It's a little weird for me that a company supposedly in "maintenance mode" has been ignoring the Mac for so long. Even a 5th rate computer company can manage to come out with a new model once in a while. How did Apple get to the point where a company in "maintenance mode" ignores a big product line like this for so long? Is Apple not capable of executing on more than 1 project at once?
Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
61–70 of 307 posts
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#62Tim Cook is a "Bozo" - He has moved the focus away from computers and the companies core professional users and turned Apple into a fashionable health services company. They will coast for a while on their dominant mobile market share but eventually the stagnation and lack of new products will catch up to them. He built a watch, which was a "me too" product and answered a question that no one asked. Jobs would never…
The same could have been said about the ipod as well. It has little to do with computing and was marketed as a lifestyle product. Apple is notorious for being second to the market with its simplified vision of emerging tech.
Agreed. I'm having trouble thinking of any product category where Apple was actually first to market.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? I personally don't like all the pre-installed and unremovable stuff like Xbox, the fact that turning off Cortana is now really difficult, and how many knobs you have to turn to keep the os from sending everything you type to MS. Is that what's is ruining it, or is there something else?
That's been the argument since Windows XP and to a lesser extend Windows 98SE were released. Too much has been added! From my experience the thing I dislike about Windows 10 is how often I find myself using WidnowsKey+X to use it.
I've been around a bit longer. I remember that pretty much every "major windows version" (including the first) drew ire from Microsoft PC users. People complained about the transition from DOS to Windows (which was rough), from Windows 3.1 (and WFW) to 95, 98 to ME (probably one of the worst transitions), 98 to XP, XP to Vista (which had 90% of what everyone loved in 7), 7 to 8, and now 7 to 10.
Each iteration people hated it, then loved it. I don't think it's any kind of "Stockholm syndrome", each version introduced and refined new functionality that people grew to love. What a "Desktop OS" means seems to be really in a state of flux right now, so it remains to be seen if people love 10 (I'm enjoying it, but then again I liked Vista).
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#64The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings . Goog…
Azure seems to be doing well and some people expect it to overtake AWS sooner rather than later in market share.
The talk that Microsoft is irrelevant is a bit hilarious, given that they beat google on revenue and income last year. They have morphed from a company that is front and center to one that provides the infrastructure for the digital side of non-tech business. Microsoft Office is absolutely pervasive, and it's not going anywhere.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#65The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings . Goog…
> He's a man with principles and for this I appreciate him a lot, maybe more than I ever appreciated Steve Jobs. Is he really? I mean from a strategic point of view he currently only has to gain from giving that outward appearance. Occam's Razor tells me that he is just luckily able to tread the high road because for him its the one without toll booths.
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Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#66Even if I generally agree with disappointment at the apparent "maintenance mode" of Apple's product line, I am not sure Ballmer is the best analogy. My understanding is that Tim Cook actually is responsible for many of the supply chain innovations behind Apple's dominant product lines. This is an incredibly hard technical feat, not just blustery MBA crap. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Apple can put its enor…
If you take a look back, Steve Ballmer was responsible for a lot of the success of Microsoft. He mostly got hate because people hated Microsoft. I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated particularly compared to the good press Tim Cook as enjoyed.
> He mostly got hate because people hated Microsoft.
He was the face of "bad" Microsoft, the unashamedly anti-competitive win-at-all-costs bully. Gates could win some people back with his nerd-cred and things like the mid-'00s "security push". Ballmer was first and foremost a suit, or rather a suit trying to pretend he's down with the nerds just enough to screw them as soon as they turn around, and his "fuck you" attitude wasn't exactly friendly.
> I'm don't think Ballmer's list of accomplishments at Microsoft is fully appreciated
Probably because they were accomplishments for Microsoft rather than for the industry as a whole. Apple gets a lot of leeway because the iPhone really made a difference for the industry, not just winning but drawing a path. Microsoft has not really done anything like that since the Win 95 / Office / IE 5 progression.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#67The article is short on details why he thinks Tim Cook is like Steve Ballmer, except for saying that Apple is slowly missing the boat on AI. I don't know what Amazon does for AI, I haven't seen anything convincing from them, but I'll trust the author that they are working on it. However it's tough to beat Google in this space, because AI and machine learning is what Google has focused on since their beginnings . Goog…
I think Apple is making a mistake by taking the privacy first approach. I strongly believe people will be trading privacy for convenience and companies which shamelessly mine the customer data will win. This could also affect recruiting, since I assume it is more interesting to be working with AI projects in company like Facebook or Google where you have access to was amounts of customer information.
As time moves on, customers get more aware of the privacy implications of everything they do online. I think Apple is ahead of the pack.
Google cannot follow them because it's against their business interest.
I know plenty of people who do not trust Google and stay away from their products (including Android phones) as much as is feasible.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this were true Apple shouldn't be able to sell computers for a premium, and yet they do. 40 years should have been enough for commodification to take effect.
Apple in the PC market is a single digit percentage point(7.2) participant. Premium niche is a functional business model, but broad market speaking, commodification has taken place, in that 25% of the PC market is Other in most reports. That number is important because it implies that 25% of the entire market is "small" actors that have been able to leverage commodification. If you also consider Dell as a commodity v…
The parent implies that it will eventually drive the margins down. If you're saying that commodification has already taken place then it's even more impressive that Apple's line of computers can still command a premium and indicates that they have some kind of durable competitive advantage.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#69Apologies for this most gratuitous of bikeshedding, but if you're going to use proper superscripts, please sort out the line-heights.
You should be complaining to your browser vendor. It looks fine in Firefox.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally speaking a product company can't thrive off supply chain innovations. The market will move to commodification at some point.
If this were true Apple shouldn't be able to sell computers for a premium, and yet they do. 40 years should have been enough for commodification to take effect.
What if they are merely still selling computers at a premium because they merely used to be better and are slowly falling behind?