MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-09-12 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Ex-Apple Employee Slams Company / Who Killed Apple Computer?
|
This news story made such good reading that I wanted to share it with you
all!
Ex-Apple Employee Slams Company
By Leander Kahney
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,60407,00.html
02:00 AM Sep. 12, 2003 PT
On the eve of a big reunion of Apple employees, a former Apple marketing
director is blasting his former co-workers for failing to make the company a
success.
In an open letter to the Apple Computer History Weblog, former marketing
director Michael Mace calls his ex-colleagues "the Keystone Kops of
computing."
He accuses them of "group stupidity" and says the company was destroyed by a
"diseased and dysfunctional culture."
"Apple Computer as a whole was a massive failure," he writes in a post
titled "Who Killed Apple Computer?"
Mace argues that the PC industry is bloated and stagnant because Apple
failed to compete with Microsoft. He partly blames company executives and a
"venal" Microsoft, but mostly it is the fault of everyone who worked there,
including himself.
"I killed Apple Computer," he writes. "Of course you helped too, if you
worked there."
Mace, who worked at the company from 1987 to 1997 and is now an executive at
PalmSource, writes that Apple's employees were too uncooperative to make the
company great.
"We all wanted to be chefs," he writes. "Nobody wanted to be a busboy. Our
senior managers lacked the wisdom or the will to call off the game. And so
our company fell."
He writes that employees selfishly protected their own interests, blindly
rejected other's ideas and were often distracted by infighting.
"We told ourselves that our core competency was designing user interfaces,
but actually we were better at designing T-shirts and org charts," Mace
writes.
Speaking Thursday, Mace defended his controversial critique.
"I was trying to get people's attention, but I wasn't exaggerating," he
said. "I stand by my description of how Apple worked in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, 100 percent."
Mace said he wrote the critique to help former employees learn from the
mistakes made at Apple.
"My main focus was trying to learn what happened at Apple," he said. "You
can't learn unless you look at it directly."
The irony, Mace said, is that the company was full of brilliant people.
"It's not like they were losers," he said. "But all together, as a group,
they really had trouble getting stuff done. It's interesting that so many
bright people got together and failed to succeed."
Mace aired his opinions at the Apple History Weblog, which was set up by the
Computer History Museum to elicit stories about the company.
On Saturday, the museum will host the biggest reunion of Apple employees to
date. About 1,000 ex-Apple employees are expected at the AppleLore event,
including Mace.
"I want to see all my friends," Mace said. "It's going to be a great party."
In his post, Mace notes that these days Apple is a very different company
from when he worked there. He writes that co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who
returned to the company in 1996, "had to burn the old company to the ground
in order to salvage something viable out of it."
"Maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and
heft as the old one," Mace writes.
In a response to Mace's post, Jim Armstrong, another former Apple employee,
agreed that Apple was "at times dysfunctional," but argued the company has
had a profound impact.
Armstrong compared Apple to Lou Reed, who isn't the best-selling artist of
all time, but has influenced countless others to start their own bands.
"Apple changed the world, and not in a little way," Armstrong writes. "In
this sense, Apple hasn't failed."
Who Killed Apple Computer?
http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/storyReader$72
It's great to see so many people excited about the things they accomplished
at Apple. The things we did were wonderful, they improved people's lives,
and they are worth celebrating.
But I think we should not lose sight of the fact that Apple Computer as a
whole was a massive failure. Our fundamental goal, if you remember, was to
transform the world by setting people free from bad computer design and
stifling corporate dictates. "The Computer for the Rest of Us," we promised.
Today "the rest of us" are a passionate but small personal computing clique.
The company is treated as the eccentric uncle of the computer industry --
still interesting, still beloved, but no longer as powerful or dangerous at
it once was.
Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical
interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has
ground to a stop. The operating system most computers users work with every
day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last
decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and
PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years.
Why? Because they don't have to change. Because there's no effective
competition. Because Apple failed.
Those of us who use Windows every day at work are reminded constantly of our
company's failure. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is being punished
along with us.
