“Apple is large and still growing. By itself, despite the DNA of Apple’s culture and the legacy of Steve Jobs, that’s going to create problems,” John Martellaro writes for The Mac Observer. “In fact, it already has. Apple’s heritage of simplicity has run headlong into Apple’s complex, interactive services, and customers are getting restless.”
“Wealth and power create problems for companies. It always has, and it always will,” Martellaro writes. “Apple’s success was the byproduct of the brilliance of Steve Jobs, and while CEO Tim Cook has professed allegiance to the spirit of the cofounder, he will still have to deal with the absolutes of Apple’s size and influence as a company as he moves into his first full year of control.”
Martellaro writes, “Reconciling Apple’s ambitions with the need to communicate better about its products and services, manage complexity and deal with ever mounting customer workloads is now the challenge for Apple’s CEO and executive team.”
Much more in the full article here.
I guess – like an artist is his own worse critic – kind of thing
Bla bla bla
Yeah Apple is Doooomed… Again!
Shocking I say!
Wealth and power is a company’s worst enemy? My god! So does that mean that RIM and Nokia are sitting in the sweet spot without wealth and power? Exactly what is the point of building a successful company if the end result is going to result in failure? Should Apple strive for mediocrity? Apple was doomed when the share price was $12 and now it’s doomed with a share price of $390. Apple is still a relatively lean company that’s growing in size but nowheres near the size of the largest corporations in head count. Apple is in no worse position than any mediocre company.
Where do these guys come from? I’m actually beginning to yearn for the days of physical newspapers. At least then the amounts of commentary was restricted by space and editorial review. Today, anybody that took creative writing in Jr College can post to some “we’ll post anything” blog.
+1
It’s called freedom of speech….and I’d much rather choose not to read bozos like this blogger than have a handful of people in some NY City high-rise determining what I can and can’t read!
very astute Jeffersonian point, TR…way to go.
With respect Gregg, the message from Mr. Martellaro is a message *every* CEO needs to hear. Apple may not be in imminent danger but it could very easily become another Micros**t.
As long as they stay focused and don’t get bogged down with a fat layer of middle managers they will be fine.
Seriously… its not cash or power that creates problems for companies.. its taking on too many things at once and creating a ‘manager’ for every 5 employees.
Another thoughtful commentary from Mr Martellaro that highlights the corporate stupidity that resulted in the elimination of Save As.
” When a customer can no longer work as desired because of Apple agenda, resentment surfaces.”
This quote could also be applied to the loss of Rosetta and the FCPX mess.
rosetta is not missed, legacy apps need either active updates or they deserve to die or are already dead
“deal with ever mounting customer workloads” ?!? What the hell is he talking about?
BTW, Tim Cook has basically run Apple for more than a year anyway due to Steve Jobs’ medical leave of absence. It’s not like he woke up one day last month and said, “Oh sh*t, what do I do now?”
These analysts act like Apple didn’t plan for this, or that Tim Cook is some kind of mail room boy who went all Michael J. Fox and took over the company.
Cristine Algoy agrees also… whatever
So this guy thinks Apple’s problem is that they don’t include printed manuals with their products? Huh?
No news here. Centuries ago, the Mayans predicted the demise of Apple Computer. The year? 2012.
Another “Without Steve Jobs, the wheels threaten to come off Apple!” article?
Original.
Did you even read it? There is a lot of truth to the article, and the comments section from readers is very valid. Apple is humming along doing the vast majority of things well. However there is an increased learning curve. Snow Leopard was the last, best release of the Mac OS. My wife is running Lion on her MacBook Pro. She hates it. No “Save As”, no Hard Disk icon on the desktop, and having to use the drop down to create a new finder window….(all suck)! That an no longer Rosetta to run older software. I know, I know, Apple pushes on into the future. But it’s difficult if you have a 3000 file database on Appleworks. My wife also discovered that iDVD is no longer included in ilife, so burning a movie to a DVD requires the purchase of a boxed program.
Apple is counting on vertical integration through icloud. iTunes Match, and cloud backup is great, but Apple the learning curve on the cloud is somewhat steeper than advertised. Apple did not anticipate users in a household sharing itunes accounts and the issues that creates for backup to the cloud. Older versions of iphoto do don’t play nicely with photostream. All in all, lately the software does not feel very Apple like.
No fix for save as but u can check a box in the finderr’s preferences to bring back the hard drive icon to the desktop.
The longer I use Lion i find myself agreeing with you, snow lep might have been the best.
Thanks for the finder tip. I will tell her.
and Command-n creates a new finder window, just like it always has.
Appleworks has been EOL for YEARS, she has had plenty of time to extract the data and put it into another program. DOn’t blame Apple for her laziness.
Now it’s year 2020, and still, Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of Os X (or macOS, as it’s now called). Every major release after it has been less and less stable. Catalina is superb example. It is about as stable than Windows ME. Weekly kernel panics, for many users.
Also, iCloud works just bit better than mobile.me, which caused Jobs to almost lynch people. There is no quality in Apple anymore.
