“Apple is the largest company in the world, but success is fleeting. While the numbers are impressive, they don’t come close to painting an accurate picture about how much trouble Apple is really in,” Bryan Clark writes for The Next Web. “Apple’s rise under Steve Jobs was historic. Its fall under Tim Cook is going to be much slower, more painful.”
“Tim Cook can spend days waxing poetic about profits but even a modicum of ability to read between the lines is all it takes to realize it’s mostly bullshit,” Clark writes. “Overall revenue looks great, but the iPhone actually missed Wall Street’s projections this quarter. On Wall Street, this is nothing new, unless we’re talking about Apple. Apple rarely misses its numbers. In fact, it often overshoots them by such a large margin you wonder just how qualified the analysts making the predictions really are. This year is different. Apple swung. Apple missed.”
“Apple lives and dies by the iPhone. iPad sales are flat, iPod’s are all but irrelevant, and while Mac sales are up, they’re nowhere close to the workhorse that can continue to carry Apple should they experience a downturn in iPhone sales. There is no Plan B,” Clark writes. “What made Apple an iconic brand is gone. Steve Jobs is almost entirely responsible for Apple’s cult-like following… Jobs created a movement of decidedly minimalist devices that required not much more than an occasional charge and a user that knew where the power button was. ‘It just works’ became a battle cry.”
“We once watched as Jobs and his eye for detail created technology that was just short of perfection. Now we watch as Tim Cook eyes Wall Street and spins earnings reports. The software that ‘just worked’ is slow and glitchy. The hardware is buggy and underpowered,” Clark writes. “And these are just the problems that Apple has a legitimate chance to fix.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Just getting this in our database for future reference, but not all of this is crazy talk: Apple should take the “it used to just work, but doesn’t so much lately” point to heart. Apple has grown very quickly in recent years. There are now far more post-Jobs newbies than Apple employees who really understand the Apple mindset that made it insanely great. How well is Apple University working, really? We referenced Apple’s faltering attention to detail back in January with: Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better.
Recently, when complaining to an Apple employee who was hired in the post-Jobs era about the unfinished nature of the Apple TV, we were told, off the record, of course, and paraphrasing: The key is that you already bought one. We already have your money. It’ll get updated however we decide to update it, if we even decide to update it. 99.9% of buyers will readily accept and be satisfied with the “all new Apple TV” despite the issues.
That is the sort of attitude that kills great companies.
Apple management and Apple shareholders should take notice.