Ballmer led Microsoft through years of sales and profits increases. Maybe MS isn't "cool" but he certainly left a very solid and profitable company.
Being compared to Ballmer is a compliment in my view.
Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
211–220 of 307 posts
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#212There are clearly many holes in Apple's armor these days, but the one that irks me the most is how Apple's literally handing the Education market to Google. I swear if Apple's hardware announcements this week don't include a Chromebook competitor I'm going to figuratively scream.
Chromebooks are fantastic products but I grew up in the Microsoft dominated 90's and hated it. It feels like Apple's almost trying to make itself obsolete in markets it once owned. Competition please!
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#213Even 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
There are developers that actually do enjoy using Microsoft stacks, even though we also have experience using other systems.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#214Hey I may be wrong one day and this comment might not age well but I believe what Apple _is_ doing with AI is crucial. Baking privacy into AI and ML is really necessary and I'm happy someone is thinking about it. I think Apple has a lot of AI stuff going on behind closed doors.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#215The 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…
Apple has a chance to really essentially poach away people if they could come up with a system of social media and search and email that offers privacy and security at least in the private sector. I would pay a certain amount to use a social media network, email, and search capability that was not open to monitoring and tracking and surveillance.
I think people, in their foolishness abdicated the internet to the siren's song of "free" back in the early aughts and we have been suffering the consequences ever since. I know there are solutions to the kind of centralized power and control and surveillance the both Google and Facebook represent. We CAN create social networks and have search without tracking. It's just that few with the clout have tried to overcome the hurdles and the network effect. I think society is ripe for a shift to a different kind of digital life that is not a dystopian surveillance state. Apple could do that and fully integrate with their phones if they wanted to. It could even open up a whole different market for marketing and commerce, not by tracking, surveilling, and monitoring; but by self-selection, offering, and selling. What Facebook did was just lazy, as all authoritarian, totalitarian surveillance dystopian regimes are.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#216Earlier 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.
Siri does indeed send your voice requests off to a server to be 'understood.' But, IIRC, it's all Apple-owned with no third parties involved.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#217The 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.
Actually, their mistake is not trying to leverage the privacy first approach better. If as the author stated, Apple had more innovation in its blood, they could come up with things like social networks where the user is in control of content and data and users are not farmed and harvested like livestock.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> announced very few new products. Look it up, he's actually announced plenty. Just they're kinda underwhelming. Off the top of my head: MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil.
MacBook, Mac Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone+,MacBook HDMI Dongle, iPhone Headphone Dongle, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Pencil. These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products (in the blue ocean sense) as seem to be defined in the article. This is the complaint the article makes with "execution" executives. As products they're all mechanisms for increasing revenues on existing (re: stagnan…
Mac Pro, Apple Watch, Pencil, Apple Music were not iterations. There was nothing similar before them from Apple.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These are primarily iterations or extensions of existing products, not new products Some much more than others. If you apply this logic consistently, the only new products Steve Jobs introduced were the original Apple (II), the Mac operating systems, the iPod and iOS. Everything else was an iteration, right?
These were not just product transitions, but radical business model transitions – new channels, new customers and new markets–and new emphasis on different parts of the organization
Alexa is the perfect example of a product that could have been made by Apple but wasn't, and which ticks all those boxes.
And not just those. Apple's big strength isn't hardware, it's ecosystems. The hardware was always just a front end to a network of unique systems, markets, and services.
The latest Apple offerings seem to have forgotten that. Watch is primarily a shiny widget, not the thin client the iPod and iPad were. The latest Macs are heading in a similar direction. There are more services, but they're less appealing to users because the UI designs have become clunky, and there's no sense of forward momentum among many user groups.
With Alexa, Amazon has proved that it can play the consumer game too. Alexa includes links to content providers, links to hardware manufacturers, and links to other software services.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a crash R&D program to create Apple's own version of Alexa. (I would be surprised, but maybe not completely, if Siri Home appears on the 27th. I'm guessing next year is more likely and 2018 isn't impossible.)
But it may be too late. Amazon has a first mover advantage, and it can only drop the lead by allowing the platform to stagnate.
Amazon may well do that. Bezos seems to suffer from occasional new product ADHD, so he may not follow through.
But there's certainly huge potential to take Alexa much further, and if Apple is going to compete any R&D project has to aim for where Alexa could be three to five years from now, not where Alexa is today.
Which doesn't change the fact that Apple could have made Siri Home first. The hardware was always available. The only thing missing was Cook's lack of vision and drive.
Re: Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
#220Apple does appear to be losing focus. For example: Apple has devalued the PRO moniker under Tim Cook's guidance. By trying to ram it's Mobile OS into a PRO product (iPad PRO). I mean the UI grid is still 4 x 5 on a massive 12 inch display. Nobody noticed it feels more like Fisher Price? And the iPad "PRO" apps are all dumbed down, feature limited versions of actual pro desktop apps. Then, by stagnating a once well re…
The Mac Pro and MacBook Pro are still very capable, solid, and focused machines. Go into any dev shop on the planet and you will see that's true. The only point your comment is right on is the Pro moniker being attached to an iPad.
The Mac Pro is pretty ancient at this point. If you see them in dev shops, it's because they simply don't have any other choice: if you want a powerful desktop Mac, then you buy the Mac Pro, even though it's three years old.
And even that is not necessarily true anymore. The iMac tends to beat it on many tasks now. At this point, people buy it because they really want to bring their own monitor, or they just can't imagine an iMac could be faster, or they are one of the few people doing something the Mac Pro is still better at.