Interesting read.
Though, there's something fabulously pretentious about writing an opinion piece and then concluding it with a "Lessons Learned" section.
Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
121–130 of 307 posts
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#122It's also a power game, who gets the next number one spot. People want to have their shot at giving direction to such a big ship. So they make friends with the current boss, ensure loyalty by key employees to themselves, gain authority over important projects. Then you cannot just fire them or put someone else in front of them. I think it's also okay, that companies come and go. If you look at it more closely each company is simply a paper and a bank account. The ideas and people who made the disruptions possible will move on to other paper-account combinations and innovate there.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#123It'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?
> a big product line There's your mistake - next to i-devices, the Mac is simply not a big product line. It's something they need to have around for ecosystem developers, and something of a brand exercise in other sectors. Nothing more.
True, but why is that so? Apple wants the high end consumer. Gamers are high end consumers, and yet Apple doesn't sell them high end desktop or laptop machines with gaming capable GPUs. Also no VR/AR gear. This seems like quite a strange omission from their product line.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#124I can sort of see the analogy but it does disservice to the way Ballmer led Microsoft to become anti-customer in their promotion of DRM technologies, among other strategic errors. Tim Cook seems genuinely pro-user in his emphasis on privacy.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#125One important thing that visionaries get credit for, but perhaps shouldn't... Being in the right place at the right time. It is a delightful bit of luck that Steve Jobs made it back to Apple. That scenario could have been way different where Apple bought BeOS, and Steve Jobs didn't return to Apple. If Jobs isn't at Apple, he doesn't have the opportunity or resources to make his vision for the iMac, iBook, iPod, iTune…
I'm not so sure. Jobs learned at lot at NeXT, I think the next company/product he would have worked on would have gotten it right, even if it hadn't been Apple.
Getting it right is not what I'm talking about. I'm saying doing the exact same kind of thing. What if his next company would have been building an online store like Amazon. Does he end up building the iPhone from there? Probably not.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#126The 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…
It seems to me the comparison being made between Ballmer and Cook is not in their characters, but in similarities between the directions their companies take under a comparable set of circumstances.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The cost for Privacy is pretty big in terms of loss of convenience. If people really cared about it duckduckgo would be huge and gmail would have never gotten off the ground. Facebook would be a desert. Most people feel comfortable sharing and being a mostly open book. Only real privacy people care about is who gets to unlock their phone. Most people are lost in that their privacy is they are one flake in a snowstorm…
> Apple just makes things harder for their customers with their attempts on privacy.
In addition to Siri, what else would you put on the list of things made harder by Apple's privacy positions/implementations?
(Edited for clarity.)
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Ballmer got hate because Microsoft's consumer products consistently flopped. The stuff that those of us who flipped to Apple while he was in charge used (Zune, Windows Vista, original Surface, Windows Phone) were consistently underwhelming. However, Ballmer was simply inarguably an effective CEO from the perspective of investors. He grew the enterprise business consistently (which has a huge amount of value for l…
For the kids out there: “original Surface” isn’t what you think. It was a “smart table” and its most compelling use case was to present a menu right underneath your place setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxk_WywMTzc
For me its most compelling use case was as a gaming table. At Origins I got to see it used for D&D. Quite fun, but too expensive an option for the average gamer (who isn't already buying Geek Chic furniture).
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I only have one thing about the pseudo-AI craze that I'd like to hear from Apple to get my business: Seeing how their current top end SoC is so powerful, stop sending all sorts of data to external parties to offload the compute requirements to make stuff like Siri work.
I thought Apple specifically didn't send your data to external parties. That's one of the reason Siri is behind Google, which does send you data to their servers.
AFAIK that's not correct, which is why it doesn't work offline.
See e.g.: "[Nuance rep] said that Siri has both embedded and cloud technology for voice recognition, but that the feature is overall a cloud solution."
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/30/nuance-confirms-it...
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#130It'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?
> a big product line There's your mistake - next to i-devices, the Mac is simply not a big product line. It's something they need to have around for ecosystem developers, and something of a brand exercise in other sectors. Nothing more.
…and what are the thousand? people in the division doing for years at a time?