I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this.
I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.
Office on the web actually does this really well now. The desktop app is a little more glitchy, but Google doesn't even have one of those. I really like tracked changes in Word on the web. Microsoft has come a real long way in the last three years.
Does this include products like Word Online? Because that product is awful.
The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.
I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.
Completely different experience for me. The desktop app is solid (although latest patches made it unstable + the visual change is just not good), but the collaboration tools are horrible to use.
You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).
> Office on the web actually does this really well now.
Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.
I won't touch any web app because I'm perfectly fine using my Vimium shortcuts that I don't need them to interfere with a web app that could have been just a native app...
You must have been using an old version of MS Office, or had it improperly configured. We use Office for real time collaboration on documents all the time. You can put a file on SharePoint, then have multiple users edit live using a mix of desktop, mobile, and web applications. The changes are immediately visible and this doesn't create different copies.
Microsoft Office, Teams, and SharePoint have comprehensive APIs so you can export any metadata you want. It's no different from competing Google products in that regard.
MS Office is actually a counter example of this. It was much worse than Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and WordPerfect. They crushed the competition because of vampiric sales strategies.
Early versions of the individual Microsoft Office products might have lacked some features compared to competitors. Their real innovation was building an integrated suite with consistent user experience. That was tremendously valuable to casual users.
Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.
Word for Windows was NOT worse than WordPerfect. WordPerfect continued using their primitive inline codes after GUIs were the norm.
Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.
They crushed the competition, because competition management was quite bad with their decisions, a good example of their bad decisions was sticking to MS-DOS until it was too late.
Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.
It is also interesting to see what designers actually think about the future of Figma. I think, the market is always in move. https://youtu.be/hDHByVS2I6Q
There is a lesson to be had there for sure. It all started when they bought Macromedia. Happens to many if the greats, look at Cisco,IBM, AT&T they all have that happen to them after which the only way decision makers know how to make great products is to buy other companies.
There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.
From 2015-2019 I found this quote massively ironic as it seemed Apple had fallen prey to the same thing. They were trying to sell Gimpbooks with 2 ports and unreliable keyboards for a €1700 base price, and iPhones that were milquetoast iterations of past one's kept creeping up €75-150 per year. Their sales growth was cratering.
People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.
> ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently....
It's a great quote for what has happened to the USA in almost every single area, industry, government, education, religious thought, political thought.
I recently found out MARS yes the candy company has become the largest owner of Veterinarian offices in the USA. It really is palpable how everything is on a runaway train and we can all see it yet are powerless to stop it.
Also cat food. They invest in a reef conservation technique too, and named a reef in Indo - where they were trialing said technique - after one of their catfood brands. The logo says "more coral today, more fish tomorrow" and there's a picture of a cat.
Started in Europe with pet food (90's). Slowly moved into pet pharma and scientific research. Then in 2007 they started moving into the vet game. Seems like a pretty natural evolution. Wonder if they'll try to buy Chewy.
It happens here in a unique way, partly because of the legal structure we have around public corporations. In the US, institutional investors want to see revenue growth, even over profits. Way more sexy. And they have ways to arm-twist management by influencing the board, agitating for new board members, etc. They work to frighten other stockholders into supporting them and then management has to go along. Sarbanes-Oxley might be waved around, too.
Normally, a cash-cow business would be a great thing to own. Unfortunately the accumulated cash plus (feared or actual) slowing of growth equal a big red flag.
Ironically when Apple acquired NeXT, it was essentially a reverse take over, since almost every significant executive and technical position of the merged company was from NeXT.
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
I think BeOS was a serious contender as the next generation MacOS. But BeOS didn't have Steve Jobs. Buying NeXT meant bringing Jobs back at the helm of Apple.
It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.
It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo of a relatively incremental improvement to the classic MacOS formula. It was only a “serious contender” in the media and in the headcanon of Apple’s fan base.
