Isaacson: Apple’s future as a company was one of the things that a year ago Steve was obsessed about. He had gone in at the end of August to tell the board that he was stepping down as CEO. And everybody on the board is very sad, and then they try to jolly things up, and they talk about how Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) had just gotten out of the tablet business that day, was screwing things up, and he said something like, “Wait a minute. Bill Hewlett gave me my first job. When I was 13 years old and needed a part, I called him from the phone book, and he gave me a summer job, and he and David Packard thought they’d made a company that was going to outlast them and continue to grow for a generation, and these bozos have screwed it up. Don’t let that happen to Apple.”
He said, “Here’s what’s in our DNA at Apple. We stand at the intersection of art and science; at the intersection of creativity and technology.” And he said, “That’s been in the DNA of great companies. That’s why Walt Disney (DIS) – even though people tried to screw up that company – it’s still going to survive.”
I think punditry serves no purpose. I don’t care if it has a future.
Setting the Agenda
For the Democratic Party, this bespeaks a larger problem here that goes beyond Obama’s second term. Even leading Democrats such as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley say the party has failed to set the agenda for the past 30 years–to come up with a powerful new message to counter “Reaganomics.” “Since Reagan [the Republicans] have done a very good job of setting the frame,” O’Malley, one of a small handful of leading Democrats who are spoken of as potential successors to Obama in 2016, told me in an interview before the Democratic convention. “That the enemy is government. The enemy is taxes. …. Too many of us started trying to adopt their message and repackage it as our own.”
Hence in the last two years Obama has allowed Republicans to make the deficit (most of which is George W. Bush’s) the central topic of discussion, just as Bill Clinton was once forced to “triangulate” against big government. Fearful of the big-government stigma, the Obama campaign has even shrunk from trying to promote its signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, to the American people, despite vindication from the Supreme Court, which upheld the health care law in June.
This has been the problem with the Democratic Party since I started following politics around 1992. I don’t see that changing during Obama’s second term. Unfortunately, he just doesn’t offer much in terms of a vision for the country or for government’s role in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-ZebWUzSlg
Dick Morris says Mitt Will Win in a Landslide with 325 Electoral Votes
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
the everyday sexism project
Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?
Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?
“There’s no excuse,” Garner writes. “Quality control on Apple Maps had to have been terrible to not get this right. Bluntly, Scott Forstall should be fired over this mess.”
Even if you don’t think Maps is as big of a mess as it’s been portrayed in the press (and I don’t), it’s been the biggest PR fiasco for Apple since “Antennagate.” Forstall is ultimately responsible for iOS, and the article reminds me of a speech Steve Jobs supposedly gave to newly minted Apple vice presidents:
One such lesson could be called the “Difference Between the Janitor and the Vice President,” and it’s a sermon Jobs delivers every time an executive reaches the VP level. Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have been changed, and the janitor doesn’t have a key. This is an acceptable excuse coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. “When you’re the janitor,” Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.” That “Rubicon,” he has said, “is crossed when you become a VP.”
When the MobileMe launch failed, Jobs responded in a manner true to this spirit:
Shortly after the launch event, he summoned the MobileMe team, gathering them in the Town Hall auditorium in Building 4 of Apple’s campus, the venue the company uses for intimate product unveilings for journalists. According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question: “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”
For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.
Mark Papermaster, chief of iPhone hardware engineering, was fired from Apple in the wake of the iPhone 4’s antenna issues. Will there be any accountability for Forstall? (It’s also possible that Forstall is only responsible for the local software, and Eddie Cue is ultimately responsible for the back-end services.)
Note that I wouldn’t expect Forstall to be fired. He’s been in charge of the iPhone software since the beginning, and surely his career overall is in good standing. He won’t be sacked for one mistake. But the product launch has been a complete disaster, and has spilled over into the iPhone 5 itself, so some measure of accountability is surely deserved.
This makes me wonder about the broader power structure within Apple. One wonders what the perception of Maps was inside Apple prior to the launch. I’ve been using iOS 6 Maps since the first beta was provided to developers in June. It was obvious to me then that there were serious data quality problems. If I was able to see it, surely it was also obvious to people at Apple. Was it obvious to Tim Cook? The “this wouldn’t have happened if Steve were still alive” trope has become tiresome, but nonetheless it’s easy to see Jobs using maps on iOS 6 and understanding its shortcomings. No one can know if he would have released it in its current state anyway. But one thing I wonder very much about Tim Cook is, as someone who is not a “product guy,” how much insight does he have on these issues? Does he have the respect and the clout within Apple to tell someone like Forstall that his software isn’t good enough?
