How Apple Is Organized for Innovation
hbr.orgIs the way "Apple is organized for innovation" the reason why XCode is so prone to crashing? Is it why so many of Apple's new APIs are lacking documentation? Is it the reason the iOS Simulator doesn't reliably export the accessibility tree needed to run XCUI tests without flaking half the time?
What about the fact that they haven't announced a single new product category since the Apple Watch in 2014?
To my mind, it certainly seems as if Apple is actually organized to simply refine the innovations of its past, much like the conventionally grown tomatoes that we've all grown accustomed to. Apple is now just another amplified thing, very much in the mold of our post-WWII mindset.
> single new product category since the Apple Watch
They released the HomePod and AirPods as well as a range of new services e.g. Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Fitness.
And we are expecting two major changes to their product offerings over the coming year or so i.e. ARM Macs and Apple Glass.
> it certainly seems as if Apple is actually organized to simply refine the innovations of its past
This takes innovation, too. Just because a product isn't a wholly new, virgin thing doesn't mean it isn't innovative.
The A-series chips aren't products themselves, for example, but they're certainly innovations. Apple is now the best mobile processor house in the world, and it isn't particularly close - who saw that coming?
> Apple is now the best mobile processor house in the world
Will likely be the best laptop processor in the world as well.
Very much doubtful. AMD is seriously on fire, and unless they can pull some magic I don't see that happening.
You’re using an example of an underdog suddenly topping a hegemon in the field to make a point that no other company can do that again?
AMD was able to topple Intel because Intel was stagnant. Apple is coming from a design that is worse in every single way to AMD, which has been working on this for over a decade, and is attempting to topple them while they're killing it every year. Simply not comparable.
Indeed, if you look at AMD's laptop chips, their performance per watt is quite superior to Apple's chips. And since then AMD has only improved.
Amazon's ARM processors outperform AMD at similar price-points.
And I would expect Apple to be significantly better at Amazon.
Source? From what I've seen they are around half the speed.
> To my mind, it certainly seems as if Apple is actually organized to simply refine the innovations of its past,
Apparently Apple can't even refine their own innovations without breaking their own kit and bilking their customers.
To wit, iOS 14 and watchOS 7 (most recent versions) break Activity and Health GPS data and Apple recommends using iCloud backup to resolve the issue. [0]
The problem is that not only is iCloud insecure (e.g. Messages) compared to local backup, it also costs money for over 5GB storage. [1] In other words, Apple has broken GPS with iOS 14 and watchOS 7 and their recommendation is to use an insecure service that will cost users more money.
Such affected customers should be represented in a class action lawsuit. (I'd love for this link to get traction, but I know it's a longshot. [2])
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211865
> What about the fact that they haven't announced a single new product category since the Apple Watch in 2014?
AirPods (2016) are pretty popular.
(edit: I listed some of Apple's recent new services here, but removed since the AirPods make the point by themselves. Apologies to user optimiz3 for leaving your comment dangling.)
A credit card is a bit of a stretch. Virtually every enterprise in existence has tried to get me to sign up for their in-house card since the mid 80s.
I would argue that Apple card is actually a significantly different and better experience purely by virtue of being able to cycle the number at will. I no longer have to worry about the safety of handing my card number out over the phone. I no longer have to wait for a new card if the old number gets compromised. I no longer have to deal with completely inept new card processing agents who fail to actually send the card to the right address while I'm traveling after half a dozen tries and they keep just sending the damned thing to my house which they know I'm not at.
The innovation is that it is not actually a credit card as previously known. It can't be used manually, it is a way to get retailers to move to Chip and Contactless, which is a way to get them and their merchant acquirers to move to Apple Pay.
I mean if you look at it in conjunction with Apple pays it’s pretty good.
How is it any different than with any other card and Apple Pay?
> simply refine the innovations
This was always apples thing.
I mean even if we go back to the apple watch. Was it a new innovation? No, not at all. Other companies had produced similar products years before, just non did put enough mony into it to refine it to the degree Apple did.
Same goes for their ARM chips. They didn't invent them nor did they invent the idea of fast ARM chips. But they took and refined them over many product generations to now yield excellent results.
Same for ARM laptops.
Same for a lot of their software innovations.
Same for there camera.
Through it should be noted that for them to be able to refine thinks to that degree often some technological innovations are mixed in in-between.
But that's fine, constant refinement is often more use-full then complete new innovations without refinement.
Sadly sometimes the focus on what gets refined in which ways is pretty questionable.
In turn refinements you can't sell as innovation get neglected.
Also the developer is forced to work with Apple using apple tools so that is often neglected, too. Their is little insensitive for Apple to spend more money on things like that when this will not bring more Users or Developers to Apple.
Which is short sighted IMHO given how much money Apple has.
