
Apple’s Organizational Crossroads - hullo
https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroads/
======
abalone
Nah. DuPont was selling gunpowder and paint to completely different customers.
Apple sells devices and services to the same customers. Furthermore what they
are selling needs to be tightly integrated.

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Maarten88
Apple Services could be sold to very different customers - those on Android
and Windows devices.

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jmspring
This assumes Apple can get their iCloud working properly. I've avoided pings
from them in the past because their is no leadership in this area. ICloud has
been a failure for multiple years.

I'm not comparing management, but iCloud reminds me of the non-dropcam part of
Nest - basically unable to deliver.

I've been contacted by both for roles and just think why would one want to be
part of a dysfunctional after thought?

~~~
gurkendoktor
I agree that the iCloud brand has generally been a failure. Does anyone ever
proudly use their @icloud.com address anywhere? MobileMe is considered an
embarrassing failure by many, but I still see @me.com email addresses from
time to time.

But technically, iCloud is not really one "thing". iCal, Reminders, Notes and
Photos work pretty well, whereas iCloud Core Data is an unsalvageable
afterthought. Working on some parts might still be fun.

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Osiris30
Well argued rebuttal and counter by John Kirk at Techpinions

[https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-
till-...](https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-they-
come-to-it/45209)

~~~
Dwolb
Thanks for sharing - I wouldn't have found this otherwise.

Is anyone aggregating discussions like this today?

NYT has some opinion pieces and shares rebuttals, but I haven't seen long-form
opinion aggregators around.

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yoodenvranx
> Is anyone aggregating discussions like this today?

That's something I'd like to see as an official feature on HN or reddit. In
addition of normal comments on the article you can also add "additional
information from a qualified source" (which can be either a qualified user or
another article from another reputable journalist).

But I am not sure if that would work. Perhaps it would be fine on HN, but it
would be difficult to enforce and moderate on reddit.

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xtx23
The reason why services and devices can't be totally separated as gunpowders
and paint is software. Apple's recent software qualities have been facing many
challenges and varied user feedbacks, Apple Map, Siri, FinalCut update, New
Photos, iCloud hack issues. I doubt their organization structure is the magic
fix to their software issues, in fact, a complete separation between devices +
services might make some of their software challenges even harder.

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tyingq
Is Amazon a good comparison? Amazon Web Services is a separate organization
from the consumer side (amazon.com, zappos, etc).

As I understand it, the "jewels" (retail/consumer) do depend on AWS...they
supposedly are strong on "eating your own dog food". But, they have roughly
equal footing and representation. There is the difference that Amazon's
services can be sold standalone, rather than just bundled, I suppose.

~~~
rmccue
Amazon and AWS have different markets (consumers vs business), similar to
DuPont's paint and gunpowder (consumers vs military). Generally speaking, the
markets don't overlap.

As noted in other comments here, Apple's products and services are both
consumer-focussed; ideally, you're trying to sell the consumer both of them,
so the outcomes for the two are co-dependent. Amazon doesn't really care about
how many instance-hours AWS sells; the iCloud team cares a lot about how many
devices Apple sells.

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blinkingled
Services are hardly a unique Apple specific problem though. For a few that get
services right you'll find many that suck. It takes a very different
collective mindset, culture, processes and iterative improvements - those are
a no brainer. Beyond those it also takes unconventional innovation at multiple
different levels - look at how HTTP2 happened for example and look at how
everything underneath GMail must have improved to make it what it is. Also
think of AWS and how many first-have problems they must have needed to solve.

It's hard to get services right and even harder to keep them right. I am of
course not saying Apple can't get there but merely separating the hardware and
software/services isn't a meaningful first step.

~~~
derefr
I don't know about processes or mindset; I think it's mostly a matter of
hiring real Engineers and letting them do real Engineering on your backend.
_That 's_ a cultural problem, though, on an organizational level: if you run
everything in the "20-somethings burning midnight oil to ship" mode, the
experienced Engineers don't want to join you. You'd have to shift your culture
into one that has room for them (like e.g. Facebook is continuing to attempt
to do with the Engineers from Whatsapp.)

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majestik
This article makes the case Apple should have a dedicated Services division.

