"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Not really ironic. It only really started after Jobs died, and I think his whole point was that he needed to be the dictator to keep everything in balance. Though I'd argue in Apple's case it was less "salespeople that don't understand product" mucking everything up and more "a designer that doesn't understand function over form" (Jony Ive) mucking things up.
I would argue the MacBook Pro. Taking out the SD slot (so you can't expand storage, and have to buy a more expensive or replacement machine) and replacing the function keys (with a Touch Bar, which looks good in ads but sucks to use) were driven by marketing/sales people, not product people.
This machine is awful to use and I'm in the processing of researching something to replace it with.
I would happily switch back to a 2015 model, even with the drop in CPU and GPU power.
I actually like typing on the butterfly keyboard, I'm doing it right now - but it has reliability issues.
They also took the headphone jack off phones - making it a worse device, because the AirPods/HomePod marketers didn't want anyone plugging their phone into their existing headphones or speakers.
The awful mess they've made of Lighting/USB-C ports on different devices is also confusing and irritating.
I wish every device of theirs had the attention to usability the Apple Watch does. That thing is a pleasure to use, it's just expensive and incompatible with Android. But the way they're going, they'll put a verification chip in the strap, to make sure you have to buy those from Apple too.
Unfortunately they have by far the best chips, trackpads, and smartwatches on the market.
Apple has always moved fast into stopping using technologies that didn't fit their product vision. If removal of the SD card slot (that one isn't even one of my top 10 feature-removal grievances from Apple and I have music and photography as hobbies so plenty of use for it), headphone jack, etc. is shocking for you then you haven't used Apple for long.
Apple really don't care what you think you need as features (or at least Steve Jobs didn't), they have a vision and they will try to sell you it, not the opposite.
I don't have strong opinions about this, personally I think it's interesting that some companies (such as Apple) want to stick to their philosophy instead of just chasing dollars around by pumping out products designed by committees.
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."