Daring Fireball’s John Gruber “came to Macworld Expo 2010, however, not to praise the company but to probe its vulnerabilities,” Phillip Elmer-Dewitt reports for Fortune.
The problems, in the order he delivered them:
1. Steve Jobs: The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it’s a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader.
2. AT&T: [Apple sticks with them because] AT&T so desperately needs the iPhone that Apple can extract far better terms from them than it ever could from Verizon. Meanwhile, however, AT&T’s service problems are draining Apple’s good will.
3. Computers: Gruber thinks he’s seen the future of computers, and it is the iPad. “It’s really, really good,” he gushed. If you are sitting on a couch and you need a computer, most people are going to reach for the iPad, not the MacBook Pro. And that puts Apple into uncharted territory. For the first time since the original Mac replaced the Apple II, it has two overlapping computer products. And although it took a few years for the corpse to grow cold, the Apple II basically died the day the Mac arrived.
4. The App Store
5. Security
6. Mobile Me: It’s great for syncing your iPhone to your Mac, but what’s the point of Mobile Me’s Web apps?
7. Back Ups: Time Capsule is the right idea, but it’s not really a solution for all those people who don’t even know they’re supposed sync their iPhones to their Macs.
8. Apple TV: Gruber is not one of those who talks about Apple TV as Steve Jobs’ one dud. He likes Apple TV, but says it has a fundamental problem: [Content or the relative lack thereof]. Hulu is a wonderful solution but when Boxee figured out a way to put it on TV, the Hulu guys freaked out. They have “this crazy brick wall in their heads,” Gruber explains, that perceives computers and TVs and two fundamentally different things. They worry about ad-supported Hulu getting on TVs when they should be worried about people bootlegging their content for free and watching it with no ads. “I don’t see,” Gruber concludes, “how Apple can get from where they are to where they need to be when they are negotiating with people that stupid.”
9. Arch Rivals: A company needs direct rivals to stay hungry, but when they get big enough they tend to run out of them… Apple’s closest rival in smartphones, Gruber maintains, is not Google (which will rake in the Web ad riches whether Android succeeds or fails), but Palm, whose WebOS he admires.
10. About Box Credits: If software is a form of art, as Apple insists it is, “artists should get to sign their work.”
Full article, with full explanations of each of the 10 points above, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Some of these are a stretch. Number 10 is seemingly there only to fulfill the promise of ten points. As for number 9, Apple has plenty of arch rivals and self-motivation; they don’t require a floundering group of castoffs with chips on their shoulders in order to motivate them. There is plainly no need for Palm’s webOS; it’s superfluous in the current marketplace; a redundancy. Unless some other company decides to junk their current OS and snaps up what’s left of the company for webOS (which we strongly suspect is the real dream of Elevation Partners), Palm has no reason to be. If not saved via a buyout, Palm is dead. Number 6 isn’t really a vulnerability on the order of, say, how the company will someday run without Steve Jobs. Number 3 is many years off. It certainly won’t happen as quickly as Mac took over from Apple II because Mac had greater capabilities than what it succeeded, not less. Unless and until iPad evolves to do everything a Mac can do and more, the Mac will not only survive, it will thrive. All that said, it’s still an interesting, thought-provoking list and therefore a recommended read.
@HueyLong:
Re: CDMA. You should not talk about tech if you have no idea about it. CDMA is a well-known multiple access technique that you can find in all text books of communication theory.
Verizon and AT&T;3G services both use CDMA. What Verizon uses is called CDMA2000 variant. AT&T;uses the GSM variety called WCDMA. BOTH ARE CDMA! and both are equally good. Technically, GSM/GPRS just refers to the 2G part of AT&T;network.
Reason why Verizon had an one-up on AT&T;is since Verizon’s 2G tech is also based on CDMA while GSM is not. GSM found out that CDMA is the best option for 3G when they started their 3GPP standardization. It was easy for Verizon to upgrade to 3G due to this and hence the problem with AT&T;: they need to throw more money to get 3G parity.
Of course, both are good technologies. It just requires necessary investment to make either work well. AT&T;is still in the process …
um…John….Mr. Gruber….
how did you fail to mention Apple’s Quality of late?
Two problems:
1. Too much money
2. Nowhere to put it
@ Bob: “Gruber is smoking his lib hippie crack.”
Shame on you for trying to degrade this thread into political nonsense. “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!”
The biggest problem facing facing Apple is Apple staff laughing so hard at the ‘competition’ like Windows Mobile and Palm Pre and the 250,000 Moto Droids sold after a $100 million launch ad campaign (do the math!) or the 80,000 Google Nexus ‘Super’ phones sold in a month.
No wonder Steve Jobs had to give a troops a rousing pep talk and remind the guys not to relax “Hey Tim, Phil stop laughing! Google is evil!! Google is out to kill the iPhone! Hey GUYs I said stop….” .
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Come on FUD isn’t on the list? Astonishing, FUD has been one of Apple’s major problems for yours in a general way. Someone should talk to the author in private.
Regarding item 1, while it’s true that Apple ran just fine while Jobs was on health leave, this only proves that they don’t need his constant guidance and direction to maintain operations for a few months. Let’s face it, anyone who thought otherwise is an idiot.
The real question here is how Apple would fare without Jobs in the long term. Is there anyone besides Jobs who has the vision, the leadership, and the balls to make the sort of difficult decisions that even Jobs is routinely criticized for?
Could someone like Cook have pulled off the switch to OS X, or the one to Intel chips? Could anyone else get away with things like no Flash support on the iPhone and iPad, or the removal of Firewire ports and user-repalceable batteries on laptops? How about the battle against the music industry for fixed $0.99 pricing, and later trading that in for the removal of all DRM?
