Local multi-user experiences and widgets headline Apple's annual software update.
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visionOS 26 adds a plethora of features that were already on other headsets
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AirPods and iWatch are upsells to iPhone.
Ask yourself: Take iPhone out of the picture, what happens to everything else Apple produces today?
1. Mac. Dies. Already functionally dead as a standalone product. Apple maintains macOS solely as a feedpump for iOS App Store. Because Apple isn’t completely stupid and understands to control its own destiny it must retain control of the building foundation. 1960s technology invented by Doug Engelbart, and when Engelbart died his obituary read “Inventor of the Mouse.”
2. iPad. Dies. Good first step to ubiquitous digital all-Apple home. Solid step to ubiquitous digital all-Apple K12 education. Apple started well…and just stopped. Something died. Family iPad is fobbed off to the kids, to divert from greater toys and tools. Edu iPad, nuked to bedrock by ChromeBook.
3. Apple TV [Hardware]. Give me a break! Did I mention somebody died? A dongle hung on the back of your 80" Sony Bravia is not a product, it’s a flesh wound.
I genuinely wonder what Jobs was thinking here, not taking the plunge on the second iteration. (Though with cancer returning and iPhone exploding, may just be he hit the max. number of balls he could juggle at one time. Should have delegated tho’.)
Television sets? Yes, world’s most saturated market. But, fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son, and one industry’s big bloated senescent body is one fast smart disruptor’s next all-you-can-eat buffet. All Steve had to do was hang a 40" solid black glass slab on every Apple employee’s home wall for a year. The true Apple TV would have invented itself! Opening already lost. Move along.
Television sets? Yes, world’s most saturated market. But, fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son, and one industry’s big bloated senescent body is one fast smart disruptor’s next all-you-can-eat buffet. All Steve had to do was hang a 40" solid black glass slab on every Apple employee’s home wall for a year. The true Apple TV would have invented itself! Opening already lost. Move along.
4. Apple TV [Service]. See Apple TV the box. Apple’s original and re-programming was already late to the game when it launched. Streamers today are dime to a dozen. Currently learning that customers are prepared to pay for one or two at most; one or zero in a recession.
Q. “How much is your product worth?” A. “As much as the market is willing to bear.” (Old business saw.) All streaming service vendors currently run on expectations that customers will purchase their product to get its original programming. Which they will, if you are Disney, or maybe second-tier Netflix. The rest? Pfft. Where have we seen a pattern like this before? iOS, Android, everybody else (Windows Phone/Symbian/Blackberry). Or Macintosh, Windows, everyone else (various). Or IBM, everybody else (BUNCH).
In practice, customers will fit themselves into one or other of the top two market leaders, whichever takes less squeezing. All the other vendors from #3 downwards, sooner or later squeezed out.
(It may be that second-tier vendors wise up, realize syndicating their exclusive shows to each other after first run actually strengthens their collective earnings, keeping them in the game longer. Had e.g. Amazon done this for The Expanse, we’d all be ruled by Martians by now.)
5. Apple Car.
Apple: “LOL, gotcha!” You: “Oh, Tim. You wag!”
Look, as Apple’s COO, Cook was best logistics fabricator in existence. But as CEO couldn’t even decide what ports to put on MacBook, directed New Product development engineers build both. (Can’t find the original anecdote so here’s a video reenactment.) If he knew this wasn’t his forte, he should’ve promoted a 2nd-tier underling who could to his CPO, delegated all that. Steve centralized everything, ’cos Steve could do everything. Incredibly efficient, zero fault-tolerant redundancy. Cook was great at one job. He could’ve, should’ve delegated all the others safely, but Forstall’s little “let’s blow up a skiff” move taught him not to. Mistakes all round.
