“Let’s all agree that Apple makes some rip-roaringly good products. The iPhone, the iPad, and the MacBook Air are all massive successes. And there are ceaseless rumors about the forthcoming iPhone 5,” Sam Grobart writes for Businessweek. “But Apple makes many things, and it stands to reason that some of their products are better than others. The problem for Apple (and it’s a problem many companies would like to have, no doubt) is that when the bar is set so high for the good stuff, the merely adequate starts to look unacceptable.”
“That’s why Apple should consider the Jack Welch approach to product management: Just as the former General Electric chief executive officer would close or sell business units that did not place first or second in their industry, Apple should look at some of the laggards in its product portfolio and ask some hard questions about whether they have a future at the company,” Grobart writes.
Here’s where it could start:
1. Safari: Safari has never cracked 10 percent of browsers in use.
2. Game Center: I’m sorry, but what is this? I just know it as the annoying thing that pops up before I want to play Angry Birds.
3. Pages: For most people, there’s Microsoft Word, and there’s Google Docs. One’s bloated and powerful, the other’s limited but streamlined. Nobody needs another word processing program.
4. Numbers: Numbers is Apple’s challenge to Microsoft’s Excel, but for better or worse, Excel is the standard here.
5. Mission Control/Launchpad/Dashboard: Apple keeps pushing these different ‘views’ of your desktop. Most people know them as the weird screens that pop up when you accidentally move your cursor into a corner of the screen and then have to figure out how to get back to what you were working on.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
1. Smartphone/Tablet Browser Share, August 2012: Safari – 66.43%
2. Just because you don’t know what it is, Sam, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful and fun for those who do.
3. Pages for iPad is the world’s #1 word processor for post-PC devices. Grobart lacks understanding regarding Apple’s mobile iOS devices to desktop/portable Macs strategy.
4. Numbers for iPad is the world’s #1 spreadsheet app for post-PC devices. Grobart lacks understanding regarding Apple’s mobile iOS devices to desktop/portable Macs strategy.
5. As with the 4 previous items, Grobart doesn’t know enough, or anything, about the products he advises Apple to “stop making.” Mission Control displays open documents and their apps. Launchpad shows available apps in iOS style. Dashboard runs widgets. They aren’t three “different ‘views’ of your desktop.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “John C” for the heads up.]
Grobart is an arrogant bastard. I love all 5 products on that list, and I hope apple keeps making them.
Grobart, kindly shove your head back up your ass.
Grobart should not make any little grobarts. The first one is a complete failure.
@thethirdshoe
Made me LOL!
+1000 gro bart gro
What poppycock is Grobart digging into? This arrogant punditry from Grobart who lives in the ivory tower of media prostitution is trying to teach Apple how to do technology.
+1000
Why, thank you.
Another dumbass shows his ass.
The whole tech journalism thingy stinks with dumbasses who make shit up to meet their daily quota. This guy does not know his head from his asshole.
His editor and publication are a pile of steaming shit.
He, like MANY others, are still stuck on the Desktop paradigm. This is what happens when you let a company with no soul or innovation talent (Microsoft) to ‘lead’ the market for so long.
Mission Control, Lauchpad, Expose, Spaces–All of ’em are dumbed down useless bullshit!
son of said dumb@$$?
um…no, they’re not.
you must not know how to use your Mac. Just play with it.
Launchpad I do personally find useless. But Mission Control, Expose and Spaces? Are you nuts?
In Lion, it was totally useless… But now in ML it’s awesome as a quick launcher. It’s completely replaced Spotlight for me for this…. Just assign a keyboard shortcut (I use cmd-cntrl-space), type a few characters, hit return, and bam, app is launched. It’s super-fast.
Another cool launchpad trick is to use the four finger plus thumb pinch gesture with a trackpad. It seems to draw launchpad up through the desktop and the reverse pushes back under. It’s so sick, and blows most wintard minds most mercilessly.
Go Apple!
If it would somehow automagically arrange my 150+ apps in alphabetical order and fill the empty spots, it actually would be usefull.
If the Launchpad would somehow automagically arrange my 150+ apps in alphabetical order and fill the empty spots, it actually would be usefull.
Maybe they should change the name to “Businessweak”
This guy is a major douche… If marketshare were the only determining factor, we wouldn’t have half of the cool sh!t we do!
Rather M$ should stop Internet Exploder!
It’s the reason for so many nonstandard web sites… 🙁
Pages/numbers meh. Microsoft is the alternative… And google? Sorry ain’t gonna do that.
Safari… Firefox is my backup browser, I like safari.
I don’t mind the dashboard, and I DO use Mission control a lot.
