All big companies spin and backtrack and screw people over, but what I think sets apple apart is their lack of communications. If you're going to screw me over please go ahead and tell me, preferably with a little notice. Don't make me stew in my stress flying my business blind. It is a lack of respect.
Reading this I realized how scary Apple's reputation is, like you should expect them to do spiteful things. I hear invited to be pitched by Steve, pissed off their legal department, no answer... I would be wetting myself.
Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.
> Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.
I think this is an example of the Jobs reality distortion field. Geeks, at least, did distrust Apple back in ~2000. Consider high geek Neal Stephenson's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Com... essay written back in the dark ages of 1999 :
> "It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
> It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them."
It's Steve Jobs. He once went to a town hall meeting, just to tell them Apple has been in the city for so and so years, and how he's expanding the HQ and how things were going. That's all he wanted to say, nothing to complain about, but just reminding them who Apple is.
It reminds me of their sudden decision to drop their XServe line, with no explanation or hint of follow-up. We have a guy that has specialized in "enterprise-y" Apple deployments. We have a few XServes here and the default laptop people get is a MacBook. Essentially, years of building domain expertise on this platform have been wiped from his resume, and he's now terrified for his career; he's decided to learn a certain open-source programming language, one which is fairly friendly to Macs and good for scripting (so he can learn while having a practical use, since he's done a lot of bash scripting) as well as enjoying some popularity for web application development. He wants to hedge if Apple doesn't create an analogous replacement.
Jobs is capricious and doesn't tip his hand; the article's lesson of not basing anything on his (or any other person's or company's) whims is a pretty good one.
It's a bit off-topic but if I remember correctly they silently introduced a 'Server' version of the Mac Pro. Running the same X-Server software. Basically all that has changed is the form-factor, which isn't a rackmount anymore, but instead a tower model.
'Enterprise-y' Apple deployments will probably still be an option, just not in a rack.
Not to continue this off-topic digression too much further, but a Mac Pro running OS X Server is in no way a replacement for an "enterprise" XServe deployment.
tl;dr version: The Mac Pro takes up 4x the rack space and lacks hot-swappable power supplies and drive bays, making it an awful fit for most 24x7 server environments.
This is just one of the reasons for my growing distaste for a platform I was once quite fond of - the frankly mystifying decisions with regard to what features and products stay and go. Apple seems to be embracing the "less is more" ethos more and more as time goes by - which is good as far as it goes, but sometimes I think they're taking it too far. Certainly, as this article shows, they've already taken it to an extreme where communicating with the outside world is concerned.
I've been modded down twice on HN for predicting that the whole Macintosh line is going to meet the same fate, and sooner than many would prefer. The success of the iOS consumer platforms has brought Apple to a fork in the road, and there are a few signs -- such as the quiet excision of the 'Computer' part of 'Apple Computer' -- that suggest they can read a map.
You keep getting downvoted because it's unsubstantiated nonsense that defies logical expectations.
Why would Mac kill their own development platform? Further, look Google as they thrash around desperate to diversify their revenue stream. Do you think it's sensible for Mac to go the opposite direction and pile all their eggs in one basket? Not to mention all the effort that went into creating this new unibody form factor. Should they just throw away all the resources they've put into doing that?
Well, there was an effort in developing the Xserve line as well, apparently it was no problem for Apple to throw the entire Xserve effort in the trash bin.
I think Apple will put less emphasis on the Mac in the next years, simplifying the line and reducing the products in the market, not so fast as he wishes, and this will be a trend in the entire industry, not only Apple. But that's my opinion and not a detailed analysis.
They ditched the XServe because people just weren't buying them in any noticeable quantities. Apple sells a lot more Macs now then back when Macs were pretty all Apple made, so why would they decide to leave all that money on the table?
It's a chicken and the egg thing. People weren't buying them because they were not competitive with other rack servers anymore. By using your logic Apple could just not update the MacPro for a few years and then pull line because 'people weren't buying them.' Apple created the people not buying them situation though.
I'm actually a little surprised that they took this long to make the decision to kill off the XServe. Back during the G5 crash-and-burn they stopped publishing separate XServe sales data, merging it into a collective "G5" sales bin, presumably to hide how drastically and quickly G5 sales tailed off after the initial surge of sales, followed by a lot of disappointment when their customers realized that their performance wasn't anywhere near where Apple claimed that it was.
>I think Apple will put less emphasis on the Mac in the next years
Apple has already put less emphasis on the Mac. OS X has largely stagnated since 10.5 came out in 2007, right around the time iOS started coming into the picture.
