11–20 of 39 posts
Well argued rebuttal and counter by John Kirk at Techpinions https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-...
Thanks for sharing - I wouldn't have found this otherwise. Is anyone aggregating discussions like this today? NYT has some opinion pieces and shares rebuttals, but I haven't seen long-form opinion aggregators around.
Services are hardly a unique Apple specific problem though. For a few that get services right you'll find many that suck. It takes a very different collective mindset, culture, processes and iterative improvements - those are a no brainer. Beyond those it also takes unconventional innovation at multiple different levels - look at how HTTP2 happened for example and look at how everything underneath GMail must have imp…
Weird.
This is dated 4/19, but I would swear I've read this (and seen the same organizational graphics) before. Was this already posted somewhere else? Is this a summary of a bigger work that is getting the summary treatment on multiple sites? Weird.
https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-reorganization-i...
This is dated 4/19, but I would swear I've read this (and seen the same organizational graphics) before. Was this already posted somewhere else? Is this a summary of a bigger work that is getting the summary treatment on multiple sites? Weird.
Edit: I see you found it
As I understand it, the "jewels" (retail/consumer) do depend on AWS...they supposedly are strong on "eating your own dog food". But, they have roughly equal footing and representation. There is the difference that Amazon's services can be sold standalone, rather than just bundled, I suppose.
This post makes the case that Apple is not organized in a way to allow it to effectively run services like iCloud, iTunes, Apple Pay, etc. I haven't worked there in ten years, but back then at least, I'd agree with that. Teams and orgs were heavily siloed and vertical. However, then it goes on to say a few things that I think are harder to defend. The author talks about how it's hard for Apple to build good services…
Well argued rebuttal and counter by John Kirk at Techpinions https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-...
Well argued rebuttal and counter by John Kirk at Techpinions https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-...
Well argued rebuttal and counter by John Kirk at Techpinions https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-...
His opinion is interesting, and leads to the question: Why shouldn't apple start a services division, with it's own process, managers and internal profit and loss, but that would have somewhat limited independence, by definition - in major decisions they would have to consult the CEO and the other divisions to make sure this doesn't interfere with the hardware products.
But a lot of what would make Services profitable isn't necessarily good for the rest of Apple: squeezing people harder to upgrade storage space for pay, paywalling popular features like Find My Phone, or selling iCloud for Android might all make Services look better on paper but hurt Apple as a whole.
Your proposed compromise, if anything, might make Services worse -- take it from someone who's been there, there's nothing more demotivating and worse for productivity than being held responsible for the bottom line while not having any authority to do anything that would improve it.
And if you're not going to hold the Division responsible for its financials, there's no benefit to moving it out of Engineering.