To be fair the smartphone was a once in a generation event. I think Apple still has a lot of structural advantages when it comes to inventing new product categories. Coming up with another device with the same impact as the iPhone is going to be very very difficult.
That said though I think their services offerings so far are underwhelming.
After a certain point, all complex organizations/systems will be exhibiting undesired emergence while desired emergence is reduced. At that point it’s all about marginal gains. Also, consider different goals. If the goal of the company is to make things work for engineers, they have shortcomings. But their goal clearly is making money and that seems to be working very well.
If nothing else, watching Apple will give you an idea of what every other company is going to do for the next few years.
woah, big tyme hater
iMessage is a true marketing innovation in America, where the only "alternatives" are Facebook and (barely usable) SMS. It restricts communication and makes life more difficult for everyone who doesn't have an iPhone, which in turn increases iPhone sales. Meanwhile, while holding basically infinite money, they pretend some patent troll is holding them back from making it cross-platform. Pure genius.
I use WhatsApp and Signal to communicate with people on an iPhone in the US all the time. How have I ever been restricted?
I do know that MMS is garbage, and that the mobile networks used to price gouge people for using MMS, and on top of that it doesn’t work many times, or at least it didn’t use to.
That's why he pointed out that it is marketing.
Because people believe you need to have iMessage.
Source? I've never see an Apple advertisement that would lead me to believe I can't use WhatsApp or Signal or any other messaging application.
Anecdotal sources: Every group of peers that wouldn't have excluded me from the group chat if it didn't "turn green"
The green means that it's technically inferior than WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, etc. and/or you can end up with surprise international texting charges from your mobile network.
I don't have a problem with people discriminating against MMS, but everyone I know doesn't have a problem using any of the other decent alternatives that work on both Android and iOS.
I agree it's a good indicator, only given it isn't exclusive to a restricted platform (or expensive platform, therefore making it a status symbol). I think Signal does this right, 1. by supporting all major platforms, 2. by showing standard SMS as "dull grey" and allowing you to choose your own color for a contact (otherwise having a random color) when the conversation is Signal enhanced. On that note, I have hopes that Signal can become The One True Messenger after they iron out a few more quirks.
There’s a pretty common meme about people having green texts being “meh”. It’s weird.
Does this count as a “source” in this instance?
Edit: found something more traditional https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not...
pretty frustrating read though. Be warned.
Sounds like the green messages are doing people a favor by pointing out garbage people who discriminate against someone for not using iOS.
I'm just claiming that there is a valid use case for making it abundantly clear if a conversation is happening via MMS versus iMessage, so I didn't take it as a way for Apple to somehow "lock" people into iMessage...especially since plenty of other chat apps are a few taps away with no degradation in usability.
Before there was iMessage, there was BlackBerry Messenger. It had similar qualities of being a nicer user experience as compared to SMS.
Must be nice to reimplement an old idea and qualify as innovation. :)
Google tries again, again, and again, to create a decent messaging app, and fails every time. Whether it's bad marketing or management, it's clearly not the simplest thing in the world to achieve what apple did with iMessage (unless now you want to posit that the billionaires in Google also have no idea what they're doing ever) and the discussion is relevant especially when we are reviewing their management style.
Google Talk was fairly successful for its time. Why Google were unable to replicate that success again, I have no clue.
> and (barely usable) SMS
What's the issue with SMS in the US? At least in Australia, SMS is no hindrance to messaging between Android and iOS apart from the colour of the bubbles.
You never know if SMS actually arrived. Sure, it probably did. But sometimes, it didn’t. And you won’t know.
Is that a common thing? IME they do always arrive unless the recipient has a habit of leaving their phone turned off for weeks.
The two group conversations I have on my iPhone that I interact with most are MMS, and often (once a week or so) I will miss part of a conversation and have to piece together what the heck is going on. More often I have a problem where messages send/recieve out of order (even if I'm stationary or using Wi-Fi calling to send), or one message will send and once will bounce so the recipient will get a picture with no context or a caption with no context.
None of us are on the same messaging services (besides Discord I guess, but that doesn't have good notifications), so we can't switch. This is on AT&T, but Verizon and T-Mobile have the same problem.
I've had issues receiving SMS messages for no apparent reason, despite living in a major city and keeping my phone charged. I went down a rabbit hole with some support people once on it and we never found the root cause.
SMS messages work almost all of the time which makes it really irritating when they don't.
You’re right it is very rare that it doesn’t arrive. But I’ve lost friendships or at least severely disrupted them the few times sms didn’t work. It’s not just that it didn’t arrive. In one case it was days late (yes, days). In that case, the delay turned the original message from a casual one into an insult.
The colour of the bubbles is a brilliant marketing play. People put peer pressure [1] on each other to “upgrade” their bubbles from the ugly green to the cool blue by buying an iPhone.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18624681/apple-imessage-a...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s not just marketing: in the US, the green bubbles are sold by your carrier to marketing firms, while blue bubbles are opaque to your carrier.
