Think Multiply
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2026
1:40 · 34K views · Sep 28, 2017
A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining how sales and marketing people take over mature companies from product people, leading to product decline.
HN cites it whenever a company stagnates, from Intel to Boeing, to explain what happens when salespeople or finance run the business.
5 comments from Hacker News
I think this Steve Jobs clip explains it pretty well. this video Basically Intel didn’t need to innovate to make money the last decade. Now it’s come to back bite them on the ass.
It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago [1]. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically. First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing inflation by a lot) but suddenly no jobs. It became a bit of a joke to poke fun at such people who had a ton of debt and worked as baristas but this was a shallow "analysis". It was really a systemic collapse. Those entry-level workers are your future senior workers and leaders. Those jobs have never come back. The rise of DVR/TiVo and ultimately streaming brought on a golden age of TV in the 2000s. It was kind of the last hurrah for network shows that produced 22 episodes a year before streamers instead produced 8 episodes every 4 years. But what made this system work was an ecosystem. Living in LA, Atlanta and a few other places was relatively cheap so aspiring actors and writers and entertainmnet professionals could get by with secon djobs and relatively low income. These became the fut
It'll be interesting to see if they still can design and build a new ground-up airplane design. The last all-new design was the 787, initiated in 2003 and launched in 2009, and its design was fraught with problems. Before then was the 777 in the early 90s (pre-McDonnell takeover), and the 757/767 in the early 80s. There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets. The former group has no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company. Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview: this video
> without a dictator I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person. this video
This is basically what Steve Jobs was talking about, with sales/marketing gaining traction in an established company and driving it into the ground: this video