I felt reading this is what life for a CEO must be like. To be continually bombarded with 101 ways to do the job. 80%+ are wrong, from people who absolutely believe at the time they are correct.
I think it's worse than that. You don't know the right answer, nobody else knows the right answer, and the only way get by is to guess and hope you get lucky. Apple got lucky. They built the iPod, which in hindsight, was a trans-formative product, but at the time it wasn't so obvious.
This is pretty uncharitable to Jobs. If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8).
You can draw a straight line through iPod -> iTunes Store -> iPhone -> App Store -> iPad -> Apple Watch. Even though the vision was a little blurry with regards to how powerful mobile devices would get and thus how the smart phone would overtake the PC for revenue, it still holds up in the way these products are executed and integrated. Frankly, the only company that is really competing effectively with this 15-year-old strategy is Google, because they have cloud services chops that Apple has struggled with, but despite being dominant in that area, it's still just good enough to put them on par because their UX, integrated industrial design, supply chain management, and marketing still pale in comparison to Apple.
Just because it wasn't immediately obvious to the world that the iPod would succeed doesn't mean that the vision wasn't there or that it was just dumb luck. Obviously there is a huge amount of luck in terms of circumstances that fuel every large company, but I find it really annoying when people are so dismissive of good execution with this type of hand-wavy rhetoric.
> If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8).
That's not really the case though. As Jobs outlined it in that video, the Digital Hub strategy was to sell Macintoshes by positioning them as something you could dock your consumer-electronics gadgets, mostly from third parties, into. It was a plan to sell hubs, not spokes. This strategy had limited viability for Apple, because a typical consumer wasn't likely to think "I've just bought this $500 camcorder, so now I need to spend twice that or more on a Mac in order to offload and edit the video". If they were going to use any computer as the digital hub for their camcorder, it was probably going to be their Windows PC. That's probably why iTunes for Windows was such a difficult and long-drawn-out decision for Jobs: because it was a decision to mostly abandon the Digital Hub approach in favour of selling more of the spokes. Then Apple's slow and initially reluctant embrace of the "post-PC era" with over-the-air iDevice updates and cloud storage to partly displace iTunes means that it's increasingly taking nearly the opposite of Jobs' 2001 stance: "We're clearly migrating away from the PC as the centrepiece" and "We don't think of it in terms of the PC business anymore" are things that Tim Cook could say today without really startling anyone.
It sounds like you think they rolled a die for every design decision that went into creating the iPod and it happened to turn out well. I would agree that there are many factors outside your control and subject to luck for a company in a situation like that, but how you choose to design and market your products aren't among them. Apple back then wasn't Samsung, they didn't just make one of everything, in as many different models as they could, and see what happened in the market. They had very limited resources and had to be extremely judicious and thoughtful about how they used them. They're not in that position now, but the disipline they learned through those years has stayed with them.
I think they were just betting the whole company. If you're betting the whole company on a single revolutionary product, you better make that product as awesome as you can possibly manage.
I imagine with each design decision they asked just two questions "will it make the product more awesome" and "can we afford it".
I wonder if stock holders knew Apple was risking that much on a project that wasn't even a computer.
At the time it was a heavy music player with an annoying interface that only worked for mac users and was useless forever if you dropped it and the hard drive broke.
They fixed all those problems later versions, but the initial device was underwhelming to a lot of people.
I had an early one, and loved it. It's been slowly forgotten about over time, but the scroll wheel interface was an amazing innovation. Even years later I'd see people with MP3 players with up and down buttons struggle to scroll through a large list, whereas the scroll wheel made it comfortable, fast, and easy to control.
The on thing of note is that Mac users seems to include a massive number of people involved with media production. This including artists of various stripes.
From personal anecdote i think i first heard about iPod when people started chatting about what those white earbuds some artist had been spotted using.
And i sure as hell don't think Apple was in the position to pay them to use the iPod publically.
Apple tends to be pretty good at releasing 1.0's where the problems can be fixed as tech improves, rather than being fundamental design flaws (though they manage those as well.. coverflow)
Plenty of items on the list are involved with what happened. Like 'keep a retail presence', 'distinguish your looks' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac#/media/File:Nafija55.jpg came out the next year), 'focus on customer support', 'break new ground, don't CYA', 'improve your marketing', 'simplify product names', even 'buy a song' (hello U2).
Notable exceptions are 'apologise', 'build software the business community cares about', and, of course, #1 'abandon hardware'.
These are all items on the first page, because I haven't clicked the second one yet.
Not in any meaningful sense. Hardly any big tech companies manufacture hardware in the US any more. Hardware is Apple's single distinguishing feature as a business, and theres way more to it than which company happens to assemble the components together.
I think what Apple does is a bit different to outsourcing hardware production. They actually finance the initial investment in the manufacturing facilities in order to secure exclusive and long term contracts.
It seems to be a cost effective in that they get the benefits of owning the hardware production while the technology is still new.