And if you look at what's coming in 10.7, it essentially reads like they're trying to turn the desktop into iOS. It's not an approach I'm particularly thrilled about; interfaces that make sense of small, touch-driven displays don't make as much sense on huge, high resolution displays, IMO. But Apple is letting their UI development for the former drive their desktop UI development.
Apple, in particular, is never (well, while Steve Jobs or anyone similar is in charge) going to rely on other people for essential parts of their platform again. They've learned that lesson many times.
As long as nobody comes along and closes your development platform of choice, there's really very little to be afraid of when it comes to cross-compilation and emulation.
No man is an island, and certainly no corporation the size of Apple is one, either. Vertical integration shouldn't be considered a religious matter.
Really? I would argue that switching to what amounts to commodity hardware with custom bios in a custom case is a move away from vertical integration.
Now, you could say that Apple didn't fab it's own PPC chips, but the x86 mac hardware is sure a lot more similar to everyone else's hardware than mac hardware has ever been before, and it's probably saving Apple rather a lot of money.
Of course, you could also argue that this trend is reversing, with the Apple platform now being driven by ARM devices that are far more, uh, custom. but you kind of have to do that right now, because the market for cellphone chipsets/motherboard layouts isn't as mature as the market for desktop/laptop chipsets and motherboard layouts.
I'm just pointing out, Apple is perfectly happy to use commodity stuff, when they think that commodity stuff is better/cheaper.
That's great, as long as their stockholders understand that they're investing in a church, rather than a corporation. (A church that actually has to pay taxes, no less.)
This is what's frustrating about trying to have discussions with you. You say "answered" and then provide your opinion on the matter. Spewing out your opinion on something isn't "answering" anything. It's, at best, painting a picture of a possible scenario.
You may think owning your own development platform is overrated but you haven't demonstrated that at all and not everyone agrees. Worse you go on with this controversial opinion and built an entire alternative universe based on it. Are you a writer for the Enquirer or something?
Macs accounted for 27% of Apple's net sales in FY '10. Mac sales were up 26% over the previous year. In comparison, iPods accounted for 13% of net sales and, and grew only 2% over the previous year.
Why, precisely, do you expect Apple to just throw away 25% of their business?
Think of it this way. Imagine that Apple just came out of nowhere and released the iPhone, iPad, and iPod line. Do you think their next move would be to launch a line of proprietary computers?
If you pitched that idea to Jobs, you'd probably be looking for work the next day. It would be that dumb.
Maybe or maybe not, but that doesn't matter. They already sell computers and have lots of customers who want to buy them. I don't know much about business, but I would still have to say that it sounds just stupid to suddenly stop selling them.
There's a big difference if one product line that used to take 70% of business is down to 25% because of declining sales OR if it is because of fact that some new product line got to be so wildly successful that it overshadowed the former champions.
I believe that iPod was supposed to be a complement of Mac but then it and its siblings grew so big that actually now other products are selling Macs.
That's just a specialized version of the console used as a hardware debugger. They probably make about 200 of those a year. Actual development work is done on a perfectly ordinary Windows PC.
I think it's a valid prediction, but I don't think they'd accept programmers for Apple products using non-Apple products; I don't know what they'd do. But their servers are all (I hear) XServes, and they basically eat their own dog-food, so I'd expect a follow-up of some sort.
Without MacBook Pros, I don't know how they'd develop new versions of iOS. Systems coding on iPads? Would they actually use Linux? Neither seems likely, but I wouldn't put it past them to beef up iOS to the point that their devs are using it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if their new server line were to be based on 16-core ARMs running some form of iOS.
I think it's a valid prediction, but I don't think they'd accept programmers for Apple products using non-Apple products; I don't know what they'd do.
Sony doesn't mind people using PCs to develop for the PS3, and game development is murderously complex compared to anything developed for iOS either inside or outside Apple.
But their servers are all (I hear) XServes, and they basically eat their own dog-food, so I'd expect a follow-up of some sort.
You could be right but if there's a case for Apple to be in the server business, I sure don't see it.
But what makes you think the Macintosh line will be abandoned by Apple? Mere aversion to product diversification? They discontinued the Xserve ("nobody buys the things"), but I have the impression that MacBooks and iMacs are selling quite well.
I think it'll eventually make sense for them to focus on non-computer products because those are the ones that are selling insanely well. The local Apple stores are so full of customers and browsers that I'm surprised they haven't had problems with the fire marshal, and it isn't because people are mobbing the Mac displays. Computers, even Macs, are heavy on support costs and light on profit margins.