Look, as Apple’s COO, Cook was best logistics fabricator in existence. But as CEO couldn’t even decide what ports to put on MacBook, directed New Product development engineers build both. (Can’t find the original anecdote so here’s a video reenactment.) If he knew this wasn’t his forte, he should’ve promoted a 2nd-tier underling who could to his CPO, delegated all that. Steve centralized everything, ’cos Steve could do everything. Incredibly efficient, zero fault-tolerant redundancy. Cook was great at one job. He could’ve, should’ve delegated all the others safely, but Forstall’s little “let’s blow up a skiff” move taught him not to. Mistakes all round.
6. Mac Pro (aka Trashcan, Cheesegrater). Not even a consumer product. Tiny, irrelevant tree sucker. No tree! Next!
I don’t know, do these still exist? Either way, top-end AV workstations are the least Apple-the-consumer-company product ever. (Over-wealthy fanboy boxen don’t count.) Handful of incredibly niche vertical market that couldn’t even support powerhouses SGI/Sun eventually. Huge margin, no volume at all. Only reason desktop workstation isn’t extinct today is that massively parallel server farms still have latency, so local data crunching still has a place. Realistically: buy a Windows workstation; you get an SLA with that. Post-blowout IBM and MS can burn nearly forever like a white dwarf on minimal fuel. Apple’s supernova won’t leave that much. Industry will dump Apple workstations the second its center starts to fall out out. No matter how good a premium technology, the Premium Product they purchase is absolute business continuity.
7. Earrings and bangles. Already done these. Customers buy luxury products for their luxury associations. One Osborne/Ratner/Elop boner, no more luxury, no more store.
8. iCloud. If you need this one explained, I can’t help you.
9. Any other things? Honestly, I pay very little attention to Apple any more. Their output’s not significant, and hasn’t been for years. The Cook board has already made Apple the next Microsoft, 20 years after Apple made Microsoft the next IBM.
This stuff is incredibly basic Business 101. I offered you Steve’s 5-minute masterclass to how the whole damn machine actually works, so here’s a first-hand testimonial if you’d prefer to try that:
Until and unless you understand Market > Product ≫ Technology, you know exactly two things: 1. how to earn top Slashdot karma, and 2. how to utterly bone yourself.
In the last quarter-century, I have conceived, developed, tested, used, documented, shared, and production-proved two technologies unrivaled on the planet (this is not a joke). Built in a cave, out of scraps (this is very slightly).
I know exactly where you are standing now. You’re an expert in Technology. You think this qualifies you to pronounce on Technology’s industry. You are wrong. Been there, done that. Twice too:
• First cost me 10–100K users and my foot permanently in Apple’s door, a phenomenal vantage point from which I could try shape a billion users’ future just a tiny bit.
• Second cost me my tech, $150K investment, and 3 years of my life.
Will I make the same mistake a third time? Nope. I’m a very slow learner but do eventually learn. Tech is least important. Know your market first.
If you watched Jobs’ lecture, the bit I connect to: scars. It’s a learning process.
When you have your own, look me up! Touch-wood there’s a $20Bn corporation and a $2Bn corporation with knifes drawn at dawn, and, in between, this Man With No Name yukking it up.
Until and unless you understand Market > Product ≫ Technology, you know exactly two things: 1. how to earn top Slashdot karma, and 2. how to utterly bone yourself.
In the last quarter-century, I have conceived, developed, tested, used, documented, shared, and production-proved two technologies unrivaled on the planet (this is not a joke). Built in a cave, out of scraps (this is very slightly).
I know exactly where you are standing now. You’re an expert in Technology. You think this qualifies you to pronounce on Technology’s industry. You are wrong. Been there, done that. Twice too:
• First cost me 10–100K users and my foot permanently in Apple’s door, a phenomenal vantage point from which I could try shape a billion users’ future just a tiny bit.
• Second cost me my tech, $150K investment, and 3 years of my life.
Will I make the same mistake a third time? Nope. I’m a very slow learner but do eventually learn. Tech is least important. Know your market first.
If you watched Jobs’ lecture, the bit I connect to: scars. It’s a learning process.