Pretty sure Eddy Cue runs a division called "Internet Software and Services"
which is iCloud/Maps/Siri etc: [http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/eddy-
cue.html](http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/eddy-cue.html)

Article: 0 Fact: 1

~~~
simonh
Yes, but what Ben is proposing is that instead of being a functional division,
it would be it's own business unit reporting it's own profit-and-loss. That
might even mean having it's own engineering team, it's own design team, it's
own sales, etc, etc. Maybe not all of those, but certainly some of them.

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marcus_holmes
This is the road that IBM and HP went down, isn't it?

Stop making things and start providing services around the things you used to
make.

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appleflaxen
This is dated 4/19, but I would swear I've read this (and seen the same
organizational graphics) before. Was this already posted somewhere else? Is
this a summary of a bigger work that is getting the summary treatment on
multiple sites?

Weird.

~~~
appleflaxen
Ah. Realized it was probably the discussion of Microsoft in 2013 on the same
site.

[https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-
reorganization-i...](https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-
reorganization-is-a-bad-idea/)

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acqq
The scary example against the "separation" the author suggests is Sony, having
the structure where the different profits and loses produced the results where
one Sony makes another Sony worse and vice versa.

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hans
fascinating thought is what a well-run services Org looks like?

and how that can layer onto a hardware / device Org.. they never seem
compatible

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nocarrier
This post makes the case that Apple is not organized in a way to allow it to
effectively run services like iCloud, iTunes, Apple Pay, etc. I haven't worked
there in ten years, but back then at least, I'd agree with that. Teams and
orgs were heavily siloed and vertical.

However, then it goes on to say a few things that I think are harder to
defend. The author talks about how it's hard for Apple to build good services
since they're so focused on achieving perfection with a tightly integrated
device that has a new release once or twice a year. Basically, the thesis is
that since the market penalty for releasing a bad device is so high, Apple has
thrown a lot of resources into getting the device right the first time, which
makes it very hard for them to think or operate at the tempo you need when
operating services:

"You only get one shot to get a device right, so all of Apple’s internal
rhythms and processes are organized around delivering as perfect a product as
possible at a specific moment in time."

This isn't right in a couple ways. First, Apple has released all kinds of sub-
par hardware in the past. And will likely do so in the future. Apple says they
are looking to achieve perfection, and it sounds noble, but it's more of an
iterative process than this article makes it sound like.

Second, many of a device's features, especially the integration that the
author lauds, are actually in software. Particularly the integration pieces
that make the device seem like magic. And those are updated often as one can
see with the release tempo of iOS updates. The pattern has been the same for a
long time--release a bunch of new features in iOS X.0, then do point releases
to fix bugs, plug security holes, and make minor tweaks to fix annoying things
and make the user experience feel more smooth.

The other conclusion I don't agree with is that the author says that in order
for them to build better services, they need more accountability, which would
be achieved by tracking profit and loss for each service and making the
leaders financially accountable. I agree that accountability is something
that's required to create strong services, but it's not the primary lever I
would use. And I certainly wouldn't bring P&L into the accountability equation
since that incentivizes the different service orgs to grow adversarial
relationships. It's old company thinking IMO.

Instead, I feel you need to build better services by building a better
infrastructure culture. A lot of people look at situations like this and look
for punitive or regressive measures to fix the problem, i.e. using the stick
instead of the carrot. I think however they would build better services by
focusing on other levers like open communication (the heavy siloing meant a
lot of duplicated work), being open to criticism (lots of politics and
defensiveness meant fiefdoms and grudges were created), a focus on
instrumenting and measuring performance of services to have the right picture
for how everything is working together (instrumentation and visualization of
performance was terrible), a culture of learning from mistakes instead of
assigning blame, having embedded SRE-like engineers who focus on production
quality and availability instead of having separate second-class ops teams,
etc. I could go on, but I have a really strong objection to boiling all their
problems down to not making each service unit financially accountable. That
won't fix things, it will instead make the internal culture on the
infrastructure side much worse.

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Rexxar
The comment was marked as "dupe" but I don't see why so I vouch it. Is it a
bug ?

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PhantomGremlin
Check the guys comments to see the dupe. He posted the same comment to a
separate submission of this article.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11559781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11559781)

~~~
nocarrier
Yeah, I didn't realize you couldn't do that. Next time I'll just put a link to
the comment versus pasting it verbatim.

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chillaxtian
this article is all fluff.