A common argument is "Well, what do you think people are using to develop for all those iPhones, iPods, and iPads?" The answer to that one is, "What do you think people are using to develop for XBox 360s and PS3s?" It's true that you need a Mac to write iOS apps, but that's an arbitrary corporate policy, and not an inherent requirement.
They do have problems with customer numbers in stores and a fire limits. At my closest apple store on a saturday there is often a queue to get into the store with security controlling the numbers. It is one of the small store designs though
At the Back to the Mac event, Tim Cook pointed out that Apple's Mac business, if spun off into its own company, would be #110 on the Fortune 500. The Mac isn't going anywhere.
Spinning it off into its own company might actually make a lot of sense. Anyone who doesn't think there's a huge, morale-killing war brewing inside Apple between the old-guard Mac cult and the young iOS Turks hasn't spent time around any large companies.
Apple isn't your typical BigCo though. Your predictions about the existence of bureaucratic infighting and turf politics ignore Apple's nature. First, Apple is run more like an enormous startup. Second, iOS and OS X share a LOT of engineers. You are arguing that Apple's engineers are at war with themselves. Third, Steve wouldn't stand for it.
>First, Apple is run more like an enormous startup.
So? There were turf-wars and in-fighting between product teams when Apple actually was a startup.
>Third, Steve wouldn't stand for it.
Most accounts I've heard are that Steve was a driving force in that early in-fighting. Of course, he's 25 years older and has probably matured some, but I don't know that I agree with the assessment that he wouldn't tolerate it.
How does Sony expect PS3 devs to create their games? Even though you can't plug a couple of monitors and a keyboard into a PS3 and run emacs and GCC on them, there are still plenty of "apps" for game consoles.
Jobs isn't capricious, he's an asshole. I have two friends who both had the misfortunate position of being Jobs' personal IT bitch at Apple. He fired my one friend, and I quote, "because I'm tired of struggling to understand your gimpy voice". Jobs is added proof to the argument that nice guys finish last.
I don't doubt that jobs is an asshole from time to time. You kinda have to be to get where Apple is today, from where they were. But unless you were present at the firing of your friend, or he recorded it, I don't think it's 100% fair to quote Jobs, especially out of context. Just because he can be an asshole at times, doesn't mean we get to slander and spread hearsay. Your friend wasn't doing what his boss wanted. The boss said something mean for whatever reason. Anyone in a long term relationship has said something mean. So if an employee isn't the right fit for the company, chances are, every once in a while, something mean will be uttered when they are canned. You're making to much out of it. Unless that's the typical way Jobs fires someone. Then he truly is an asshole.
Fine. He was fired for not having the magic ability to change his voice in order to please his asshole boss. My only point was that he shouldn't be quoting someone unless it's first-hand. We have no way to verify it.
Without giving too many details away, my friend was chosen by Jobs to take this role, pulled away from one at Apple where he was very happy, given a promotion and a raise, then fired 6 weeks later. The quote is from his blog (which I'll not post due to his desire to be discreet) but I trust him, and he says it's verbotem, and knowing his speech impediment very well, I find the story very believable. Further corroborated by having worked for a friend a few years back who had this same position as well (more successfully and for a longer period of time, neither knew each other btw) before he got fired on the spot while Jobs was outraged over something (my speculation is he spilled some spinach goop on a mock turtle neck and decided to take it out on somebody).
Its confusing to say you're quoting from a blog, a pretty public place normally but this quote has the expectation of discretion. but the quote cannot be found on any blog using google. I don't know. Maybe this ain't a quotation as most people understand it, even if secondhand. Is it more accurate to say you are paraphrasing?
Without giving too many details away, my friend was chosen by Jobs to take this role, pulled away from one at Apple where he was very happy, given a promotion and a raise, then fired 6 weeks later. The quote is from his blog (which I'll not post due to his desire to be discreet) but I trust him, and he says it's verbotem, and knowing his speech impediment very well, I find the story very believable. Further corroborated by having worked for a friend a few years back who had this same position as well (more successfully and for a longer period of time, neither knew each other btw) before he got fired on the spot while Jobs was outraged over something (my speculation is he spilled some spinach goop on a mock turtle neck and decided to take it out).
Right, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you'd decided to jump on some kind of "Steve Jobs is evil" bandwagon. The story seems balanced, probably more balanced than it would have been if you'd written it back in 2003 (I'd wager.)