When you have your own, look me up! Touch-wood there’s a $20Bn corporation and a $2Bn corporation with knifes drawn at dawn, and, in between, this Man With No Name yukking it up.
HTH
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+1. And if Apple were a $10M company today servicing high-end technical markets, it would have heard every word you just said and say “Terrific! Tell us exactly what you need.”
BUT… this Apple today is a $400Bn company, servicing one global consumer market 2Bn strong. Can’t even hear you over the sound of its own money streams.
Apple has no use for your market, its unique needs and wants. Apple earns by selling 200M iPhones/year to the world, not 10,000 artisanal GIS systems to a niche vertical market.
Apple’s capacity for such niche-market adaptability and low-volume profitability died around Xserve. Right choice for its spectacular growth. But it does restrict the types of markets it can effectively target. Global, homogenous, consumer markets are Apple now.
…
This doesn’t mean Apple couldn’t vacuum up the entire GIS market if it wanted it.
I can see one great reason this would be worth it: Your specialist market already knows exactly what it needs and wants; and its needs exactly the right company to meet it.
Not Apple itself—wrong shape and size of business. However, Apple is easily big enough to manufacture new companies if it wants and has a market for them. (It has done this before, e.g. Claris).
Here is what Apple could have done 5-10 years ago, had it had started with Market and worked back (as Jobs taught), not made a neat tech and then try to work out how/who/why to sell it:
Identify a vertical highly-specialized market, e.g. yours with a crystal-clear need that needs serviced. Rigorous performance demands, absolute bleeding-edge; needs and wants a specialist product tailored to fit, and has the specialist budget for it. The moment Apple even thought of doing a headset, it should have identified that market and spun up VPGIS as a wholly-owned, wholly-independent company. Hand all VisionPro work to it, with its own board, goals, and startup budget, and leave it to run itself for 5 years.
This company develops and hones the high-cost professional-market new product, like an ATG or Xerox Parc except it sells its own product so it is self-funding and self-improving too. Write its charter so all employees from CEO to cleaner take 100% of the profit home, biasing the split in favor of so lower ranks receive a bigger percentage. This creates a lot of very smart, engaged, motivated people to excel. Experts who know their expert audience inside-out, and vice-versa.
Sell their product to its target market. All customers are two-way NDA’d, and they will respect the NDA or they will lose access to your product. Now watch closely how the product fares in production use, and revise and refine its design and implementation constantly. Not just the device, the whole support ecosystem growing around it. The market will be happy to pay a high premium in exchange for their seat at the design table, shaping the product. A product designed by them, for them.
All t daily learning-by-doing, and tight fast feedback loop with expert customers, generates a ton of information. That information is used daily by the company, so it’s production-proven knowledge. And that production-proven knowledge is sent back to the parent company (Apple), so that when/if parent decides it’s time to build a consumer version it already has all the technical unknowns, implementation bugs, fabrication processes knocked out, plus all the post-sale stats on how the device holds together out in the field.
And while “VisionPro (GIS) Inc” is trekking its 5-year mission, the mothership determines if there is a market for its own mass-produced, mass-marketed consumer-market iVision:
1. Who is iVision’s intended market?
2. What problem(s) do these customers have which [only] iVision will solve?
3. Etc, etc, etc. Until,
4. Sell iVision.
5. Profit.
…
This seems a more complex solution than Apple building a device and selling it itself. It is! More moving parts. BUT…
All of these parts are highly cohesive and loosely coupled. i.e. Each company, is designed to do one job optimally, completely uninfluenced and unimpeded by direction, inertia, needs, or bureacracy of the other, e.g.:
1. A behemoth like Apple can crush the world. Incredible mass. Massive inertia. No turning circle.
OR:
VPGIS can turn on a penny.
2. Apple customers adore novelties, surprises, one-more-thing, “Shiny!” Jobs 2.0’s Apple was THE market leader in creating, destroying, disrupting markets. Astonishing work.