Game center, I agree there are many achievement based game services on iOS and now os x. But game center is actually clean.. I prefer it myself.
The guy is just an old fart.
There is nothing wrong with old farts!!
Yep I are one to.
old farts stink more
What a numb-nut. Mission Control is the #1 thing I miss when I am on a PeeCee. Especially with only one monitor. Clearly this guy has never had to have multiple spreadsheets / docs from different programs open at once.
Wait this is business week… The same people that said that removing an item from the menubar is best done by the command line (cause they just read a list of commands…) rather than tick a checkbox in settings, or drag off the bar itself..
Bunch of idiots.
And his opinion matters?
Major irritant of the internet, people who blow actually get “ink”.
That’s one of the dumbest articles I have ever read.
LibreOffice is my choice for Office documents, but also use Pages extensively.
Numbers is a spreadsheet, not a word processor.
MDN’s “Take” is spot on. BTW, how do you “stop” manufacturing software applications? They take up digital 1 and 0 spaces. If you don’t want to use them, don’t.
Meanwhile, Apple, make PAGES/NUMBERS, etc. applications better, so they DO compete with Microsoft’s Office suite fully.
We *ARE* way overdue on an iWork update. I think that Pages and Keynote are both BETTER than their MS counterparts, but Numbers has a long way to go before it can replace Excel for me. I would LOVE to be able to get rid of Office on my Macs completely/
> Just as the former General Electric chief executive officer would <
Shares in GE vs Apple, which has done better? Hint: not GE.
I think the Apple people might know what they're doing better than a hack GE shill. And it's a deliberately provocative list. So MDN etc. link to it and push it up the rankings.
This has to be the stupidest article I’ve read. Everything he talks about, he has no idea what he is talking about!
HE SUGGESTS TO DROP SAFARI?!?!?
That’s the only browser I use! EVER!
Bloomberg should stop making BusinessWeek. It is a waste of both time and space.
Businessweek needs to tighten up!
Isn’t GE a “failed” company? Yeah, that worked out well, didn’t it?
What a maroon!
At least he didn’t put Apple TV on his list though. I fully expected that.
This uninformed idiot probably hasn’t even heard of the AppleTV yet.
Stupid article. But one factual point: Numbers, while not a great spreadsheet, is much better than Excel for quickly generating attractive graphs and then manipulating the graph elements. There is still no substitute for the old Cricket Graph in this regard, but Numbers is closer than most and far better than Excel.
1. WRONG!
2. Don’t care.
3. I like choices!
4. Again, I like choices!
5. Sorta care.
Numbers ROCKS Excel for basic use. The ability to put multiple “sheets” on a single page? Genius. You can make some FANTASTIC looking spreadsheets in Numbers.
I use Safari all the time. In fact it’s my default browser. I’ve had the misfortune of using Internet Explorer, and let me tell you, that is a pile of doo doo. Chrome is not much better than IE. I installed it once on my Windows 7 machine (before switching to the Mac), used it for 5 minutes and deleted it off my machine. It’s less useful than Firefox which was my default browser on Windows until I switched to the Mac. Safari is beautiful, fast and easy to use.
I don’t have much of an opinion on Game Center because it’s not what I use most of the time.
Because I interact with people using MS Word, I’m forced to use Word for Mac on my machine, otherwise I’ll use Pages if I’m working on a document that doesn’t need to be shared. I have Pages and Word on my machine and I use both interchangeably. I prefer the way text looks in Pages because it’s more aesthetically pleasing but I don’t have a preference one way or another of Pages over Word. I think both are equally good in their own way.
Pages on iOS is another story. It’s a very good word processor on the iPad and iPhone and I wouldn’t want to use anything else. I do have Documents to Go but it’s a pale shadow of what Pages is capable of. The only annoying thing about Pages for iOS is the inability to open Word documents without unintended formatting changes and for that I use Documents to Go to view and edit.
Numbers I prefer over Excel because of its simplicity and usability. It doesn’t come preloaded with lots of useless baggage that I don’t use and the features that it has I use all the time so I don’t need or miss the complexity of Excel although for collaborative purposes, I need Excel to exchange documents on a team-wide basis.
I used not to like Mission Control and preferred Spaces but I’ve pulled myself to liking Mission Control. Moving between desktops using finger gestures is great. Mission Control is another incarnation of Spaces, except on a horizontal scale rather than in a grid format. I use Dashboard all the time. The widgets are really helpful although I think most of the widget makers haven’t updated their widgets to work with Lion/Mountain Lion and I find many of my widgets broken after upgrading from Snow Leopard.