Any big company. Anyone who I had promised my clients I could deliver them to, then changed their mind.
Really more my fault than Apple's, for promising something to my clients before I had a signed contract in my hand.
But the way they made it sound at that initial meeting, with the full pitch, immediate contract, and short timeline, made it sound like the contract was a small technicality.
I think you are far too forgiving. Jobs' language initially indicated Apple wanted all music in the store. Later he reversed his position entirely and seemingly spitefully. Apple does great things, but Jobs does have a reputation for expecting loyalty from companies they do business with. I suspect we'll see more moves from Apple like blocking Adobe's Flash to iPhone app tool (at least until presumably the FTC pressured them). That and a bunch of other great products.
What really struck me about this post is that he went back to Apple after being disrespected so hard. The lesson is there are times when you have to swallow a big lump of pride in order to better your business. I know I would have a hard time doing that.
I have bought more than a couple of CDs from CD Baby and thanks to them I've been able to connect with more than a couple of wonderful artists.
However, from Apple's perspective, it must have seemed like CD Baby was simply trying to make a profit simply by guaranteeing access to the Apple Store, and therefore Apple decided not to move forward in order to protect its brand.
Except that Apple didn't decide not to move forward -- Sivers assumed that Apple had decided not to move forward, based on an offhand reference by Jobs in a keynote.
Exactly. I think most of this timing was circumstance, not causal.
Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a positive public spin on their delay.
I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them. So his keynote seemed to be a decision. Instead, it was just an important lesson on spin and circumstance.
I was working in the industry at a sub model service when itunes was being built, and at an indie distributor when he made that speech - I remember it well.
Negotiating with the majors for content and pricing and access was worst hard-ball negotiations I've ever seen and schizophrenic at that. One of their big fears of course was enabling a market that would erode their competitive advantage in distribution and allow smaller players to sell music in ways indistinguishable from their own.
I have no direct inside knowledge, but I'd bet big you were just on the ass end of a power play that otherwise had little to do with CD Baby. Your catalog was a huge stick that could have been wielded in many ways in those fights. The contract that arrived the next day had an NDA, so suddenly you weren't able to disclose the terms of any deal you might have right?
As an aside, congratulations for sticking with your model and your principles and surviving that whole decade. It wasn't easy at all to make it in that market, my resume is just a bunch of smoldering craters from that period.
Apple has become so successful that people start attributing amazing strategies to them that are really accidental. I've emailed a high up Apple executive about something before and not heard a thing only to get a reply to my email 9 months later while he was on a flight and had time to kill. From what I heard, dealing with all of the legal mess around the major labels (e.g., contract upon contract numbering dozens to get a single album onto iTMS) was a huge part of the 2003-2004 era work at Apple. It bogged down executives and even programmers who had to constantly revise code to accommodate legal requirements.
It could be that Steve Jobs was somehow being manipulative and singling out CD Baby. Or it could just have been that the company was bogged down. You said yourself that hundreds of others were at that original meeting. That's like herding cats. In fact, the entire iTunes Music Store was an exercise in herding thousands of cats. I still have a hard time believing it got done.
Regardless, it's still a good tale. You never know, right?
>I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them.
That's interesting. I wonder if you or anyone else had raised a question about this at the presentation. Communication is a key aspect of partnership. And if there is little communication, or terms on communication SLAs, then there is plentiful scope for ill partnership.
Reading your notes about the presentation on Slashdot, it appears that Apple had thought very carefully and prepared extensively about the iTunes business model. I am pretty sure they must have had something about this aspect as well. Its pretty surprising that no one else on the other side raised anything about it.
I would suggest that one of the most important ways to protect your brand is not to be evil. I believe Microsoft failed at this (it is why I switched away from using their products). Apple is now currently failing here at an even greater degree (I currently own a Macbook and an iPhone, but I believe these will be my last Apple products).
It is one thing for a company to want the best experience for its users. But blocking musicians from their fans is not the way to go about this, no matter how small the musician or fan. You can still have a great store for the general populace, and still allow everyone else to access and share the data they want.
Also note that this means that from Apple's perspective, music isn't "worth" being on iTunes unless they already have a deal with a "respectable" record label, "respectable" of course being up to Apple.
I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs, but to me this shows how evil and manipulative he is ( not the first time hearing this about him). What people call timing, I call intentional to openly put it out there they want these independents, have others follow their lead and open their stores to independent artists, and then openly and publicly call every other service out there a joke because they let anyone on. Then the next day signing the contract. I highly doubt its all just coincidental.
