11–20 of 82 posts
Kinda weird how much of this is the opposite of what worked.
I felt reading this is what life for a CEO must be like. To be continually bombarded with 101 ways to do the job. 80%+ are wrong, from people who absolutely believe at the time they are correct.
Kinda weird how much of this is the opposite of what worked.
I felt reading this is what life for a CEO must be like. To be continually bombarded with 101 ways to do the job. 80%+ are wrong, from people who absolutely believe at the time they are correct.
I love reading posts from the past like this, ironic how things actually played out for Apple. Interestingly a few of the points actually happened, specifically; point #7, point #12, point #14 and more interestingly "39. Build a laptop that weighs 2 pounds." - kind of fitting that this played out for Apple focusing on thinner and lighter products than competitor offerings. This takes me back to the days leading up th…
16. Take better care of your customers -- Apple support is pretty good, especially if you can get to a store
26. If you sell it, make it -- Their supply chain integration and control is impressive today
38. Make it easier for ISVs to make applications -- The app store and the development ecosystem is important for apple
50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development -- This paid off hugely
53. Recharge your strategy for Europe -- Apple is a very global company and is pushing into lots of markets
59. Invest heavily in Newton technology -- Apple parked that particular project, but the iPhone and iPad followed
Some clearly joke entries, and some misses and terrible ideas, but definitely some interesting insights as well.
If you'd bought $10,000 of AAPL stock when this article was published (June 1997), it would be worth about $523,000 today, excluding dividends.
They are a for profit (and quite a lot of it) corporation that makes shiny gadgets.
Why do we keep talking about them incessantly? If we are not talking about what Apple is doing now, then we are talking about what somebody said about Apple 20 years ago.
I'm of course making the problem worse or meta-worse, if you will, by talking about talking about Apple, but I just don't understand this whole deification of a profit making entity.
7. Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople, and display everything like you're a living, breathing company and not a remote, dusty concept.
If you'd bought $10,000 of AAPL stock when this article was published (June 1997), it would be worth about $523,000 today, excluding dividends.
I spent $4,500 on a G3 + 17" monitor in '98... it was an amazing machine :)
It was a lot slower.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I felt reading this is what life for a CEO must be like. To be continually bombarded with 101 ways to do the job. 80%+ are wrong, from people who absolutely believe at the time they are correct.
I think it's worse than that. You don't know the right answer, nobody else knows the right answer, and the only way get by is to guess and hope you get lucky. Apple got lucky. They built the iPod, which in hindsight, was a trans-formative product, but at the time it wasn't so obvious.
They fixed all those problems later versions, but the initial device was underwhelming to a lot of people.