I expect a more telling difference is whether the management of the successful company is overtaken by people who are better at political infighting than competing with other companies
One wonders why.
* Lingering influence of Jobs? Even now? * Their somewhat well known weird corporate structure? * A cultural conviction that they are the underdog, instilled decades ago when Apple was doing badly, a conviction that is cherished with such religious fervour it survives even today when Apple has been top 3 market cap world wide, has reigned the profitability-in-cell-phones charts for over a decade, and in general has a profitability that makes your head spin, it's incomparably large (literally: Compare it to other big corps and it is mind boggling).
I just don't know what it is. I find it remarkable that Apple does _not_ seem like it has had its fair share of political infighting and forgetting to compete. It has had its share of that, sure. But not its fair share. Not even a tenth.
These massive companies that epically fail to adjust, is it primarily a management style (cliché representation: Private equity takeovers – focus on 'management is a job unto itself, I do not need to know much or care much about what this company actually produces', and perhaps as a consequence, cost cutting over care about the product, and considering the general opinion about your company and products as a 'brand thing that I do not need to care about; I have a marketing department for that who can fix this by tossing some ad euros at something')...
or is it more fundamental, that even with pretty good management, companies inevitably turn into a giant rusty smattering of cogs that generally keeps running but is nearly impossible to reconfigure? That we should e.g. study what Apple is doing with its odd corporate management structure: That it is _exceptional_ for a larger company to be able to pivot quickly regardless of market, circumstance, or management team?
Or is software development just uniquely difficult and therefore it is highly likely that a company that starts with a better-than-average grip on that and worse-than-average everything else still wins over a company that needs to 'buy in' to software?
Not enough data to really know, and the answer probably a convoluted mess of 'a little bit of everything'.
I know tech workers don't like to hear about this, but it's something you all need to keep in mind as you plan your careers.
Hardware engineers (most of them, anyway) make awful software developers.
They always get dregged on any slightly flexible process and higher level development.
The cost of programming those displays is relatively small and fixed, it doesn't get more expensive if you sell 1 million cars or 10. But these companies still haven't managed to have proper processes for the software platforms for their cars so the software ends up sucking.
They treat their cars like video game developers, once done and released there might be a few patches. But the next car is mostly rebuilding the software from scratch.
On an aside as more people are becoming aware that buttons and knobs are actually nice you will likely see them coming back, but only on the more expensive vehicles.
While the inflationary overuse for touchscreen is driven by cost (and fashion), it's not really like that buttons are coming back only in higher priced cars. Dacia being the cheapest European automaker uses lotsof buttons in their cockpits.
Car is perfectly fine (despite being an anaemic ICE), but damn fix your UX.
People shit on Teslas touchscreen, but buttons on your Toyotas are worse - smaller, crowded and hard to discern.
Audio connectivity feels designed by lawyers who wish you to crash car as quickly as possible (thinking about this loud - maybe it’s a good thing, like the tullock spike?)
Edit: Your not meant to try and pair your phone while driving on any car.
Would love to hear people's opinions on car UX though. The Tesla is terrible too, as are most newer car brands. I haven't minded Hyundai cars, and I recently drove a new Nissan that was decent.
I ended up just not using Bluetooth while I drove that car because it was such a nuisance. I'm not sure whether it was so bad because of incompetence (they never considered users not wanting to share contacts) or out of malice (they know they can wear people down through harassment and hassle to eventually share their data).
I will literally never get a car without CarPlay. But even excepting that, Tesla's UI mostly sucks.
The answer to shitty buttons isn't shove it all 3 layers deep in a touch screen menu, it's better buttons.
Siri is how I interact with my car while driving. Tesla’s voice recognition is straight out of a 2005 flip phone. I can’t just call someone or play the music I want to hear without touching screens. I can’t just tell the GPS where to take me because it doesn’t understand proper nouns. It’s maps routinely don’t have things or have inaccurate data. (I do love that you’ll be driving through a neighborhood and it shows you every goofy home-based business in the DB though.)
The last thing I want when driving is distraction and their UI seems designed to do it as much as possible, probably so you’ll give up and pay them for self-driving. Or you can drive at highway speeds while digging through a convoluted touch screen just to control your HVAC.
I use tons of apps on CarPlay that don’t exist on Tesla. Tesla supports very few. Apple maps is bad, luckily you can use others easily.
Tesla’s UI is so bad I honestly thought you must be trolling for a second.
This is reminding me of Motorola, or really any of the old cell phone companies that were blown away by Apple and smart phones. It was easier to get a company that was good at software to make phones, than it was to make a company that was good at phones to make software.