“Apple’s best days are behind it. And the decline started after Steve Jobs negotiated an exclusive deal for AT&T to be the iPhone’s carrier,” Peter Cohan reports for Forbes. “Its best hope for the future may be Apple Pay.”
“That’s my summary of what Stanford Graduate School of Business Lecturer, Mark Leslie, told me about Apple in a March 31 interview,” Cohan reports. “Leslie thinks that the success of Apple when Steve Jobs came back in 1997 was due not so much to great hardware design but to his ability to convince business partners — e.g., the music and the wireless service provider industries — to change how they operated to support Apple… Leslie believes that Apple’s hardware design skills are good — but over-rated… ‘The iPhone is a beautiful device but what really made it a success was how Steve transformed the telecommunications industry when he negotiated a five-year exclusive deal with AT&T,’ said Leslie.”
“That was the last time Apple innovated,” Cohan reports. “‘Since the iPhone, Apple has had no innovation. The iPad and all the versions of the iPhone since are variations on the same thing. The only interesting possibility for innovation is Apple Pay,’ said Leslie.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Interesting hypothesis. That there’s no mention of the Apple Watch is telling; or the Apple A-series SoCs; or ResearchKit, which the Stanford University School of Medicine is already using to study cardiovascular disease; or any number of other groundbreaking innovations from Apple since the iPhone.
To state that “since the iPhone, Apple has had no innovation” only goes to prove that one can run a backup software maker (Veritas Software) during the 1990s and then go on to lecture at the aforementioned Stanford University with a woeful lack of understanding regarding the meaning of the word “innovation.”
Stanford Graduate School of Business students: You’re getting shortchanged with this one.
And the watch is a variation of the iPhone in a small wrist worn package that still requires the iPhone. So where is the innovation on this?
Come on down from the forum postings trolldude. You are going to hurt your brain if you start using it to think. It is dangerous there and if we knew your father, he would come over there and give you what for.
Little girly man, you need a spanking now.
-1
And the phone was a variation on laptop computers, cell phones, and iPods.
Does the imagination proposing future fictional technology in the past mean that no one in the future who brings the aforementioned technology to reality mean no one can truly innovate anymore simply because we already once dreamed of “Communicators,” “Dick Tracy watches?”, “Star Trek PADD’s?” “Spaceship computers,” and maybe “Tricorders?”
When Transporters, Replicators and Warp Drive show up will you give it’s actual inventors no credit either simply because someone dreamed it up as a mere possibility decades or millennia ago?
Have you no patience? Try the Apple Watch when it comes out instead of opening your mouth now and expressing your premature evaluation. You sound like a Caveman shown fire for the first time “Fire? What is this strange thing and how can it be of any use to me?” I have a feeling the Apple Watch will set you on fire.
You are more right than you think. 3D printing is a replicator on a basic level. There are some 3D printers that can do food. The FLIR One is very close to a Tricorder. On a very technical level someone did a Transporter. It was having a type of particle be in two places at once. No Warp Drive yet. However the world has so many warped minds in the driver seat that people want to leave the planet as fast as possible. It looks like a lot of people want the 23th century now, and want it all.
The innovative part of iPhone was an exclusive deal with AT&T, WTF? The iPhone got the smartphone from an executive tool to a consumer device. You could see real web pages, and easily take photos. That is what made the iPhone innovative.
‘premature evaluation’!!!
LOL funny
🙂 If we all had dimes for how often that has happened and then heard mostly deafening silence once the product was actually being sold we’d all be millionaires. I never understood those out front rush to judgment souls which is more a “rush to jabberwock.” Best not to comprehensively judge a sight unseen product not yet in your hands common sense would seem to tell us. But for most of the intelligent regulars here that’s preaching to the choir.
Totally.
And the iPad was just a large iPhone.
And the iPhone was just a small iMac with a touch screen instead of a keyboard and mouse.
And the iMac is just a mac mini welded to a screen
And the mac mini is just a small Mac
And the Mac is a computer
And computers were invented way before Apple even existed.
Therefore Apple never could innovate. All they’ve been doing is copying what others do.
You’re right.
Apple has designed some great devices and have been innovative from an engineering point of view. The innovation the mentioned in the article is the ideas to do things differently. Not the hardware.
MDN is correct if you assume the definition of innovation is limited to product. When you include paradigms, that’s the innovation that saved Apple. That’s why Apple Pay was mentioned and not the Apple Watch.
Are other innovations coming from Apple. I think so. Time and negotiations will tell.
On the plus side, he did manage to get himself quoted, presumably all over the place!
Hello troll!
Sorry, that was meant as a reply to the troll boy at the top.
Hello BirdShit!
Wow! The insight. The brilliant use of the English language. Sure showed him.
Oh WOW~! Did your mother realize you were an April Fools Day prank when you were born? Or were you just split asexually from a single cell organism so that now you have two cells to bang together to come up with that comment?
Sticks and stones, girly man.
Is anyone surprised that mark leslie became and still is a lecturer from being a pseudo software boss?
Think about it. . . there has to be a reason why he isn’t a CEO any more. He wasn’t wanted at his business so the board told him to get out!
