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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

kensegall.com

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Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#81

Post by wat10000 »

duxup wrote: post #3

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here. I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.

I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.

If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.

This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#82

Post by ratelimitsteve »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #9

Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.

for something useless it worked very, extraordinarily well

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#83

Post by ratelimitsteve »

bsimpson wrote: post #22
FrankWilhoit wrote: post #9

Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.

This might be the worst take I've ever read on this website. I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the Jobs reality distortion field. But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to go out and buy the…

as someone who bought the creativelabs mp3 player back in the day, the ipod was absolutely better and I was just being some combination of cheap and contrarian

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#84

Post by delusional »

gwd wrote: post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

> I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app

That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#85

Post by wat10000 »

sjm wrote: post #34
roywiggins wrote: post #12

Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and takes away from the article.

Yes. Pretty hypocritical for an article about "crossing red lines" to use AI slop for an image of a real person. Very disrespectful.

It's not hypocritical for an article about crossing someone else's red line to simultaneously be crossing your red line.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#87

Post by Marsymars »

spankalee wrote: post #45

I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in the OS. Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment. Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every oth…

I'd pay $10/m for ad-free Apple/Google maps.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#88

Post by szundi »

jiggawatts wrote: post #73
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, a…

I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it. Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message. “Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”

[dead]

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#89

Post by accrual »

jabwd wrote: post #35
torben-friis wrote: post #15

I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better. Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux. So far, the experience is making me question whether my…

Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app. I'm sorry I came here to change a setting not dismiss a notification on your latest failed service thing that requires 20,- a month.

Yep. I have two un-dismissable notifications in the Settings app for two different AppleCare products. Can't dismiss them - you just have to have a red notification icon until they expire. Just turn off badges for the Settings app right? Sorry, the Settings app is mysteriously missing from the Notifications options.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#90

Post by furyofantares »

duxup wrote: post #3

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here. I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.

Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.

Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.

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