This comments section has lots of people saying "x was when things got really bad" followed by people saying "actually x was the pinnacle." (And some then following up with "it was actually y when it got bad.")
This has been the pattern in The Comments since I started using Apple stuff 15 years ago. Likewise, "Apple used to innovate and now they're out of ideas."
Which isn't to say that things haven't perhaps taken a downturn lately: there have unquestionably been an unusually large number of publicized missteps in the last couple of months. Some technical, some social, some real, and some media-hyped. But an apparent clustering at one moment doesn't assure or even imply a long-term trend. Five and ten years from now I feel confident the same comments will be being made.
People get annoyed at the un-Steve-like-ness of Cook's apparent focus on quantifiable things like "CustSat". But, when you're serving literally hundreds of millions of customers in a blog-driven media world, it's hard to know what would be a better way to measure these things. If customers are becoming less satisfied, you can be certain the executive team knows it.
Still, it seems apparent that there's an immediate PR issue. (And simultaneously, it should be noted, iPhones are flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers and at likely higher ASPs than ever.) If I were Cook, I'd do what I could to make really sure we got our act together in the short term, look for some opportunities to buy back some goodwill, and then I'd probably keep doing roughly what we'd been doing for the last decade or so while weighing the feasibility of some of the commmon suggestions, such as decoupling OS releases from hardware releases.
This has been the pattern in The Comments since I started using Apple stuff 15 years ago. Likewise, "Apple used to innovate and now they're out of ideas."
Which isn't to say that things haven't perhaps taken a downturn lately: there have unquestionably been an unusually large number of publicized missteps in the last couple of months. Some technical, some social, some real, and some media-hyped. But an apparent clustering at one moment doesn't assure or even imply a long-term trend. Five and ten years from now I feel confident the same comments will be being made.
People get annoyed at the un-Steve-like-ness of Cook's apparent focus on quantifiable things like "CustSat". But, when you're serving literally hundreds of millions of customers in a blog-driven media world, it's hard to know what would be a better way to measure these things. If customers are becoming less satisfied, you can be certain the executive team knows it.
Still, it seems apparent that there's an immediate PR issue. (And simultaneously, it should be noted, iPhones are flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers and at likely higher ASPs than ever.) If I were Cook, I'd do what I could to make really sure we got our act together in the short term, look for some opportunities to buy back some goodwill, and then I'd probably keep doing roughly what we'd been doing for the last decade or so while weighing the feasibility of some of the commmon suggestions, such as decoupling OS releases from hardware releases.