
The Curse of Culture - dwaxe
https://stratechery.com/2016/the-curse-of-culture/
======
Jerry2
I've come to a conclusion that Cook's reign at Apple will probably mirror
Ballmer's reign at Microsoft. Both are biz guys who inherited companies from
technology visionaries with massive revenue streams and yet they both lacked
vision and tech expertise to create successful new products. Ballmer tried it
numerous times and Cook has tried it with Watch, Music and so on. Neither of
them have succeeded. Apple's now become a "me too" company as they keep on
releasing products that other companies have released already. Apparently,
Apple is now working on their Amazon Echo and Google Home clone. They'll be
third to market once it's out.

In 2014, when Apple bought an urban fashion brand that sells overpriced
headphones, Google bought Deepmind for 1/6 of the price. That said it all
about where both companies were headed. Steve Jobs is famous for quoting
Gretzky's line about "skating where the puck is headed and not where it is"
and it seems that Google's skating where the puck is going while Apple's
skating backwards.

Apple's headed for a decade of stagnation... just like Microsoft was under
Ballmer. My only question is: how long before Apple gets its own Nadella and
who will be their savior? I don't see anyone in their executive ranks who's as
good as Nadella.

~~~
mathattack
One big difference - Microsoft's stock price languished under Ballmer, while
Apple's is doing fine under Cook. (I haven't compared versus the market, but I
suspect that it will still hold)

Cook's legacy will be if Apple pulls off the bet on autonomous cars. Auto
manufacturing is very much a logistics challenge, which plays to his
strengths. It's too early to write him off.

~~~
metaphorm
has Apple done anything whatever in the self-driving car domain? I've seen
literally nothing about it from them and I've been paying attention. I don't
mean rumor mill stuff or "open secrets". Have they announced any products?
Have they discussed any actual projects?

~~~
swombat
They have not. It's not Apple's style to make announcements about products
they're not sure they'll release, and they won't release an Apple car unless
they believe they can do it better than anyone else. I think it is a strength
of their brand that it is plausible that even after investing $10b+ in
autonomous car research they may well decide to scrap the project if they
think it's not right.

------
L_Rahman
I'm a huge fan of Stratechery and Thompson. They've given me powerful ways of
thinking about the world.

Are there others out there? While Thompson does talk a lot about the
intersection of technology with business strategy, he tends to focus on large,
well-known technology companies that primarily have consumer facing offering.

I'd pay to read something like Stratechery for biotechnology, or enterprise
software but to the best of my knowledge none of these exist.

~~~
snowwrestler
I don't get the love for Stratechery. Thompson is a good writer but the few
articles I can recall from him were bad misses. For example he wrote a long
piece about how the Nest acquisition heralded a major new consumer products
business model for Google. How has that worked out?

~~~
tsycho
I don't think it's because of his prediction accuracy. What I love about his
writing is that he brings in a fresh perspective and an alternative way to
think about tech and its future, whereas most normal tech press just reports
what's happening today and not even the why of that.

FWIW, while I found this particular piece insightful in general, I think he
ignored the huge importance of Android and iOS. Even if the future is voice,
the medium for the voice is likely to continue to be the phone or other
wearables connected to the phone for a long time (5 years or more). And hence
Apple and Google are likely to remain dominant since they will be at the front
of the funnel. Even if the actual intelligence is coming from other companies,
they will still have to be packaged as "app/AI plugins" into Android/iOS, so
the OS owners should be able to continue to extract their pound of flesh
a.k.a. App store revenue cut.

------
PepeGomez
That's an interesting thought, but I'm afraid that the actual reason is far
more trivial.

Companies are typically founded by highly passionate and creative people, who
care a lot about what they do and are both able and willing to steer their
startup in the right direction.

Once they grow, they start hiring new employees, many of those will inevitably
be the kind of people who only want to do their job and go home. Over time,
the management too gets filled by people who apply mainly because it's a high
status and well paid position, and are not at all that interested in what the
company does.

Eventually, all the remaining creative people and even the founders themselves
get bored with the routine and leave to do something else and the company
becomes hollowed out. The remaining people may be highly skilled and competent
in their respective positions, but they are generally unaware of the big
picture and the reasons behind how things are done.

As the result, the company slowly turns from succesful to dysfunctional as its
ossified culture gets out of touch with the ever evolving reality, as there
aren't any people left in the company who are able to notice practices that
are no longer functional and care enough to change them.