OR:
VPGIS customers will murder a vendor that does that, out to parking lot and beaten to death with TPS covers. Niche vertical market customers require the exact opposite of mass-market consumers.
3. And so on.
There’s no way to reconcile these diametrically opposed world-views and business objectives within one body. Something will get compromised. (McDonnell-Douglas’s post-takeover of Boeing was an especially nasty example of conflict resolution, but typically the small upstart department is wrecked by the entrenched—just ask any MS department that wasn’t Windows or Office.) The only viable answer is to separate them cleanly so each is free to find its own way, what works best for the point in its evolution it’s now at.
One more thing: VPGIS’s GIS/AR headset isn’t the product VPGIS sells. The product is VPGIS itself: device, support, and seat at its design table. Very, very powerful product, done right.
Identify a vertical highly-specialized market, e.g. yours with a crystal-clear need that needs serviced. Rigorous performance demands, absolute bleeding-edge; needs and wants a specialist product tailored to fit, and has the specialist budget for it. The moment Apple even thought of doing a headset, it should have identified that market and spun up VPGIS as a wholly-owned, wholly-independent company. Hand all VisionPro work to it, with its own board, goals, and startup budget, and leave it to run itself for 5 years.
This company develops and hones the high-cost professional-market new product, like an ATG or Xerox Parc except it sells its own product so it is self-funding and self-improving too. Write its charter so all employees from CEO to cleaner take 100% of the profit home, biasing the split in favor of so lower ranks receive a bigger percentage. This creates a lot of very smart, engaged, motivated people to excel. Experts who know their expert audience inside-out, and vice-versa.
Sell their product to its target market. All customers are two-way NDA’d, and they will respect the NDA or they will lose access to your product. Now watch closely how the product fares in production use, and revise and refine its design and implementation constantly. Not just the device, the whole support ecosystem growing around it. The market will be happy to pay a high premium in exchange for their seat at the design table, shaping the product. A product designed by them, for them.
All t daily learning-by-doing, and tight fast feedback loop with expert customers, generates a ton of information. That information is used daily by the company, so it’s production-proven knowledge. And that production-proven knowledge is sent back to the parent company (Apple), so that when/if parent decides it’s time to build a consumer version it already has all the technical unknowns, implementation bugs, fabrication processes knocked out, plus all the post-sale stats on how the device holds together out in the field.
And while “VisionPro (GIS) Inc” is trekking its 5-year mission, the mothership determines if there is a market for its own mass-produced, mass-marketed consumer-market iVision:
1. Who is iVision’s intended market?
2. What problem(s) do these customers have which [only] iVision will solve?
3. Etc, etc, etc. Until,
4. Sell iVision.
5. Profit.
…
This seems a more complex solution than Apple building a device and selling it itself. It is! More moving parts. BUT…
All of these parts are highly cohesive and loosely coupled. i.e. Each company, is designed to do one job optimally, completely uninfluenced and unimpeded by direction, inertia, needs, or bureacracy of the other, e.g.:
1. A behemoth like Apple can crush the world. Incredible mass. Massive inertia. No turning circle.
OR:
VPGIS can turn on a penny.
2. Apple customers adore novelties, surprises, one-more-thing, “Shiny!” Jobs 2.0’s Apple was THE market leader in creating, destroying, disrupting markets. Astonishing work.
OR:
VPGIS customers will murder a vendor that does that, out to parking lot and beaten to death with TPS covers. Niche vertical market customers require the exact opposite of mass-market consumers.
3. And so on.
There’s no way to reconcile these diametrically opposed world-views and business objectives within one body. Something will get compromised. (McDonnell-Douglas’s post-takeover of Boeing was an especially nasty example of conflict resolution, but typically the small upstart department is wrecked by the entrenched—just ask any MS department that wasn’t Windows or Office.) The only viable answer is to separate them cleanly so each is free to find its own way, what works best for the point in its evolution it’s now at.