Idiot…
When someone says that Apple doesn’t innovate, find out if their definition was so severe that no one has innovated since a caveman invented fire. (Oh wait, you can get wildfires from nature, I guess that wasn’t innovative either.)
Glad to see that Apple didn’t innovate beyond the iPhone. Pretty sure Mark Leslie and his band of merry idiots invented the A4 and beyond.
Wait. Is this an April Fools joke?
That’s why he is a dumbass lecturer … the old adage holds “those who can, do!; those who can’t, teach”
If Apple inc’s best days are behind it, what does that tell you about everyone else across multiple industries
Clearly, a clueless idiot!!
And “Those who can’t teach, teach teachers. Or become administrators.” But I’ve known some who were good at both of those. Still, for many, it is true.
You know what? Come take over my classes for two weeks…..then perhaps you can talk about teachers. Otherwise, quit spouting myths. “Those who CAN, teach….those who can’t pass laws (and make absurd statements) about teaching.”
Forbes has the most Apple hit pieces.
Very odd hypothesis, because Apple didn’t convince other businesses that they should change to support Apple; Jobs (and others at Apple) convinced these industries (AT&T, music industry, etc.) that partnering with Apple was in their best interests and they would profit as a result. I think that has played out to be completely true.
AT&T took a chance with Apple because AT&T at the time was a distant second to Verizon. Locking in the iPhone was pretty much a no-brainer, because AT&T had little to lose if the iPhone was a flop. Remember, the original iPhone was minimally subsidized and Apple received a cut of the monthly subscription, so AT&T wasn’t shelling out big bucks for a completely unknown product which may have sat in its warehouses unsold.
At the time, it was actually Cyngular.
Tenured Professorships – welfare programs for over-educated fools who would utterly fail if they worked in industry.
“Oh look at me. I just insulted all tenured professors. What a brilliant anti-intellectual I am.”
He’s not anti-intellectual. He’s pro-ignorance.
Oh ya the decline statred after att… Lol
Has he even bothered to look at the stock ?
Who is Mark Leslie and what makes him credible? A “lecturer” could have just about any credentials.
I had Mark as a lecturer at Stanford and he’s the real deal. Veritas was an exceptionally successful company and a great financial outcome for its investors and employees.
Can’t vouch for his comments here, but based on my experience, I’d think twice about questioning his judgment or vision.
Okay, I looked, Mark has a great record for founding Veritas, still doesn’t make him an expert on “innovation”. I mean seriously, he believes Apple hasn’t innovated since its deal with AT&T.
Sorry, no, he didn’t “found” Veritas. He was brought on board an already existing company founded in 1983 named “Tolerant Systems” as a CEO in 1989, where he changed the name to “Veritas” in honor of his alma Mater, Stanford.
His approach to Veritas’ growth was acquisitions, not innovation. And his $1.5 Billion Market Cap was in the middle of the Dot Com Boom. . . and literally wasn’t real. It was a BUBBLE that popped. It was acquired by Symantec in 2004.
What is REALLY amusing is that it got where it was by signing an EXCLUSIVE deal with . . . AT&T . . . for their UNIX file system management!
Simply HILARIOUS!
In his lectures on Apple, especially in his claims about excluding deals with AT&T, it is becoming obvious that he is recapitulating his OWN business experiences and the arch of the rise and fall of Veritas!
There is nothing profoundly deep about his analysis that is at all convertible to Apple’s business arch or any other business. He is projecting his Johnny one-note business experience to ALL businesses, mistaking his limited experience as the way every business must live and die. His view is very parochial and myopic.
I’ve thought several times, and I continue to question his judgement and vision.
What a bunch of BULL SHIT!!!!
The Forbes writer, Peter Cohan has a long history of hating on Apple. His main premise is that Apple stopped innovating, and now he’s pretending someone agrees with him.
Oh. Look. Another April Fool.
Say what you want.
Apple made AT&T become a better carrier… Made the rest of them BEG apple to make a deal with them.
They were all offered the iPhone… They all said no, AT&T said yes. And they all came back to beg Apple and ask for forgiveness.
Ask any of the CEOs (at the time of the att deal) of those carriers if they could go back and change their answer to apple. Bet they would.
All carriers improved their networks since the first iPhone, and most did DUE to the continuing usage of the iPhone… Android sufferers are not using all their bandwidth.
iPad not an innovation?
The new MacBook?
The new iMacs?
List can go on forever..
The guy is a dumbass.
Stanford Business School has the worst April Fool pranks.
HeathKit and ResearchKit are huge.
Getting into the Health Industry is huge.
More to come.
So I think, crack smoking was a factor in writing the article.
“Can’t innovate any more? My ass!” — Phil Schiller, WWDC 2013
=:~)
Just another clueless wonder. Why Stanford has him is anybody’s guess.
Oh, man, get this guy on CNBC!!!
I think this guy is smoking his socks!
If this isn’t supposed to an April Fool’s joke, then if anybody on here remembers correctly AT&T was making deals with MicroSloth, which went away when they sold their cellular business to Cingular. Cingular is who Apple made the exclusive deal with, and who, because of brand recognition, also bought the rights to the AT&T MOBILE name. Overly simplified explanation, but it not an April Fools joke.