IMO, This article was good at some points, but missed the point at others.
Hmmm.. notice this was posted without comment. Not exactly the Tim Cook Fan Club around here…
Oh please, another blowhard, oh-so-insightful, self-important pundit.
It is so funny that these outsiders gives advice to a man that has been worlds best Chief Operating Officer and knows exactly what is needed to run the company in to the greatness with presicion newer seen before. CEO Tim Cook knows these thing better than anybody so STFU.
Incredibly worthless article.
As a professional journalist I can tell you that writers are paid to write a certain number of articles per week and their editors are pleased when the articles stir controversy. Writers call these articles “moose poop.”
Should that really have been “mouse poop”?
😆
heritage of simplicity v. complex interactive services
Wealth and power will eventually corrupt.
Apple needs to communicate better, manage complexity, and deal with consumer workloads.
Oh boy! Such insight.
The truth is Tim Cook will manage the complixity and focus on what is important to preserve simplicity very well. I am more interested in the role there will be for Jonathan Ive to create new ideas in the future. He seems like the passionate, creative visionalry at Apple. Is there a role for him at the side of Tim Cook? I very much hope so.
Great article. I just said much the same thing yesterday in feedback on a call i made to apple support about mobileme migration to iCloud. I was trying to figure out how my iPhone 3G was going to handle contacts, mail and calendar once i migrated to iCloud, and why Search no longer finds emails correctly in Lion mail. Where is the f****ing manual?
Apple’s answer was that the iPhone 3G will lose all synch ability except for USB synching. Which is completely useless. They told me to switch to gmail. Can you believe that? That means i have to abandon my .mac/.me email addresses and install gmail on my two macs, my iPad and my iPhone.
Astonishing!!!
And incredibly arrogant. When the iphone was announced much was made of the fact that apple would extend the functionality of the phone, over time, with software updates. My 3G works fine, if slower than when new, but it is now a brick… Surely apple can make a version of IOS 5 which runs on the older phones? Its only 4 years old and it cost as much as a mac, and yet apple expect me to throw it away.
Thats foolish arrogance, and very annoying for a long-term, dedicated, apple customer.
The author is absolutely right about the lack of documentation. I have complained about this for ages – less is NOT more when it comes to knowing how your technology works…
“Surely apple can make a version of IOS 5 which runs on the older phones? Its only 4 years old and it cost as much as a mac, and yet apple expect me to throw it away.”
1- Surely they can modify iOS 5 to make it fully functional on a 3G! Sure, why not? The only thing standing in the way are the laws of science and the company’s need to earn a profit.
2- Your 3G iPhone is “only four years old.” So you bought it in 2007? Really?
3- Your iPhone cost “as much as a Mac”? Which Mac would that be?
4- They expect you to throw away your iPhone? Did they tell you not to sell it?
And pardon me for asking, but why do you have to abandon your email accounts for your two Macs and iPad simply because you have an old phone?
Byronic has a valid concern, but it’s one that has been around for decades and is by no means unique to Apple:
Old hardware becomes obsolete!
The solution: Sell your iPhone online and get a new one. If you don’t want to be part of the never-ending upgrade cycle buy a flip phone or do as my friend does, forgo the use of a mobile phone altogether.
blahblahblah
FUDFUDFUD
YawnYawnYawn
JOHN MARTELLARO ran out of writing ideas again.
So who’s your own worst enemy John? AHEM. Here’s the research you missed for your article:
http://support.apple.com/manuals/
Oh and John, this might have helped as well:
http://help.apple.com/icloud/
IOW: You might also want to recant this statement, seeing as it’s wrong:
The continuing conceit that Apple services are so simple that only knowledge base articles — that clear up nuances — are sufficient will create problems for Apple going forward.
Folks, here is a hint as to how JOHN MARTELLARO can write so much while being so wrong. From his credentials at the bottom of his article:
During his five years at Apple, he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager…
Imagine someone like this being the CEO at Apple. This is a great example of why I’m always rattling on about the ills of Marketing-As-Managment and why Steve Jobs insisted that the business culture at Apple and NeXT and Pixar be entrepreneurial.
YAWN.
That was a waste of an article. So Apple should be a small company, without wealth and they would be better off?
Come on now Martellaro. Apple has always had a unique way in dealing with complexities over the years. I don’t see how Jobs’ absence will change this. The Team know how Jobs’ saw things, and they have been trained well. Time will tell how Apple plays out sans Jobs. I too worry about Apple’s future now, but lets give it time and the new Team a chance to show us they learned well from the Master.
He’s talking nonsense.
Apple has a limited number of platforms that it supports:
hardware
software
stores – real and virtual.
The rest is small stuff. Apple is moving towards ever tighter integration and interoperability between its systems.
Of the three main platforms listed, the stores are by far the most demanding – especially manufacture and media sales operations with its constant negotiations with third parties like suppliers, ODMs, publishers, music companies, Hollywood and more.
But, in essence, Apple has a pretty flat management structure and the level of cross-communication and collaboration is high.
I have no worries about Apple’s growth pains in management terms.