“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.