One more thing: VPGIS’s GIS/AR headset isn’t the product VPGIS sells. The product is VPGIS itself: device, support, and seat at its design table. Very, very powerful product, done right.
…
TL;DR: A company must optimally adapt itself to its target market, not the other way about.
That’s my best current working hypothesis on How To Business, which anyone who has more applied experience than I do is welcome to call “horseshit” and show me how Businessing is really done. Fingers-crossed I’m in the right ballpark tho’.
------
@Aurich: I know this is outside the “Dear readers” thread but if you want to punt it to editorial team, please do!
Have you considered trying business-dev war story interviews, similar to the game-dev war stories you’ve run? I loved those Dead Space interviews! (How things are made fascinates me more than things themselves.) Find a few tech industry veterans who understand their tech and how to business it, and how to weave great companies and stories from the union.
Tales of both successes and failures please! I lost my first $100K tech startup ’cos I didn’t have a beginner’s HowTo checklist of all the things NOT to do. (If I had a TARDIS I’d gladly go back 10 years to pay you $50K for one, and I’d have a $5M company now.)
I’m guessing this won’t immediately appeal to a lot of Ars readers; kids nowadays want to hear about spaceships with pew-pew lasers and fantasize of building their own; not so much Actual Reality of passion, ambition, endless hours, copious shitwork, getting kicked in the teeth; and still grinding it thru’ all till success or shirt. (Sounds suspiciously like work…)
e.g. I’ve devoured Ray Kroc’s Grinding It Out book plus The Founder movie adaption. Dick and Mac’s ”Speedee Service System” is exactly the sort of brilliant tech innovation folks here love to create, yet don’t realize the $Bn company built around it is brilliant creative work too.
But I know I can use all the pointers I can get; there will be some techies who realize they need to develop these skills to bring their own amazing ideas to market success; and this sort of “cross-pollination” article could draw in new readers from the other side: people already skilled in building businesses and always searching for hot new tech products and tech brains to build them. Hey, best way to change our world is to own the means to do it!
Tales of both successes and failures please! I lost my first $100K tech startup ’cos I didn’t have a beginner’s HowTo checklist of all the things NOT to do. (If I had a TARDIS I’d gladly go back 10 years to pay you $50K for one, and I’d have a $5M company now.)
I’m guessing this won’t immediately appeal to a lot of Ars readers; kids nowadays want to hear about spaceships with pew-pew lasers and fantasize of building their own; not so much Actual Reality of passion, ambition, endless hours, copious shitwork, getting kicked in the teeth; and still grinding it thru’ all till success or shirt. (Sounds suspiciously like work…)
e.g. I’ve devoured Ray Kroc’s Grinding It Out book plus The Founder movie adaption. Dick and Mac’s ”Speedee Service System” is exactly the sort of brilliant tech innovation folks here love to create, yet don’t realize the $Bn company built around it is brilliant creative work too.
But I know I can use all the pointers I can get; there will be some techies who realize they need to develop these skills to bring their own amazing ideas to market success; and this sort of “cross-pollination” article could draw in new readers from the other side: people already skilled in building businesses and always searching for hot new tech products and tech brains to build them. Hey, best way to change our world is to own the means to do it!
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Hmm, I remember Newton was Scully’s pet, and that it didn’t find its self-sustaining growth market. But my impression was Newton had a pretty clear picture of its target market: mobile business users. A decade before Blackberry did.
If my memory is correct (it might not be), what cratered Newton was Scully’s team understanding of that market: they did not understand it well enough:
• Mobile business users? Right market.
•Newton PDA? Right product for that market.
• Apple Computers? Wrong brand for that market. Fatally so. Except for Print-Publishing the “Apple” brand was instant death, no industry used Macs—the company was an industry joke, half-dead already.
