The inevitable question for Apple, post Steve Jobs, is whether Apple can continue to create new markets on the scale it has done in the past. It isn't an easy question to answer, if only because Apple's product roadmap tends to stretch out a ways.
So any "post-Steve" initiatives will take some time to emerge. Some might argue Apple is changing under CEO Tim Cook.
Adam Lashinksy seems to be in that camp. Jon Gruber is not.
But it wouldn't be unusual to argue that, over time, Apple's performance will regress toward the mean. The only question is how long it might take for that to happen, and how great a reversion might occur. But companies, like products, have life cycles.
Apple isn't likely to escape its own life cycle indefinitely. The next "big thing" Apple attempts might not tell the story.
If it turns out that "television" is that next big product opportunity, we might not start seeing the first real "post Steve Jobs" initiatives until one more major product category is tackled, after TV.
The reason is simply that Apple's roadmap stretches out a significant way into the future, and that Steve Jobs was an unusual leader. Few business executives in the last century have stamped their own sense of "what the market wants" on a company, rather than "responding to what the market wants."
The prevailing mantra of "listening to the customer" was not how Apple revolutionized existing markets, and created new markets. The view has been that people could not adequately determine their own desire for products and experiences with which they had zero familiarity. Few business leaders will have the "arrogance" or "insight" (depending on how one wishes to view the matter) that Steve Jobs did.
That is not to say Jobs did not form a company culture with distinctive characteristics. But neither does the impact of a distinctive company culture remain constant over long periods of time. HP, 3M, IBM, AT&T and all other sufficiently-large firms also have cultures.
You might question whether the core values and cultures have been maintained, in business-driving ways, over time. People, companies, products and countries evolve over time. It seems unlikely Apple will "forever" escape that aging process.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Is Apple Changing, or Not?
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
AI "Performance Plateau" is to be Expected
There is much talk now about generative artificial intelligence model improvement rates slowing. But such slowdowns are common for most--if...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
One recurring issue with forecasts of multi-access edge computing is that it is easier to make predictions about cost than revenue and infra...
No comments:
Post a Comment