~~~
visarga
A shorter version could be: startups are tempted to think radically different,
to try new approaches, because they have nothing to lose. But a big,
entrenched company has to protect the current cash flow first, then think
about how to extend it. They have a lot to lose by cannibalizing the current
business model in favor of a new, visionary model. They become victims of
their own success.

~~~
PepeGomez
While that also could be the case, it's not what I meant.

------
roymurdock
_Summary_

Founders set the company culture, success ingrains that culture deep into a
company's subconscious where it runs in the background regardless of whatever
cultural reforms/artifacts are introduced - culture can only be changed when a
new CEO (Jobs, Nadella) steps in and _announces_ a huge change in culture,
which usually stems from an otherwise unimaginable partnership (such as
Apple/MSFT) that shows a concession to the realities of the market, which the
company once thought it was above.

\---

Author singles out Apple and Google as companies he is worried about WRT
current culture.

Apple - threatened by "big data AI services": Author calls for Apple to
partner with Microsoft to get access to cheap backend services (Azure) and/or
frontend services (Siri + Cortana), ostensibly to play in Amazon AWS (compute
as a service) and IBM Watson's (AI/marketing as a service) markets,
respectively. Alternatively, Apple should open iOS to enable customers to muck
around with the latest and greatest Android developments and set Google
services as defaults on their iOS devices.

Google - threatened by users spending time on social apps: Should partner with
Facebook by building a bot for Facebook Messenger and a backend for Facebook
Messenger developers.

\---

 _Questions /Comments_

\- It is unclear what unique advantages Apple would bring to the table for
either the frontend/backend services market. Why break the intense in-house
hardware/software coupling focus by leaning on MS for services? What backend
services does Apple need to bring in-house through a partnership?

\- What are the cool new Android services that iOS needs to integrate? I know
the author says AI capabilities, but that is not a well-defined technology or
use-case.

\- I don't know a single person that likes using Facebook Messenger.
Additionally, messaging applications have much, much lower barriers to entry
than web browsers. Messenger is not comparable to Chrome. This is why Fbook
purchased Whatsapp.

\- Underlying premise: does Apple really need to play in the big data/AI
space? Does Google really need to play in the social media space? Are these
really going to be markets that drive future growth?

~~~
wmeredith
\- What are the cool new Android services that iOS needs to integrate? I know
the author says AI capabilities, but that is not a well-defined technology or
use-case.

I'd much rather talk to Google than Siri. It works about 10x better. But I
can't set a default assitant on my device. Nor can anything else interact with
Siri, as it has no API. I'd love to see them open this stuff up more.

I love Apple's hardware and I like their mobile OS. Their software/services?
Not so much. I hate iTunes, I find Siri worthless, notes is a bag of hurt,
Calendar has syncing issues, the iWork suite other than Keynote is a joke for
professionals since it was gutted a couple years ago, and on and on... I use
alternatives for all of these things. But they cannot be integrated well.

------
bluedino
>> I’m worried for Apple…If the landscape shifts to prioritize those big-data
AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did
almost a decade ago:

Maybe Apple is betting that AI won't be achieved in the next 15-20 years.

~~~
wangii
I'd bet the same.

~~~
blister
Wow, I wouldn't. We are on the cusp of a major paradigm shift. Some of the
smartest people in the world are tackling small edges of an impressive graph
of capabilities. As more and more of these edges are solved, general purpose
computing inches ever closer to our grasp.

If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on 10 years or less.

~~~
nikdaheratik
AI is just like fusion in that we're always 10 years away or less from
achieving it.

~~~
leadingthenet
With the notable difference that there are actual practical applications of AI
on the market, which are out right now, with many, many more coming in the
near-future.

------
_yosefk
IMO what the article talks about is the business model, not the culture, they
are two separate things - not entirely separate, but mostly. Business model is
Apple shipping devices and Google providing ad-supported services over the
Internet. Culture is how in one company you can't push changes to the central
repository without a code review which might take a couple of days, while in
another you can work whichever way you please but if things break you're
expected to fix them on Sunday at 3 AM.

Like the business model, culture is certainly influenced by the people at the
top, though I think it's defined by a somewhat larger number of early
employees, and it's harder to change once established, compared to the
business model. Both affect performance in the market, but it's not as
straightforward to analyze, even in hindsight, how exactly culture affects
market performance relatively to the business model where in hindsight it's
perfectly clear.

~~~
jdmichal
It's discussing and means to be discussing organizational culture. The
business model, controls, and processes are _artifacts_ of the underlying
hidden culture. This is what the beginning of the article is discussing, when
it talks about going three degrees down. Think of Conway's Law: An
organization is constrained to design systems that mirror its structure. This
is basically the same thing, but abstracted a level; the organizational
structures themselves are constrained to be shaped by the business' underlying
assumptions.

("Tech culture", such as your example of code reviews, is usually an example
of controls and processes. What controls and processes exist for creation and
deployment of software? If we were making widgets on the factory floor
instead, the fact that these aren't "culture" as being discussed would be more
immediately obvious.)

------
amelius
> and the company (Apple) is almost certainly working on a car

I'm wondering how that will turn out. It looks like cars will be seen more and
more as a service rather than as a product. And Apple has more experience in
making products that people want to own.

------
hanginghyena
Interesting - Google's control over organic search might actually come under
threat sooner....

[http://www.marginhound.com/siri-will-virtual-assistants-
disr...](http://www.marginhound.com/siri-will-virtual-assistants-disrupt-
googles-control-of-organic-search/)

Granted, Apple's recent market share numbers for mobile devices were down (and
they are strong in US markets than globally; Android is doing better
overseas). But they've got a legitimate shot at disruption as voice search
grows.

------
Animats
That's a great scene, with Jobs announcing that Internet Explorer would be the
default browser on the Macintosh, and the crowd booing. Jobs has to stop
speaking, twice.

~~~
justinh
I had somehow missed that gem in past viewings. I only focused on the "Bill
Gates as BB" aspect.

For the curious, it starts at 28:36.

~~~
r00fus
Probably because that aspect of the scene was so central to "Pirates of
Silicon Valley"? It's etched in my memory too.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/)

