His working style and some of his personal history seem like they would not have worked in 2020s.
I could see him as a board member, occasional informal consultant. But not as head of the company. And I don’t know if he would have liked that too much.
I think if he was CEO of Apple in the current environment, certainly there would be less hero worship outside of Apple, and a lot more people would be writing pieces critical of his leadership style and effect on the world, but there wouldn't be anything serious enough to force him from the company given how well things would be going. In other words, he'd be much closer to Musk than Kalanick both in terms of the severity of the criticism and his ability to weather it.
https://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-med...
Versus other sources that say Jobs did delay treatment.
> And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Developers are customers too.
In the past decade, Apple's focus is self-centered: optimising for profit. That has come at the cost of community. Will the new hardware solve that? It's a welcome improvement! I use a laptop for data storage, and am worried about being unable to quickly swap my SSD over to a spare laptop (restoring 8TB will take a long time). I'm very pleased about the return of MagSafe, though, and battery replacement. Will Apple's software improve? Will Apple listen to developers? Or will the Linux community act first to welcome more newcomers? We're going to find out this decade, and I'm excited to see what changes it brings.
Apple became the most valuable company in the US before Jobs passed.
>"Maybe it'll be a billion-dollar marketplace at some point in time. This doesn't happen very often. A whole new billion-dollar market opens up: 360 million yearly run rate in the first 30 days, I've never seen anything like this in my career for software,"
>"Music is a two and a half billion-dollar business a year for us. I'm thrilled at $360 million a year run rate. We'll be dancing on the ceiling if we cross a half a billion. Maybe someday we'll get to a billion."
He also said he doesn't believe App Store will overtake iTunes in revenue. But that was at the launch of App Store in 2008.
Forward to 2010, App Store was nearly $2B. Still not as much as iTunes, but it was growing fast. And projected to overtake iTunes in 2011. He didn't understand the App Store market. So it was uneasy for him. He spoke about it in multiple interview since 2008. But he was sick, and well aware oh his health. On his last trip to Japan in 2010, we wrote "All Good Things", the last part "must come to an end" wasn't written out. But he must have known his days may be numbered.
Remember 2010 to 2015, Apple was about, or at least perceived to repeat the same mistake of Macintosh and Windows again. Current iPhone 13 in launch quarter would have sold more iPhone than all iPhone 2G to iPhone 4 combined. iPhone revolution has barely stated despite most of nerds realise how big of a change it will be.
In 2015 the war has pretty much settled. Android will never be able to destroy iPhone. And iPhone growth projection has zero momentum lost. I wrote on AI how Apple will reach 1B iPhone user in 2020 at those projected rate in 2014. At least Phil Schiller was aware of it in 2014 and floated the idea or lower commission rate from "Strength". I am sure if Steve was alive and Scott Forstall was still on the team you would at least have some support of that idea.
The problem is right now no one has the conviction to say no this isn't a business we should be in. Certainly not from the number guys like Tim Cook or CFO. iTunes was used to sell iPod. App Store should have been used to sell iPhone. Instead it is now used to extract value from iPhone users aka Services Revenue. Scott stood up for Developers, Steve did too. As shown in email released in court. And I am pretty sure Katie Cotton would have smelled the PR disaster before it even started. But all three are gone.
After the App Store: Apple takes 30%
But let’s not pretend that most of the App Store revenue comes from poor indie developers. It comes from pay to win games, loot boxes, and other in app purchases with zero marginal costs.
But again, you’re not standing up for the poor starving Indy developer. You’re standing up for companies that are doing far more sinister things going after “whales” than anything Facebook has ever done.
There are several things wrong with that statement.
1. If these companies engaged in truly destructive business practices (and it could be proven), then Apple has a duty to remove those apps. Every developer has to pay them $99/year to be registered, so that money should be funding the removal of these supposedly exploitative and 'sinister' apps.
2. You cannot prove that the majority of these businesses are all big.
2a. Even if you could prove that, it's common knowledge that Apple is the largest company in the world, which renders that entire argument moot.
3. How do you delineate between indie developers and 'whales'?
3a. When you do differentiate the two, how is it ethical for the largest company in the world to ask for more of their profits?
4. Apple isn't standing up for the poor indie developer either, which is why it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to do better. There is not a company on this planet with more liquid cash than Apple, so there's nothing wrong with asking them to just improve their treatment of developers when consensus is that they're one of the most exploitative and destructive companies in the field of consumer electronics.
