“In any discussion of Apple these days, talk turns inevitably to hardware and software: specifically, how can Apple prevent an inexorable erosion of profit margins on the iPhone? And can design supremo Sir Jonathan Ive work his magic on iOS software to make it as much a joy to use as his sleek devices?” Richard Waters asks for The Financial Times. “All of which begs what has become an overriding question for Apple as the basis of competition in the mobile world has shifted: What about the services?”
“Does Apple have what it takes to compete head-on with Google in services?” Waters wonders. “The iCloud [sic], Steve Jobs’ last big launch, sought to glue the company’s devices together by making a user’s personal content show up automatically on all of their Apple gadgets. It was a nice idea, though it was restricted to the Apple universe of gadgets and has had mixed reviews from developers and users over its reliability and ease of use.”
“The Maps service, which came a year later, was a fiasco. As chief executive Tim Cook admitted earlier this week at the D11 conference in southern California, the flaws in Apple Maps have still not all been fixed and Apple has had to put some of its best minds on the problem to sort it out. But it will take much deeper changes in Apple’s culture and processes to fix the underlying weaknesses in services,” Waters writes. “Apple’s own developer conference starts in San Francisco on June 10. Mr Cook and Eddy Cue, who took charge of all of Apple’s services in a management shake-up last year, will have a lot to prove.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iCloud is fine for users. It’s the developers who have the most issues with iCloud. Hopefully, this gets fixed at WWDC within weeks.
Apple’s Maps issues were, are, and will likely always be, wildly overblown. Apple’s Maps are ahead of Google Maps in many ways already.
iMessage/Messages are a huge success. Waters likely doesn’t mention that Apple service because it fails to fit with his narrative. Not good reporting.
All that said, Cook, Cue, & Co. do need to focus, focus, focus on services to make sure each element is the absolute best it can possibly be.