Had Apple spun up a new independent B2B company called Business International Machines, untainted by smelly rotting fruit, installed an ebullient Steve Ballmer clone as its CEO and ordered him to sell the hell out of “Ford-N” PIM for his job, I think Blackberry would never have existed: BIM would’ve taken its market already.
…
(Scully shouldn’t feel too bad. When MS’s new product folks showed their bleeding-edge Courier prototype to Steve and Bill, Steve said “I don’t get it” and Bill said “Does it run Outlook?” and the Courier team said “No.” Bad answer. Courier got immediately canned, and the road to iPhone was laid. Missteps all round, and MS lost “Personal Computing” not long after.)
…
Newton isn’t to blame for Apple’s 90s plunge towards bankruptcy though. Apple 1.0 was already steering sideways by time Steve got kicked out, and it just kept on getting worse. Everyone’s kids playing with themselves for fun, no serious grownups asking “Who, Why, and Where the hell is our paying market for all this whizzy stuff?” Vast monies poured into new product development, lots of brilliant ideas. None of which ever created the new markets to buy all those products. Group insanity, really.
Apple’s last card: its tightly-coupled graphics market that would pay the earth for what Apple was selling: the best prepress productivity platform in the world. Top-end Macs and their exclusive 3rd-party app and tool ecosystem. That locked-in lifeline kept Apple alive just long enough for the right conditions for Steve’s return to emerge. Otherwise Apple would have extinct out by late-90s, just another also-ran flatted by Microsoft’s juggernaut.
(Michael Dell wasn’t wrong when he said: return money to shareholders and close the company down. Just didn’t notice something quietly evolving in the shadows, over where the workstations lived.
The Steve 1.0, who invented Apple 1.0 in the garage, was a snot-nosed kid. A amazing flash-in-the-pan first work; lacked staying power. Scully kicking Jobs out for his decade in the wilderness was best thing that ever happened to the man. Made him grow up. The Jobs that founded NeXT already knew how to make greatest hardware and software in the work. And he’d just been taught the lesson of his life in how NOT to sell stuff. So, he fixed this. Taught himself How To Business right, forged Jobs 2.0, and rest of his life is History!
…
Last ever product Jobs should have made? A super-NDA’d, private, internal training school: “How to Business Like Steve Jobs 3.0.” That Apple would likely own the world by now—there’s worse ways to live!
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LOL. Take your +1.
Mind, I got my first Mac before half of you existed. Classic II, ’92. Just two colors, postage-stamp screen—I was instantly hooked. My kind of computing!
ZX81 (’82!), BBC B, Classic II (Word 5, MacDraw, StyleWriter!), Performa 630 (Marathon!), 7500 (shitbox!), G3 (workhorse), iBook (Tangerine Terror/Ship of Theseus—under desk RN!), PowerBook G4 (Titanium, shit hinges), another Powerbook G4 (17" Alu, solid hinges, beast), MacBook Pro (15" Alu), MBP Retina (15"; first-gen 2012 and it 100% didn’t suck; flawless [except MagSafe needs manual cleaning], best machine I ever owned, love of my life; its corpse sleeps under my gardening stuff—one glass of water, fuck), MBP Retina (15" 2016—fucking banana that couldn’t even do lemon right!); current beastie is MBP Retina (14" 2021; loaded, primary production box to date). Also somewhat responsible for variety of iPads, and iPhones for me and fam over the decades; couple Windows mini PCs, various handme-up/down/overs which typical got Linux loaded; one HP microserver waiting in cupboard to be used one of these days. And, new addition, a shiny XPS 13 to learn VS on. Pretty. Much prettier than MBP21. Michael Dell honor satisfied.
Nominally cromulent techie, even for a Machead.
…
In answer to your zinger: I don’t pay attention to Apple’s output.
I pay attention to How To Business Good. This includes observing How NOT To Business. Everyone else’s fuck ups are much cheaper than your own!
Tim Cook’s C-suite has been helpfully offering a very helpful, free, training course in the second for the last decade. Oh how far the exceptional have slidden to merely mediocre.