BeOS was also multi-platform (PPC and later IA-32), like NeXTStep. Anyway, yes, it was rough around the edges, but it was way more accessible; the hardware was a lot less expensive, and when sold as a standalone OS, was also reasonably priced for a hobbyist. There were a lot of great ideas in there, especially compared to the Windows, MacOS, and the various other *nixes of the time.
I'm not saying Apple made the wrong choice to be reverse-acquired by NeXT, obviously, they've done pretty well. But an alternate universe where Apple acquired BeOS is well within the imagination.
In an alternate universe where Apple acquired Be, we'd see another Copland-esque slow moving catastrophe as the skeletal and unproven Be technology was cobbled together with everything needed to execute a plausible transition plan for the existing System 7 platform. This had every prospect of turning the Macintosh into another Amiga: even if a BeOS technology transition was a miraculous success, Apple's prospects as a company would be largely unchanged, because the real problems at Apple wasn't technology, it was a lack of leadership.
Would a Be acquisition do anything about the hundreds of engineers fritting away at dead ends like Pippin, OpenDoc and NewtonOS? Would it have stopped Apple from selling awful flawed hardware like the Power Macintosh 5000 and 6000 series? Unlikely. It's easy to forget just how ridiculous the Apple Computer of 1996 was. It was a company destined to — and deserved to — be consigned to the history books.
As valuable as the NeXT technology was to Apple, its importance is utterly dwarfed by the actions of Steve Jobs to rip away at the junk and rebuild the company in every sense of the word.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo
So true. Even though the market share of NeXTStep never got very high, it was a robust, battle-tested operating system that ran on multiple processor architectures with real software like FreeHand and Lotus Improv, an amazing spreadsheet for the time that would hold up pretty well today.
And interestingly enough, one of the main BeOS guys ended up at Apple and worked on APFS.
I tried both back in the day, and tech demo is exactly right (a really cool tech demo, to be sure! but still). The OS came with a simple task manager-type app that had two buttons on it that could be used to disable either processor (to demonstrate how it affected system performance, I guess?). Thought I, "Hmm, surely they wouldn't let you turn off both.." But nope; everything immediately halted.
By comparison, NeXTStep was quite polished, certainly by the time it was available for x86, which is when I used it.
Agree; while they had some very nice ideas (like taking their filesystem capabilities and tracker and make it into basic email), they did some things that would be fatal: like locking their ABI into gcc 2.95 C++ ABI. Which was immediately a problem, when gcc 3.0 came out. Ugh.
My friend had an Newton and I was in awe. It made Palm look like a pocket calculator.
Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.
But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.
NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.
Yes indeed it was. I ran OS X in beta on a G4 for a year as my main OS. It was that innovative and great. Like magically having the “Linux on the desktop” dream come true overnight.
It was clunky and slow at the time but it was so awesome it hardly mattered.
Reminds me of the Simpsons when the Newton is used to make a note to beat up Martin and the hand writing recognition is slightly off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M
When 2007 rolled around, broadband internet was widely available; search, mapping, social media had caught on. People were ready to take the internet with them in their pocket.
To echo the sibling comments, this is incorrect. NeXT lives on today in every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and every other Apple device. When Apple bought NeXT they used it as a foundation for OS X, which went on to power every device Apple makes or has made.
The kind of creatives we're talking about, kind of by definition, do things differently (not to ape Apple's old slogan too much). That's AKA risk, and, yes, sometimes it will lead to ruin.
But it's also the only way to move the area forward.
It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard).
AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.
Just because you don't see any Apple skunkworks VR/AR headsets getting left in a motel room [1] and they don't report how much they are investing in that new product line (rumored to be more in total than Meta's 10B/y) - you should not underestimate the potential for immersive spatial computing to do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the iPod.
this is true, to be fair .. anyone remember "Xaos Tools" (video effects), Audion or when Marc Cantor became so personally offensive that the business people paid him to leave? it is true.. end of innocence stories here
This is mere hand-wringing; Steve Jobs never cared to consider the aspects of our political system that leads to this, on the contrary, he positively exploited them for his own gain, e.g. patents and his app store tyranny. Steve Jobs is among the worst people to talk about this kind of neo-feudalism.
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.