think the same can be said for google these days, there is no reason to risk investing time or money into one of their new technologies because it will get dropped if its not one of the big 4 (search, ads, youtube, GCP, maybe arguably android)
The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
They did fine, insofar as they're still profitable and well-capitalized, but one has to wonder what things could have been like for them if they hadn't spent the aughties playing Dr Strangelove's Hand with themselves.
OTOH, one could argue that spending a decade eating humble pie was a necessary step in teaching them how to play nice with others.
For sure, I think MS was panicking tbh. They missed the mobile revolution (This was Ballmer and Gates), and then cloud was starting to take off and realized their OS and Office products were not optimized or read for that shift. I think they realized they had to change, and change fast and as a result didn't go well. But at least it started the change we see today with MS (for good or bad).
My memory is fuzzy on the specifics but the breaks weren't done just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, refactoring on a titanic scale on the Windows Phone OS was underway along with the same on Windows itself to both make Windows a componentized OS that would work on anything from a tiny mobile device to a huge server and to synchronize the architecture of WP to Windows. By the time of WP10, as the old joke goes, "the operation was a success but the patient died". It's kind of a pity.
iOS has not been unified with OS X, and Android has not been unified with Chrome OS. And all four OSes are quite successful despite the lack of unification. Meanwhile, the Windows RT Surface tablets never took off, and the Windows 8 unified experience was universally recognized as an unmitigated disaster on launch day, if not earlier.
It was a gamble that enough native desktop apps would remain for this strategy to pay off, but they lost to web and electron apps.
But they didn’t want to take the risk with a low margin high cost center activity like providing in person support and expanding headcount. Hence no reward.
And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
On top of that, even though that was towards the end of the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers, it was still the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers if you bought directly from them.
Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that. Many consumers didn't blink if there was a huge sticker price difference between the iPhone in the AT&T Store and the unlocked one in the Apple Store, because it was a luxury brand. Microsoft was never going to earn that. Additionally, if a lot of people showed up to an AT&T or Verizon store with an unlocked iPhone and were refused a SIM that would be a major scandal, and would get a lot of luxury good "entitlement" people out of the woodwork. People told that they couldn't buy an unlocked Microsoft phone and use it on their carrier just shrugged and moved on (to an iPhone or an Android).
> And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
Windows and Office are still getting improvements, it is a bit disingenuous to consider those products "rent seeking".
Xbox and Surface are doing just fine with or without Microsoft-specific Stores.
Besides, both before and after the Microsoft Stores, Microsoft had good retail relationships with Best Buy and others. It's not like there is "zero" Microsoft retail exposure without Microsoft owning their own boutique retail stores.
I disagree. It takes time, money, and effort to earn people’s trust, but it’s possible. They obviously weren’t going to reverse a decade of shipping malware ridden computers, but they could have put out quality Microsoft products, and spent years earning back people’s trust.
And yes, maybe it wouldn’t work, and taking risks is part of business. But this is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, and they could have afforded it.
But if the point was to save the marketshare of Windows phone products via retail store presence, Microsoft didn't have time, they were racing a losing money clock and the shareholders were watching retail operations worried Microsoft was just "throwing good money after bad".
... in the USA.
Meanwhile the other 90% of the global market awaited.
I think it is another reason why doubling down on US retail store operations as an attempted run around the US carriers was ultimately the wrong plan.
Sad that we are stuck with Android and iOS basically now.
I'd still take WP over Android or iOS.
The app store was definitely lacking. In my own circle of real life users I did not meet one person that did not really like the phone (software included). Granted this is just my own experience so very limited but its also a group of non-technical people just sharing with me. I never heard one complaint in fact it was usually more accolades.
Biggest flaw at the time was Google's shady nonsense involving banning Google Maps/Youtube on Windows Phone without a native app.
As far as the Macs, outside of the keyboard fiasco which has been rectified, the recent Macs are getting good reviews from people who were rightfully critical a few years ago. The ARM Macs will soon be as far ahead of equivalent PCs as the iPhones are Androids when it comes to processing power.
And I think USB-A isn't quite legacy just yet (it's OK they ditched the VGA and/or DVI ports), there are still a lot of need for one of those ports. Same with a card reader slot. I also think there is a need for a headphone jack even though bluetooth is qutie viable.
This is an odd thing to blame on Ballmer — he was CEO already during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 launches! His CEO tenure was 14 years...
Why doesn’t he get credit for making Microsoft a top vendor in gaming?
Such a shame they sold it off and yes I know the reasons but it was the best phone I've had in the modern century.
> "Windows Phone"
You can lay that at Terry Myerson's feet. The several breaks in backward compatibility was a big factor in ensuring WP had no apps.
> "Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360)"
That was crappy decision making by Don Mattrick. He also had a hand in killing Flight Simulator IIRC.
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
Tim Cook has done a fantastic job.
So ummm, maybe a slight difference in performance.
The one that hurt Microsoft was the EU decrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission may remind you of that.
That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.
Ballmer became CEO in 2000. But Bill Gates continued being involved in day to day operations until 2009.
Considering that Microsoft got religious about security in the 2000s, and this was a shift in corporate policy, I give credit to Ballmer.
But ideas are a dime a dozen. I give credit not to coming up with the idea, but to actually putting in the elbow grease. And there is no question that Ballmer put a lot of elbow grease into keeping the initiative going.
A company is more than its stock price.
In fact according to the CAPM economic model, it is impossible. The assets of the company decrease by the money spent on buybacks, which matches the value of stock bought and destroyed. This should leave the price per remaining stock unchanged.
All are second order effects.
