“Apple shares rose 6 percent Wednesday, after the company reported earnings that beat analyst expectations on strong iPhone sales,” Alex Rosenberg reports for CNBC.
“But the best news for the company may be the cultural shift that management is undergoing, said one close Apple watcher,” Rosenberg reports. “‘They’re about to get the ghost out of the boardroom,’ said Max Wolff, senior analyst and chief economist at Greencrest Capital. ‘They’ll start making what the market is telling them to make, and not what someone is channeling out of the ghost of Steve Jobs.'”
Rosenberg reports, “‘I don’t think channeling is all that useful in the boardroom,’ he told CNBC.com. ‘”Tim Cook is a good CEO. If he’s free to make decisions, he’ll make good ones.’ …As it is, the company has been constrained by Jobs’ vision, Wolff said. ‘People would tell them, ‘Gee, I like your phone, but the screen’s so small.’ And they would say, ‘Well …'”
“‘I wouldn’t doubt that here and there the company has asked itself, ‘What would Steve do?” said JMP Securities analyst Alex Gauna. ‘I don’t think those shadows last forever—I think people move on. It’s a very capable organization. And the company is moving on.’ In addition, Gauna said, people tend to overestimate the co-founder’s role. ‘What Steve Jobs was always exceptionally good at was being the final gatekeeper,’ he said… Wolff also thinks the breadth of Jobs’ vision may have been slightly overstated. ‘It’s not the stuff of legend — he didn’t discover cheese,’ Wolff said… ‘He just figured that if you made something that didn’t break every five minutes, people would be willing to pay for it.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Silly season is here. D-list “analysts” making baseless pronouncements, wildly underestimating Steve Jobs’ contributions, and woefully misunderstanding Apple Inc. on TV shows. Happy dog days of summer, everyone!
We’ve forgotten more about Apple than these two fools combined will ever know and we’ll tell you this: The day Apple starts “making what the market is telling them to make,” is the day the Apple we all know and love begins to die. Apple makes markets, it doesn’t follow them. Following whims, fads, and dead ends does not lead to a success on the scale Apple has achieved.
When and if a larger screen does iPhone arrive, it’ll be because Apple (if they’re still running right) believes it’ll deliver the best experience for a certain group of customers, because battery life hasn’t been fatally compromised, and because any issues it might inflict upon the ecosystem (fragmentation) is either an acceptable trade-off or because the problem has been largely solved (with Retina displays across-the-board and scaling) or solved (with resolution independence or via some other mechanism.)
We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us.
It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.
So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.'” – Steve Jobs