Yet no one takes responsibility for what happened. In fact, most of the
people who were at Apple claim passionately that the company's collapse
wasn't their fault. Some have written whole books to prove that they had no
blame for what happened.
It's a terrible gap in company's history that no one takes responsibility
for its fall. So let me fill in that gap and let you know who was
responsible.
I did it. I killed Apple Computer.
Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a
number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more
than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're
celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional
culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be
saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on
this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building
will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not
lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in
order to salvage something viable out of it.
What went wrong?
The story of Apple from the late 1980s to the late 1990s is, in my opinion,
a story of individual brilliance and group stupidity. From the moment I
joined the company in 1987, I was amazed by the energy and intelligence of
the people around me. Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more
interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again. And yet,
despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of
computing.
For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were
strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive
projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent?(1) Kaleida?(2)
Jaguar?(3) OpenDoc?(4) The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world
has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to
market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user
interface ideas in the Sybil(5) project.
It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but
frankly, they weren't powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive.
Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common
goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large
company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were
unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. We'd sit in
meetings and smile and nod at the plan of the day, then go back to our
offices and swear about how stupid that idea was and how we were damned if
we'd every cooperate with it.
Those of us who were managers often failed to insist that our teams work
together. Instead of integrating them to cooperate toward a goal, we settled
into walled fortresses, protecting our projects and budgets from attack by
others. Ideas and initiatives from the outside were rejected as vigorously
as your body's immune system rejects a germ.
We told ourselves that our core competency was designing user interfaces,
but actually we were better at designing t-shirts and org charts. In ten
years at Apple I worked in basically three roles, but reported into 12
different VPs.
We all wanted to be chefs. Nobody wanted to be a busboy. Our senior managers
lacked the wisdom or the will to call off the game. And so our company fell.
Lessons learned
Now I, like a lot of former Apple people, am at a new company, facing many
of the same challenges Apple faced in the late 1980s. I think about my Apple
experiences a lot, and they guide me in my work -- they tell me what not to
do. Here are some of the lessons I learned:
--Because cooperation is essential to success, you have to welcome the ideas
of others, search for their good parts, and find ways to build a common
agenda.
--Because unity is more important than perfection, you need to support and
carry out the decisions of your management, even when you disagree with
them.
--Because no one can do it all, it's important to work cooperatively with
other parts of your organization, even if you think you could do some things
better yourself.
--Because no single company can change the industry, you have to team with
other companies to share the opportunities, and help them understand the
vision and excitement.
--You must banish the words "moron" and "brain-dead" from business
conversations (no matter how applicable they may be).
Sounds pretty basic, but I think it was lack of those basics, more than
anything else, that killed Apple.
Will we do things differently this time? Hard to say. But it feels a lot
better.
Who knows, maybe we can still change the world.
--Michael Mace
Director of Competitive Analysis
Director of Mac Platform Marketing
Director of Marketing, Home & Education Division
Apple Computer, Inc 1987-1997
__________
(1) Once upon a time, Apple had two major projects to make a next-generation
operating system, called Blue and Pink. Blue was a sort of incremental
improve-what-you've-got project; Pink was more of a start over with new
foundations type of approach. Apple couldn't decide which one to focus on,
so as usual it tried to do both. Blue stayed inside the company, and Pink
was spun out into a joint venture with IBM, called Taligent. Taligent burned
up a lot of money and people from both firms without yielding anything of
lasting significance that I'm aware of.
(2) Another joint venture, designed to do...something. I don't remember
anymore.
(3) An early effort to move Apple to RISC-based computing. Absorbed a lot of
talented people and then was killed.
(4) An initiative for document-centric computing.
(5) One of the most interesting concepts in Sybil was the treatment of the
file system as a database. You could do various sorts on your files,
organizing them into "piles" grouped by subject. A document could live in
several different piles based on its content. It was a promising way to
navigate large quantities of information on a hard drive. Instead we're
still stuck with a folder paradigm designed for use on 400k floppy disks.
(By the way, I hear the next version of Windows will have a database-style
file system.)
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