I think you’re more explaining what happens than why it happens.
Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be. When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to.
Once an organization has grown to multiple layers of management the people on top will eventually become those who are good at climbing the ladder.
How we choose our leaders is IMHO one of the most important problems we yet don’t really understand. It’s partly a function of how we structure our organizations.
Just trying to play devils advocate, im not sure it’s possible to do it differently. You simply can’t replicate true founder attitudes and mentality and choices with a management with stock options and fiduciary responsibility.
Steve Jobs seemed to be very concerned about this and spent a lot of time trying to create an innovative organisation independent of him. What have we got since him? A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone.
It’s really depressing but I’m not sure as humanity we can do better really. The entrepreneur is just someone who starts with nothing and creates something. You can only go so far in recreating that in a large organisation.
> A smart watch and ever increasing apple taxes on the App Store. And incremental improvements to the iPhone.
And Swift, and Apple Silicon, and FaceID, and HomePod (which hasn't been a massive success but is at least an attempt at something new), and a return to the Cheese Grater Pro, and massive improvements to Maps, and the perpetual autonomous driving rumors. What am I forgetting? Oh, Apple actually halved App Store rates for smaller developers, inducing the stores on other platforms to do similar. Maybe some of these were on some sort of roadmap that Jobs left behind, but not all of them could have been.
The "innovation at Apple died along with Jobs" argument is looking more and more ridiculous as more time passes and Apple continues to innovate.
And you can’t talk about the Apple Watch without talking about the other half of its wearables: Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative.
And who was talking about wearables before Apple entered the game? Only nerds, pretty much. There is something to be said about Apple repeatedly setting trends in our society. Many will chalk it up to “Apple worship” or whatever, but I think the real answer is that Apple is one of the only tech companies who can innovate in the cultural space.
> Airpods, which are near-universally lauded and undoubtedly innovative.
Are airpods innovative? I thought wireless Bluetooth headphones have been around for ages, including ones with better (subjective) aesthetics and sound quality than airpods.
This is a sincere question. I'm not familiar enough with airpods to know if they have some novel feature, or pulled off a magic combination of marketing+quality+features that predecessors had not, like the iPhone did.
Ha I get you, I tend to have a low opinion of Apple products so I try to temper my assumptions and ask questions about the products with an open mind.
Hm, my understanding is that this combination of positives wasn't especially novel in the wireless headphone market. Was it?
As far as the design, I tend to think Apple has historically excelled at design, to the point that my favorite phones aesthetically have been shameless Samsung rip-offs of iPhone designs. But I don't see this reputation lived up to in their last few products: eg, the square Apple Watch is a lot uglier than the contemporary (at launch) round Motorola offering. And I personally find Airpods to look like hearing aids; I was recently in the market for high-quality Bluetooth headphones and the Airpods' hideousness is part of what knocked them out of the running.
Also, the size is key. Hearing aids keep getting smaller and less visible while continually improving at varying performance metrics, and airpods represent that technology starting to impact the consumer market.
GP probably meant that people pay more and more for apps. They buy more apps or more expensive apps or more people buy apps. In other words, even with rate staying the same Apple has ever increasing revenue from the App Store.
And the GP would be wrong. Apps have never been cheaper and the App Store is a prime reason. The drive to $.99 or free apps started there.
Apple's increase in services revenue is primarily due to the incredible number of Apple devices in use, as well as the increased number of services being offered now.
I’m curious about your “apps have never been cheaper” comment. Is that actually true? Does that take into account long term ownership (recurring subscriptions)?
When the App Store first launched, it wasn't unusual to find apps being sold for more than $20. That quickly dropped to where it was hard to find an app that cost more than $.99. Of course this meant that many large vendors simply didn't create or sell apps in the Store, fearing to cannibalize their products.
Now the model has shifted to subscription based apps. But even with these, there's a huge amount of free apps as well. It appears that the majority of income comes (as it does in Las Vegas) from "whales" who spend an disproportionate amount of money, primarily on games.
I’m sure we can do better, but not sure exactly how. Working with longer time periods for incentives is probably of importance. Actively nurturing creative behavior rather than just risk mitigation also. I think this is something organizations need to be aware of because it is not natural.
Also I don’t think we are at a optimization level where only the most radical types like founders are needed. It is probably enough to get out of the way of reasonably smart people. I see this in the public sector all the time.
As the company grows the types of people that are attracted and unattracted by the company change, as do those that are accepted and rejected by it. For example, risk averse people are attracted to mature companies, and they don't like risk takers.
One of the consequences is that companies become more specialized and lose deep expertise. To put it bluntly, its because they no longer have people with deep expertise, and even when they do they are ignored by management who tend to be less interested and knowledgeable about the subject matter.
I don't know of any company that has tried to prevent this. It's a general force that permeates everything, including recruiters, HR, their job postings, etc. So even companies that think they're preventing it probably still walk right into it regardless.
Of course, specialization is not necessarily good or bad. In a very competitive environment the company may not have a choice.
Why it happens is because you cannot find a genuinely creative person with the drive and motivation needed to keep pushing a juggernaut like Blizard forward who would be willing to drop their own creative vision and adopt the one of the original founders. Who knows what they'll do? When its time to eat plates of shit will they do it? It's far too much risk to put an unknown in that position.
Your only option is to send in the corporate fleet because they're predictable. Even if they've failed before they will never surprise or throw out any curve balls to investors and shareholders and that's valued far above the possibility of a new creative spark achieving something.
Personally I know every project or initiative I’ve pushed for is because I have a vision of how things should be. When I give up the reigns to someone else, usually they’re just doing it because they have to.
There’s no replacement for passion.