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What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

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Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#31

Post by jacquesm »

taytus wrote: post #14
paganel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sense that they started out wanting to build a car and later on they decided not to build it anymore after having realized what it actually entails. I'd call that a failure, as in "failure to build a car which I wanted to build". Pivoting doesn't change anything, we all move on after our failures.

How can a company with literally mountains of cash plus the engineer power Apple has, fail to make a self driving car? I'm not saying at all that is something easy, but Apple is a beast in terms of resources. I confess that I don't get it.

> How can a company with literally mountains of cash plus the engineer power Apple has, fail to make a self driving car?

Because:

(1) it hasn't been done yet, nobody has a self driving car that is even close to being ready for the market

and

(2) just designing and manufacturing a new car is a huge undertaking.

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#32

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

stdbrouw wrote: post #26
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #13

This is what happens when you're a design company masquerading as a tech company. Do they design beautiful products? Abso-freaking-lutely! Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no! They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services, their websites suck (particularly their developer portals), they can't write a functional USB stack, macOS has more bugs than eve…

> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services, So does everyone else. > their websites suck (particularly their developer portals), I'm sure consumers care about developer portals. > they can't write a functional USB stack, Never had any problems with it. > macOS has more bugs than ever, How did you quantify this? > even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill. How did you quantify this? ... I'm not…

>> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services,

> So does everyone else.

That's fair, but given the size of Apple they're doing disproportionately poorly.

>> their websites suck (particularly their developer portals),

> I'm sure consumers care about developer portals.

I didn't say consumers care. Consumers care about design, which is what Apple focus on, that's my point!

>> they can't write a functional USB stack,

> Never had any problems with it.

Plug in a USB 3 hub. Any USB 3 hub... seriously.

>> macOS has more bugs than ever,

> How did you quantify this?

As mentioned, Apple have a complete lack of transparency that makes this difficult to quantify. However, articles like https://eclecticlight.co/2016/09/28/known-bugs-in-macos-sier... give some incite. I've been using OS X/macOS for years, and at least in my personal experience it's been mostly downhill since Snow Leopard. Finder is particularly buggy, although Apple Mail also crashes at least once a week. Waking from sleep seems to wreak havoc on all sorts of things, why does my mouse and keyboard start playing up?

>> even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

> How did you quantify this?

As above. Just personal experience. I genuinely do not use iOS much, I do admit that. I use it purely for development, a lot of which recently is just web development. However, Safari seems to have an uncanny ability to crash iOS entirely! Allocate a lot of large WebGL textures and watch the system burn.

EDIT: To clarify the "downhill" statement, large WebGL texture allocations on iOS 8 do not cause a system crash, just the expected Safari tab crash. On iOS 9+ you'll be sent to the white boot screen at least 50% of the time, and things will get hot (on the same iPhone hardware).

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#33

Post by berntb »

dharma1 wrote: post #27
berntb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, Apple starts lots of development projects and a lot of them gets "Steved". If the new product isn't enough better than the competition or won't have enough profit margins... axe. (Point is, the project might have been doing well and following the plans -- but Apple might have found that the target market niche was too small. Or the margins might have been too low for Apple.)

Very low margins generally in the car industry. It would have been a money pit for Apple

There are low margins generally in the phone industry, too. And in the computer industry.

My point was that Apple probably cuts large projects with too little earning potential.

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#34

Post by worldsayshi »

tdkl wrote: post #19

Still better "failure" then Googles "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" with its products (or even multiple similar existing at once - see messaging) that year per year slowly eroded the trust in the company.

"throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" - Is this really a bad thing? You have to try things in the real world to get anywhere. Are there any companies that can see into the future to see what works?

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#37

Post by gutnor »

dharma1 wrote: post #27
berntb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, Apple starts lots of development projects and a lot of them gets "Steved". If the new product isn't enough better than the competition or won't have enough profit margins... axe. (Point is, the project might have been doing well and following the plans -- but Apple might have found that the target market niche was too small. Or the margins might have been too low for Apple.)

Very low margins generally in the car industry. It would have been a money pit for Apple

Premium is very premium in the car industry. It is one thing to find $3000 to buy a laptop. It is expensive for a laptop, but it is in the realm of purchasable by a large chunk of the population.

It is quite another endeavour to find $100K+ to buy a car, no matter how you can rationalise it. The total market size for car at that price is probably in the 6 digits cars worldwide and shrinking in the western world.

That falls quite far from Apple business model and expertise.

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#38

Post by cyberferret »

oarsinsync wrote: post #3
NicoJuicy wrote: post #2

a seemingly rare defeat for a company that has done little-to-no wrong in the last decade (save for maybe the Apple Watch depending on how you look at it). --> Google Maps vs Apple Maps?

Took 3 years to turn that around > Apple Maps is now used three times as often as its “next leading competitor” on iPhone and iPad https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage-numbers/

I never actually open the maps app on my iPhone. I just ask Siri for directions, and I presume she uses the default Apple maps as the base.

I'd suggest that the data is skewed because a lot of people would be doing the same thing. The evolution of the phone UI basically indicates that individual apps are fading as identifiable components. Modern bots and mashup interfaces just pull data from different app/sources and present an amalgamated view. I neither know, nor care whether Siri is pulling her route data from Google or Apple maps, or somewhere else.

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#39

Post by pjmlp »

brisance wrote: post #16
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #13

This is what happens when you're a design company masquerading as a tech company. Do they design beautiful products? Abso-freaking-lutely! Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no! They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services, their websites suck (particularly their developer portals), they can't write a functional USB stack, macOS has more bugs than eve…

Come on. Are you seriously suggesting that Apple is not a tech company? Have you seen their chip designs? Do you know of any company that ships in volume that has successfully migrated from two chip architectures which is still around today?

If Steve Jobs hadn't returned to Apple, we would be talking about the Macs the same way we talk about Amiga and Atari nowadays.

I clearly remember the not so good situation Apple was in around 1994, with Copland failing to impress.

Re: What Apple’s quiet failure can teach you about your business

#40

Post by hasenj »

redial wrote: post #36

I don't call this events failures, I call them tries . And many, many tries are required to learn and create a single success. But maybe that is why I'm no analyst .

I can't help but see this as a post hoc rationalization.

When Steve Jobs was at its helm, did Apple have failures that it needed to rebrand as "tries"?

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