Most likely the missing "chat" features that people have become used to (reactions, read notifications, "currently typing", threads).
I think the marketing works because it gives you just one option that everyone automatically uses. I just downloaded a 5th messaging app from the Play Store because everyone uses something different. It is exhausting. This is one case I hate having "choices" among 100s of mediocre apps.
> only "alternatives" are Facebook and (barely usable) SMS.
Why don't Americans use Telegram?
For me there are two basic reasons: 1) everyone I know is on iMessage, 2) iMessage does everything I require of a messaging app. Honest question and not trying to be hostile, why should I prefer telegram? What am I missing?
1) everyone I know is on iMessage,
So you're privileged in an entirely privileged bubble? If iPhone is only 52% of the USA and 20% of the world it seems almost statistically impossible that all of your friends or family can use iMessage.
End to end encryption. If you’re using iCloud with iMessage Apple has access to your messages.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
Apple doesn't have access to your iMessages unless you give them permission by consenting to have your keys backed up to iCloud. If you use iTunes backup (or don't back up your phone), the Messages will be encrypted and can only be unlocked if you have a device that still has the keys.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
"Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple."
“There’s always been one major problem with Apple’s privacy claim that ‘What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone‘: it isn’t true of iCloud backups.
Although Apple uses end-to-end encryption for both iMessage and FaceTime, it doesn’t do the same for iCloud backups. They are encrypted, but Apple holds the key, meaning that the company has access to a copy of almost everything on your phone – and that includes stored messages.”
I don't know what "gimmicks" it may have which iMessage does not(although the in-chat polls are pretty handy), but IMO the big strength of Telegram is privacy. You can use it without revealing your e-mail address or phone number.
The situation of not knowing a single non-Apple user is unlikely outside the US anyhow.
Why do I need to download another messaging app? iMessage works fine and WhatsApp for people outside the US.
Why does it need to be cross platform? Why do y’all elevate it to a moral right? I really don’t get it
At the same time, it makes life easier and most importantly consistent for all those who have an iPhone. For mass market, openness of platforms don’t sell well. What general audiences want is a solid customer experience and based on sales, Apple’s hit the mark in terms of communicating and delivering on this value lever.
Can you expand on the patent troll pretext? Never heard of that.
Apparently a company called VirnetX is seeking damages from Apple over iMessage and FaceTime, which some people (in my previous discussion among others) point out as their excuse not to develop cross-platform iMessage as they do cross-platform Apple Music. I don't have any evidence of Apple themselves claiming this as the excuse.
https://9to5mac.com/2016/05/26/patent-troll-facetime-imessag...
Interesting, thank you!
If you’ve been an accountable executive in both entrepreneurial startups and global enterprises, this article resonates.
Doubly so if you've been an accountable executive among a bunch of unaccountable executives; it really puts a finger on all the things you wish your colleagues did, but... you know... don't.
It's refreshing to see that a functional organization is a viable alternative to the product-based divisions that most startups and companies adopt nowadays. Also management by experts seems inspiring:
> “We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we’re gonna be a big company, let’s hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn’t work at all….They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything. If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can’t learn anything from?"
Hard to say they're innovative when Samsung has produced folding phones before them. Similarly, bezelless display was just following Huawei and Samsung. In fact, many of their so called new and innovative features have appeared in android phones earlier, but Apple markets them better. Apple is efficient at money making. If I were to profile a company for innovation, I would profile Nintendo. They have consistently dared to create new types of gaming consoles. No generation is similar to the previous one.
Innovation is also about what you say no to.
Folding phones today are a mess e.g. creases, durability concerns, inconvenient form-factors.
Leaving things out would be innovative if they went against the mainstream for some crazy gains.In this case Apple is holding the line while Samsung and Huawei are pushing the envelope. If Apple introduce only tried and tested technologies, how can they be called innovative?
Anyone who works at Apple care to vote for or against this as a model for other companies to follow?
Apple is not an innovation company they are a well managed product company.
Using 'Rosner' as an example is a little bit insufferable: "We only have experts!" But then put an eng. with 20 years Engineering in charge of a media product?!?
'I have to learn what incentivizes News companies!'. Yeah, maybe a few more things. Three cheers for being a cowboy, but know that you're a cowboy in that situation.
Do you notice how badly Apple does in everything social or media? Sure they made podcasts mainstream, but after 20 years of incubation, and still others reap the reward?
This is an example of that kind of weird hubris, it reminds me of 'Google Plus'.
pfffft
“ Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts.” enough said.
so I guess apple has reached or passed peak innovation...
[^] press to doubt.
Apple innovates in marketing and pushing lock-in that holds back the actual progress.