Designer's Digest
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2020–2026
2:31 · 212K views · Nov 16, 2018
A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.
Cited constantly on HN whenever a large company declines, as the canonical explanation of product people being pushed out by sales and marketing.
20 comments from Hacker News
They boost the share price for a while, but then the competition takes over. Steve Jobs has the best explanation for this. this video
> resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering Steve Jobs calls this out wonderfully here: this video > [...] the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...] the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to the monopolistic position gets rotted out. By people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.
Think of why the iPhone existed in the first place. It was because Jobs saw the writing on the wall and knew that cell phones were bound to destroy the market for the iPod, Apple's moneymaker. Before making the iPhone, he made the Rokr and Jobs threw massive amounts of resources into the iPhone at large risk to Apple. He bought up the patent for multi touch back in 2005. I honestly think people overlook this aspect of Jobs leadership, basically from the time he returned on Apple he doubled down on mobile computing repeatedly throwing 50% of Apple's marketing budget into the unproven iPod for instance. Why was Jobs able to see the writing on the wall and not Intel? I think Steve Jobs himself said it best: this video Intel itself was NOT totally blindsided by the mobile revolution. Intel Atom development started in 2004. Intel Atom could have dominated the market. There were Intel Execs pushing Atom. But all the R&D was pumped into the desktop and server business, the quality silicon was reserved for the desktop and server business, Intels execs didn't want these inexpensive chips for what were presumed to be peoples secondary computers to cannibalise its expensive desktop and server chips, and the strategic vision was simply bad. You can apologise for it but the mistake may have doomed the entire business and plenty of companies did not make the same mistake. Intel wouldn't even exist if they didn't already make such a shift away from the memory market into the microprocessor mar
just my humble opinion - i believe aapl has crossed the threshold into the territory which steve jobs famously described as the hallmark of the Scully era[0] - their endless pursuit for revenue has pushed sales and marketing people to the front of the line and product people operate in their shadows. of course in a company as big and wide ranging as aapl, there are so many competing priorities and things to focus on but, IMO, tim cook is a real life paperclip maximizer. early on in his tenure there was some criticism that he was a "bean counter" and would ruin things cause he wasn't Steve, but rather than cutting costs as a traditional beancounter type would, he has been ruthless in pursuing what works to continue the endless revenue climb. there are certainly many things they could work on but choose not to, or could do better, but when you're in Cook's position and you are the preeminent Elephant (far larger and less capable of dance than Gerstner could have ever imagined), you have no choice but for changes in direction to be slow but large in magnitude. and at such a massive scale, while aapl could stumble out a new product/service and vacuum up tens of $millions, there are fewer and fewer opportunities which will clear their IRR. Taking some liberties interpreting here, but hence why they feel the need to extract value from App Store payments, turn a blind eye to scam apps, Google as default $earch, etc; their gravitational pull is so powerful that, as a proper paperclip
I feel pretty strongly that, assuming you care about the art and creating things then Valve is a blueprint of how exactly not to do it, hang on let me finish. Building Steam was a genius business move, it has basically given them an insane amount of income for close to zero effort, I mean the client is insanely janky and has barely been updated from an actual experience point of view in over a decade but it doesn't matter because almost all PC gaming purchases are funneled through it. Now what this should have done is allow the company to stop caring about profits and being able to relish in building true art to a true un-compromised vision. But something has seriously gone wrong here and the company has struggled to ship close to anything meaty in 16 years. To put it in perspective lets look at auteur studios held in similar regard as Half-Life. (I'm ignoring side releases, just focusing on mainline games) - Half-Life: HL2 2004, HL:A 2020 - Kojima : MGS3 2004, MGS4 2008, MGS5 2014, Death Stranding (worth pointing out his studio was rebuilt from nothing for this too) 2020 - Rockstar : GTA:SA 2004, GTA4 2008, RDR 2010, GTA5 2013, RDR2 2019 If Valve hadn't had steam, the company would not still exist today with that output. If HL:A good, yes. But we put it next to Rockstars output in the same time and it's not even the same league. Something has seriously gone wrong within Valve and I think the charitable way to frame it is "Oh they just care so much they only release when its