I don’t care, unless you’re talking about God, it is totally stupid to believe some company or some person ‘always will’ be something wonderful or unblemished.
At their present performance for over the last decade and with Steve Jobs (one of the founders of the company) showing the company what needed to be done... I would say that they're demonstrating that very thing. And that is what the writer is talking about.
Playing "other companies games" is not the way Apple does things, as the article is saying. And that's precisely why they're "winning" (which means winning the consumers to buy their products).
And I don't have any problems at all with that, because that means when a company, such as Apple, is successful like that -- it's because the people who boy their products are pleased with those products.
That's the situation with Apple. As long as they keep that up, they'll be fine.
And we're talking about "business" and a "company" here, not a religion and not about God. I do know the difference between the two... :-)
We’re already seeing “It could never happen in America” be shown to be a lie.
Just because things are going wrong in a lot of other areas doesn't mean that absolutely everything and every company and every person is going wrong, too... :-)
You would be foolish to say Apple will never get it wrong just because Jobs is doing a good job now. We’ve had great companies run by great men in the beginning, only to have future leaders run them into the ground.
“If they keep it up”. That’s a big if. If anything is certain, people who take over companies that are ‘doing well’ but have little to do with them getting there in the first place, take for granted what it took to get them there in the first place, and get greedy and stupid.
The founders of a company put everything into it to make it big. The next wave of people aren’t as vested but make expansions but are more concerned about maintaining. the third removed executives are even more removed from the founders and it’s just a job and stock options and such. They’re more concerned about dividends to pised off shreholders, domestic partner benefits, and if everyone’s taken the latest sexual harassment class.
You see the same behavior in the families that have amassed large fortunes, you see it in monarchies, you see it in unions, you see it in certain religious groups. You see it in all sorts of business. The ones who come down the road after the founders rarely wnat to put everything they have on the line and into the business. They rarely take the same kinds of risk or have the same kind of skin in the game. It all starts into maintenance and preservation and status-quo-ism as you mention, and the further away you get from the initial founder, the more it sets in.
As far as I read it, Microsoft is one step ahead of Apple. Gates is still there but not running day-to-day anymore. Jobs is THE FOUNDER (only remaining founder) at Apple and once he’s gone, they will most likely run into the same problem most other companies do. Stagnation and maintenance mode.
As a Mac user since, oh, the Mac Pro and programming the Mac since Lightspeed C, here’s what I have to say about Apple’s business prospects:
They’d better keep Steve alive through whatever means necessary, because when Jobs isn’t at the company, their product innovation, quality and indeed their internal employee enthusiasm goes downhill - quickly. Their board has put in such idiots as Scully (a former soda pop exec) and Spindler. A future without Jobs does not look promising given the Apple board’s history.
“Mac Plus” — brain fart on my part. The “big memory” Mac with a SCSI port.