Wow. Really interesting to see Steve spin the smaller music collection of iTunes as a positive. I think this is going to make me consider his words more closely in the future.
Then the iPad was delayed in Australia they announced it as a positive thing; the product was so popular they were diverting the stock meant for Australia to the US, and wasn't it great news for Australia that we were going to get such an awesome product!
Apple's ability to spin is amazing, but not as amazing as the number of people eating up every word of it without thinking about what they are hearing.
Other CEOs are not asses because they don't care about you. Apple cares about you enough to give you the treatment it would give anyone else and doesn't insult your intelligence trying to bullshit you.
My personal favorite: Steve Jobs Says 7-Inch Tablets Are ‘Dead on Arrival’... Apparently, these devices are too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience.
Likely Steve Jobs has a 7" iPad prototype on his desk now... He can throw out a few remarks to try to stear people away from that size until Apple has that size in the market.
He also said they should include sand paper so that people could file down their finger tips to use 7 inch devices. So how on earth a 7 inch device isn't usable but a 3.5 inch one is I don't know.
Apple argue to suit their own purpose all the time. Remember how iOS would never need native apps or an app store? The tablet form factor was 'awkward'? That people didn't want cheaper laptops?
If somebody bothered to go through all the keynotes and other statements there would a lot of examples.
There is nothing wrong with this, it means Apple can adapt - but you shouldn't take everything they say as true forever
"I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.
Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK."
It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to automate this process.
We had already automated it. But Apple was insisting we not use our own software or ripped files. That they had to come directly from the master audio CD.
If you really had lossless wavs and data, you could have emulated a 'CD' and had the apple software rip it, then put in the tags. Probably would have saved thousands of man hours compared to putting physical CDs in the drives.
All turned out wonderful in the end. We never needed to re-rip the CDs after all. Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. An incredibly efficient way of delivering over 2 million songs+metadata from one company to another.
A nice little collection of Ruby & PHP scripts on a stack of Linux servers & Windows encoding boxes did everything.
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to open-source that software since I sold it.
Really, with just music files on from known good sources in an already fixed format - I'm seeing them put it in a caddy, rip the files dumped from their app via antivirus scrubbers to a network drive or other local HDD and then [unfortunatley] chuck it in the bin. Would that be too hard?
They'd perhaps need an intern for that as a short term project. After the initial c.900000 music file (100,000 albums) then uploading would probably be more feasible.
900000 tracks of 5MB (assuming lossy compression) at 10Mbps would take over 40 days of 24-7 uploading (not allowing for errors and outages and such). 10Mbps was still quite fast for uploads in 2003 I think (faster than the current average in the US according to DSLreports). S-ATA RAID0 write bandwidth was about 34MBps at the time, roughly 27 times faster than the network in-flow; I'll assume read was faster and so this is the limit for disk-to-disk transfer. Assuming shipping took a couple of days you'd expect to finish the transfer a month quicker.
I'd be interested in how it would be cheaper for Apple for the initial round to accept uploads only, especially given this retards the lead time (to selling the tracks) by a month or more.
I'm genuinely curious as it seems I'm totally wrong on this point and HN'ers have an obvious answer to why I'm wrong, could someone be so kind as to tell me what glaring error I'm making in my analysis. Much obliged.
A day to figure out how to automate it, a few weeks of babysitting to work out the edge cases, and then however long it takes to get off Apple's blacklist for the unusual traffic pattern.
This is similar in a sense to how Adobe mishandled their "Flash on iOS" play, right from the start. They took it for granted that Apple would allow Flash-developed apps on the App Store.
I'm no going to defend Apple here, really, but rather to point out that Apple tends to understaff, and what may read as malignancy from the outside can often be more charitably explained by too few people working too many hours.
Actually there's another guy from Apple on HN who is very clear that employees at Apple get all their core work done in 40 hours. They work extra hours to go above and beyond.
"Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest turning point that independent music has ever had."
This has always struck me as interesting point from a music fan's perspective. It seems like the confluence of a lot of factor's led to expansion of independent music around this time.
2001, 2002 was around when cable and DSL prices started to drop outside of major cities. The opening of Itunes. And seemingly a lot of big time independent artists began to jump to major labels (or made major releases from smaller labels) and released very successful albums. Death Cab for Cutie, The Shines, and Modest Mouse off the top of my head.
Just an interesting phenomena I've always been curious about. This article was eye opening as to what one of the key forces in this move might have been.