As for losing out on programmers which (my words) essentially reduce the exponential behavior that tech was experiencing. I'll say this. It is sad. Rent seeking is a typical behavior of any company that gets large.
I'm actually now wondering if something is preventing these companies from growing very fast, like a national actor.
If you look at Amazon, they are in numerous industries and have a little market share of them and are trying to innovate in them. Amazon isn't slowing down either. I find it an interesting case study. Only AWS is helping programmers, many other products are actually against user's interests.
Another case study would be Tesla. They are emerging as a most likely monopoly due to their relentless innovation. But they don't harness community programmers either. I believe this will change overtime, since Musk has said this for many years but I doubt there will be a lot of freedom in their system either.
I want to see a company that is innovative and allowing others to innovate on their platform. It would be very valuable to society if we do this.
Sure, there are no home runs here, but he's effectively executing a coherent strategy and hasn't really had any big mistakes. I wouldn't put him as high up as Nadella and I certainly wouldn't put him as low as Ballmer. It's tough to be the guy who follows the founder and Cook has handled it well. I don't know who is out there who looks like a better candidate or a suitable replacement for Cook.
> Sure, there are no home runs here, ...
Huh?
AirPods + Apple Watch are bigger than either the Mac or the iPad and are growing much faster.
Companies don't crank out iPhone class "home runs" every 10 years. Microsoft had the Windows and Office, Google had Search and GMail (and made solid acquisitions in the form of YouTube and Docs). Facebook had Facebook... and bought everything else they own worth a damn.
Apple created a $25 billion/ year product line (AirPods/ Beats/ Watch) under Cook... but it's not a home run?
Prior to 2010: Search, Doubleclick, Maps, Mail, GSuite, AppEngine (which was first serverless platform). All of which were category makers or category killers.
Since 2010:
Android - Acquisition
Doubleclick - Acquisition
GSuite - Acquisition
AppEngine?? - Is that still around?
Google is indeed rudderless, but it's been mostly just milking their search cash cow for a long time.
We're still on Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, using iPhones to play digital music. You say 2020, I say 2009.
Wireless earbuds and smart watches I guess are the only "game changing" (they're not) inventions of note for the past decade?
Web... phone... computer... they're just more refined versions of products we had in 2009.
Android was launched in 2008, although I think it really deserves to be in the post-2010 category. Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Google Home is a new product. And tied in with Home & Android is voice recognition, which is definitely post-2010. Voice recognition may not be a standalone product but it has radically changed how I interact with technology. It counts.
Google Hangouts launched in 2013. Google's whole messaging platform has become a muddled mess that they're only just now untangling, but hangouts video was a huge hit for a while.
Of course it's hard to top hits like Search, Gmail, GSuite, and Maps... but there's progress.
Does it define the category? Is Google Cloud 'the' cloud provider? "Just spin up a box on GCP" the default thing for people to do in tech?
> Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Is it? Android 4 (which was around that time) is pretty close to android as it is now.
> Google Home is a new product
And? Is it category defining like maps or Mail or GSuite, did it create something entirely new like GAE did for serverless? Is it the default home assistant? Do people outside tech even know the name 'Google Home'?
> hangouts video was a huge hit for a while
And now it's close to dead. Never reached the heights of Skype or Zoom.
None of these products are category defining.
That said, Google's voice recognition does "define the category". My iPhone-using friends barely use voice recognition.
As much as HN poo poos the Apple Watch and the AirPods, from a technical standpoint it is much more innovative than the iPad - the last product that was introduced under Jobs. Once you have the iPhone, using the same technology in something with less constraints was easy. The Watch is just the oppposite.
From a financial standpoint. The Watch already produced more in revenue and profit than the iPod at peak. As does the AirPods.
Not to mention that Apple could have never shipped in volume without Cooks supply chain management expertise.
Then there are the upcoming ARM Macs that will probably be the fastest personal computers in the industry in a year or two. The $399 iPhone SE is already faster than any Android phone at any price.
I recognize Apple's A series and S series chips are different, but both the chips and watch in general seem like incrementalism to me.
The Watch being smaller, it’s technically much more impressive that it has an always on display, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, heart rate sensors, altimeter, gyroscope, 32GB Storage, and it still gets 12-16 hours of battery life.
While the Apple’s A series is already 2 or 3 years ahead of everything else in the mobile market, nothing is even coming that close to the S series chip.
They’ve been laying the platform groundwork for AR for years now, that’s not an accident.
Easy to say "making good quarters" is table stakes, much harder to come up with a vision that works. What do you see as possible visions Cook could pursue given Apple's positioning?
What Satya has done is incredibly impressive and will be much studied IMHO
For what it's worth (and this is mostly seperate from your point I guess), most of the time when people say "big tech", they're talking about the negative cultural, political, and economic impacts of those companies. Maybe its not so bad to not be lumped in with Facebook?
They are currently the 2nd biggest company in the world by market cap. Around double the size of Facebook.
They might not be cool or trendy in tech circles anymore, but they are without a doubt a big tech company.
Their OS runs over 70% of desktops [1] and their office suite has over 80% of the market share [2]. And that's just the sectors they completely dominate in before we even talk about other sectors that they are involved in with major competitive products. Xbox, Surface, Azure, SQL server, Power BI, Windows Server, .net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, are all huge popular widely used tech products. And I'm sure there's more that I don't know.
And then add GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to count recent acquisitions that still seem to operate mostly independently at the moment.
1 - https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
2 - https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-collabo...
But Cook isn't Ballmer, either.
At the end of his regime MS lost top-tier tech place (when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS), he lost the main Microsoft advantage - an army of Windows programmers. MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers, to the point where MS needs to ship Linux kernel with Windows just to get cosy with programmers again.
Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.