These are the sort of decisions that Apple will need to continue making in the future if they are to remain leaders and not followers.
Idiot
the ten biggest problems are the ten best things going for apple
I think number one on this list could have been they are making too much money, it fits with the rest of the bs on the list
@freediverx
Excellent post. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head re/ Steve Jobs’ true contribution to Apple and the industry.
Gruber is well past his sell-by date on Apple and IT matters. He has too much public angst to be objective there any more. He is bright enough but he should turn to something simpler for his future reflections. Like the vagaries of the bagel market or climate change and its impact on the price of fish, or just shooting the breeze for fun.
Not daring though, and
No fireball.
The alt is that I compile a list of Gruber’s 10 biggest problems. Now there’s an idea. The trouble would be choosing only 10 probs.
But he is sort of bright and occasionally articulate too. So I’ll change my mind and recommend that he writes a book. Always an option for even a half-way competent blogger. And JG is more than that even though he falls short as a commentator nowadays.
Always better to quit at the top of your game, while your balls are still on fire, as it were.
I don’t get this list. How do you blandly call something like the App Store a problem? Its boons outweigh its issues by far.
The issues I see with Apple are:
1. No clear successor to Steve Jobs. Everyone points this one out.
2. Lack of gaming support on the mac. Convince Creative to make mac drivers for its sound cards. Support more video cards in the mac pro, and adapt to changes faster. Make cross platform development easier.
3. No midrange tower between the mac pro and the iMac. I love my mac pro, but not everyone can drop 3k on a computer.
4. Not making Cocoa/XCode cross-platform. Note that I have the same issue with Visual Studio. This would help with #2.
To be fair, I’d better respond to Gruber’s list.
1 Apple depends less and less on Jobs, by his design. He knows about mortality and he cares too much about Apple. Jobs is Apple but Apple is becoming far more than Jobs. He has spent so much time resurrecting Apple into the giant it was destined to be, he could hardly fail to plan for his own, eventual, redundancy. He has created the core internal concept of an Apple DNA. He may have started the threads that are leading to the unfolding expression of Apple’s many strengths, but he does not seem to want to keep these threads to himself. He is passing them to others. I’ve said it before but I will reverse the expression to show it in a different light. You cannot take Apple out of Steve Jobs. But it is becoming possible to take Steve Jobs out of Apple. I believe he sees the need for that and is making it more possible day by day.
2 AT&T;? So what is the alternative in America? AT&T;is the right choice for the USA. But Apple’s markets are far, far bigger and the carriers it uses elsewhere are good enough. This cannot hurt Apple in the bigger picture. AT&T;is investing in the future. Any other US carriers doing the same?
3 This is really nonsense. If there have been any threats to sales of an existing product it was the intro of an i7 iMac and its impacts on Power Mac sales to medium power users. iPad enhances the range by filling a gap. it will not be allowed to threaten the iMac or PowerBooks for at least a decade. iPad is the everyday casual computer for ‘good enough’ informal computing. It is not in the PowerBook’s league.
4 App Store problems are caused by its unexpectedly fast and overwhelming success. What’s the problem here Grubie? There are millions of songs, zillions of books and we don’t have a problem categorising them. The same attention will be paid to apps as that market matures by quality and by attrition. It’s a good problem to have in the short term. It’s an unintended consequence of success. Big problem, yeah!
5 Security? So where is the problem that cannot be solved?
6 MobileMe? It’s value for money if you actually use it and Apple increases its usefulness as time passes.
7 Backups? Really. If people can’t be bothered, let them lose some vital data. That’s how I learned my lesson. Not everyone needs a dedicated solution like Time Machine, but it’s there and it prompts you to use it. Many other solutions too. This is a complaint about the carelessness of people which is not Apple’s problem except to provide a solution. As in …. You can take a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.
8 Apple TV is not a hobby. I never bought that. It is a non-critical experimental dish cooking on the back burner and, while you’re curious how it’ll turn out, you’re not in a hurry and you can keep adding ingredients in the meantime to see how it tastes from time to time. It doesn’t hurt Apple. It’s more profitable than any Dell product. People like it. Duh!
9 Arch Rivals? Gruber is really grubbing (grubering?) around now and he knows this is bullshit. Dishonest point to make. Apple has had a firecracker up its ass since Jobs returned. It is obsessed about impressing itself and its customers… NO ONE ELSE! Jobs has put that motivation up there front and centre in its DNA. Each senior manager is infected with that virus, and it shows, and this is why Apple is indeed firing on all cylinders. There is great congruence among the key players in Apple. They all sing from the same song sheet by choice, not coercion. It works. There is no stronger formula for success. Trying to outdo yourself is a very tough regime to follow. There are no arch rivals out there, worthy of the name, nor worthy of emulation.
10 Box Credits? It’s likely an oversight don’t you think? Acknowledgment is a part of Jobs’ personality. The first Mac had every participant’s name engraved into the inner surface of the casing. The iPad is nothing if not the embodiment of Jef Raskin’s visions made real. Credits will come when someone notices the omission. Or not. Does it matter.
Shame on you John Gruber. Writing crap just to have something to write.
It’s not nonsense. He’s a dumb-liberal-hippie-smoking-crack… hence his bad analysis. It does matter to the conversation. Just because you may be a dumb-liberal-hippie as well, doesn’t detract from the fact he’s one.
“Just because you may be a dumb-liberal-hippie as well, doesn’t detract from the fact he’s one.”
Freedom of speech does have its drawbacks.
Really lame how MDN didn’t elaborate on the most relevant points in the list, the App Store and Security. LAME, MDN, LAME.
Apple’s #1 biggest problem:
G R U B E R