Genuinely, I really do hope Apple products will one day be enlightening again. Till then, XPS 13. Sensible insurance policy (after indemnity). Business Continuity FTW!
…
Look, if you hadn’t wanted me to expound, you’d all have boosted my Jobs video intead. He explained it way better, in 5mins too!
ZX81 (’82!), BBC B, Classic II (Word 5, MacDraw, StyleWriter!), Performa 630 (Marathon!), 7500 (shitbox!), G3 (workhorse), iBook (Tangerine Terror/Ship of Theseus—under desk RN!), PowerBook G4 (Titanium, shit hinges), another Powerbook G4 (17" Alu, solid hinges, beast), MacBook Pro (15" Alu), MBP Retina (15"; first-gen 2012 and it 100% didn’t suck; flawless [except MagSafe needs manual cleaning], best machine I ever owned, love of my life; its corpse sleeps under my gardening stuff—one glass of water, fuck), MBP Retina (15" 2016—fucking banana that couldn’t even do lemon right!); current beastie is MBP Retina (14" 2021; loaded, primary production box to date). Also somewhat responsible for variety of iPads, and iPhones for me and fam over the decades; couple Windows mini PCs, various handme-up/down/overs which typical got Linux loaded; one HP microserver waiting in cupboard to be used one of these days. And, new addition, a shiny XPS 13 to learn VS on. Pretty. Much prettier than MBP21. Michael Dell honor satisfied.
Nominally cromulent techie, even for a Machead.
Oh, and there was that one time Apple asked if they could put my software in Mac OS X. How often has Apple asked you, a no-name OSS dev, if they can put your software in Mac OS X? No? Weird. Second-best tech I ever made, best in world in what it could do by 12 parsecs, 1000 devoted delighted users already in the bag, starting to generate a real network effect, super looking forward to seeing what its next 99,000 users might create.
Someone in Apple silently nixed it, I suspect ’cos it made theirs look bad. (It was.) I had no idea. But they just stopped talking.
Protip: If a company of size and importantance of Apple ever asks you “Can we use your stuff?”, the correct answer is “YES” AND, instantly, “What can I do to help sell it?” ’Cos if that opportunity slides off deck (’cos you did not do enough to secure it OR for any other reason), do not expect another.
Just one of several priceless fuckups/valuable teaching moments, from back when I didn’t know there’s a critical difference between Technology and Product and Market. Which I now do. Just had to learn the hard way, ’cos I’m dumb.
Someone in Apple silently nixed it, I suspect ’cos it made theirs look bad. (It was.) I had no idea. But they just stopped talking.
Protip: If a company of size and importantance of Apple ever asks you “Can we use your stuff?”, the correct answer is “YES” AND, instantly, “What can I do to help sell it?” ’Cos if that opportunity slides off deck (’cos you did not do enough to secure it OR for any other reason), do not expect another.
Just one of several priceless fuckups/valuable teaching moments, from back when I didn’t know there’s a critical difference between Technology and Product and Market. Which I now do. Just had to learn the hard way, ’cos I’m dumb.
…
In answer to your zinger: I don’t pay attention to Apple’s output.
I pay attention to How To Business Good. This includes observing How NOT To Business. Everyone else’s fuck ups are much cheaper than your own!
Tim Cook’s C-suite has been helpfully offering a very helpful, free, training course in the second for the last decade. Oh how far the exceptional have slidden to merely mediocre.
Genuinely, I really do hope Apple products will one day be enlightening again. Till then, XPS 13. Sensible insurance policy (after indemnity). Business Continuity FTW!
…
Look, if you hadn’t wanted me to expound, you’d all have boosted my Jobs video intead. He explained it way better, in 5mins too!
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p.s. Downvoters, cool! I love smart people explaining exactly how I am wrong! (No rush.)
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NP, appreciate the vids are something special. Text can work too, pictures help.
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