2. I said that most app revenue comes from “whales”. Those are the players who spend the most money on play to win games. https://medium.com/shopify-gaming/mobile-gaming-is-a-50b-ind...
3. Indy developers are selling a product that has value. The “whales” are the 5% of consumers buying loot boxes and candy crush coins (?).
3a Most of their profits are not from the App Store. Most of their profits come from a simple ethical business model - I give them money they give me stuff. Unlike Google and Facebook or the aforementioned games.
4. Who are all of these poor developers Apple should be standing up for? In the link above (and the numbers were confirmed during the Epic trial), most money is coming from games with in app purchases. If you look at the top selling apps on the App Store now, the last one that I can remember that came from Indy developers is WidgetSmith. How many Indy developers would be successful if Apple took a 15% cut instead of a 30% cut?
Well, there's the FlickType guy[0] who got kicked off the app store only to have his product completely cloned by Apple. Then there's the Hey! email people who went to hell-and-back just to get an inoccuous update approved. Not even a year ago there was a class-action lawsuit against Apple by developers[2], and Apple's "compromise" was to charge less for a service that was provably garbage. They know their 30% cut is illigitimate, that's why they backed off so quickly. Even still though, they charge certain people 30%, others only 15%, and then the big companies like Netflix get away with 0%[3] because of insider deals that other apps cannot benefit from.
So fixing that would be a good start. Then they need to allow for alternative payment processors (as pressure mounts from countries like South Korea and France), and hopefully get rid of their asinine sideloading requirements that do nothing for the user except make it harder to get the functionality they want. These feel like non-negotiables to me, and as a developer I have no intention of supporting their software or using their hardware until it's fixed.
[0] https://www.inputmag.com/tech/apple-blocked-the-flicktype-wa...
[1] https://www.engadget.com/apple-basecamp-hey-email-app-store-...
[2] https://www.axios.com/apple-settles-developer-class-action-c...
[3] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1444367219509637123
Netflix hasn’t allowed in app subscriptions for years.
Every developer with in app subscriptions only pays 15% after the first year.
If Apple’s 30% is garbage, so is Google’s and every console makers.
Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
As far as not allowing side loading - that’s a feature not a bug. Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I’m referring to well known software companies.
- Zoom installed a web server surreptitiously on Macs so when you uninstalled the software, it reinstalled it (https://www.zdnet.com/article/researcher-says-zoom-web-serve...)
- DropBox does all sorts of evil on Macs.
- Fortnite side loading introduced a vulnerability on Android (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/fortnites-android-vu...)
- Google and Facebook convinced users to install VPN software using a corporate certificate that allowed them to track users in other apps.
- not on purpose. But if you had system integrity protection turned off on the Mac and installed Chrome, it made the system unbootable (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/no-it...)
I agree. We have to hold Apple accountable first though, because they're abusing it hardest.
> Do you support Android? Have you bought any game consoles.
I do support Android, through F-Droid, and while my app wouldn't benefit from existing on a console I've sideloaded several apps to my Xbox One without any problem. I played through Castlevania last week and it ran flawlessly, so it's mostly Sony and Nintendo who are holdouts at this point (and I say that as someone with a hacked Switch).
> Are you really unaware of all of the malware that is on computers because of no sandboxing?
I'm fully aware. I just don't think it matters when the iPhone has much more malicious attack vectors, like zero-click iMessage exploits that cut straight through BlastDoor like it didn't exist. Maybe once Apple fixes their more egregious security vulnerabilities and embraces transparency they'd have an argument: but right now it's a poorly-disguised and obvious excuse for lock-in.
But it wasn’t about court. It’s about you selectively choosing who to have moral outrage against. So Apple makes too much money as the most valuable company in the world. But Microsoft and Google are the good guys even though they are also making obscene profits and are worth a trillion+ dollars?
It is sad. No one knew what to do with Apple Retail. That was the most neglected part of business.
Ron Johnson left. Scott Forstall forced out. Katie Cotton retired. ( I felt both Scott and Katie had a bit of Steve Jobs in them ) Mansfield retired. It sometimes feel Apple is now largely run by Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.
Although the new MacBook Pro do seems to show there are people in Apple that still give a damn. That their voice may have been previously drown out. Quote from Steve.
>It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
>So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
Really wish Steve was still alive.