Apple spreading itself too thin?

19 years ago

“Apple’s ambition may be starting to get ahead of the company’s ability to achieve it,” Troy Wolverton writes for The Mercury News.

“Renowned in recent years for its operational excellence, Apple in the past two months has delayed two high-profile products, the Apple TV set-top box and now, it said Thursday, Leopard, the upcoming update to its OS X operating system. The company pushed back the release date of Leopard so it wouldn’t have to delay an even more highly anticipated product, the iPhone,” Wolverton writes.

Wolverton writes, “The problem Apple is running into is that it’s a relatively small company compared with tech giants such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, said Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner. As of last fall, Apple had about 18,000 full-time employees, compared with 156,000 for HP, according to the companies’ annual reports. ‘Clearly there’s evidence that they’re not executing to the same level they have in the past,’ Baker said.”

“While Apple hasn’t been known for such delays, they’re not surprising, Baker said, noting that Apple is ‘broadening their product offering, and they have only so many engineering resources to go around,'” Wolverton writes.

Wolverton writes, “Apple said Thursday that it was delaying Leopard, the fifth update of its OS X operating system, because it had to pull some of its engineering and quality assurance personnel from that project to help out with the iPhone. The much-hyped device, which Apple plans to release in June, will contain a new, slimmed-down version of the OS X operating system, which powers Apple’s Macintosh computers.”

Wolverton writes, “By shifting resources to the iPhone, the company is favoring an unproven product that will compete in a very challenging industry, notes Richard Shim, an analyst with IDC, a market research firm. The delay – and the reason behind it – are ‘a risk and a sign of how Apple is changing and diversifying,’ Shim said. ‘It’s also a sign that they’ll have to be more careful with spreading themselves too thin.'”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: You can’t shift paradigms without pushing the envelope beyond the limit. And Troy Wolverton’s penchant for the negative angle on anything to do with Apple is tiresome (here’s but one example).