Tzewei94
2021-03-25
Please like and comments
Apple Failure Modes<blockquote>苹果失效模式</blockquote>
免责声明：上述内容仅代表发帖人个人观点，不构成本平台的任何投资建议。
分享至
微信
复制链接
精彩评论
我们需要你的真知灼见来填补这片空白
打开APP，发表看法
APP内打开
发表看法
1
5
{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"detailType":1,"isChannel":false,"data":{"magic":2,"id":358371702,"tweetId":"358371702","gmtCreate":1616667948106,"gmtModify":1634524658174,"author":{"id":3572923042290830,"idStr":"3572923042290830","authorId":3572923042290830,"authorIdStr":"3572923042290830","name":"Tzewei94","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/f6adb684d3ea173ba323c27f9954240d","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":11,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":2,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body><p>Please like and comments</p></body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body><p>Please like and comments</p></body></html>","text":"Please like and comments","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":5,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/358371702","repostId":1139908626,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1139908626","kind":"news","pubTimestamp":1616663752,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1139908626?lang=zh_CN&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-03-25 17:15","market":"us","language":"en","title":"Apple Failure Modes<blockquote>苹果失效模式</blockquote>","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1139908626","media":"Medium","summary":"Apple has avoided the types of failures that have beset so many tech giants. From the HP I dearly loved and the IBM we once feared, to Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, and many more…Will Apple eventually follow a similar trajectory and either disappear or recede into the shadows?Or can Tim Cook continue to keep the Steve Jobs Apple 2.0 miracle alive almost a decade after the magician’s passing?The Monday Note has been on an irregular hiatus as I labor on a book chronicling my picaresque half century in ","content":"<p><i>Apple has avoided the types of failures that have beset so many tech giants. From the HP I dearly loved and the IBM we once feared, to Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, and many more… Will Apple eventually follow a similar trajectory and either disappear or recede into the shadows? Or can Tim Cook continue to keep the Steve Jobs Apple 2.0 miracle alive almost a decade after the magician’s passing?</i></p><p><blockquote><i>苹果避免了困扰众多科技巨头的失败类型。从我深爱的惠普和我们曾经害怕的IBM，到Palm、诺基亚、黑莓等等……苹果最终会遵循类似的轨迹，要么消失，要么退入阴影吗？或者，在魔术师去世近十年后，蒂姆·库克能否继续保持史蒂夫·乔布斯苹果2.0的奇迹？</i></blockquote></p><p> <img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/028afa8092cf5134580f1cb4b8bd6596\" tg-width=\"1050\" tg-height=\"590\"></p><p><blockquote></blockquote></p><p> The Monday Note has been on an irregular hiatus as I labor on a book chronicling my picaresque half century in the tech world. While I only spent ten of those years inside Apple, gravity exerts its pull and the book sometimes feels centered on the company that allowed me to fulfill two dreams: Coming to the US and leading a product engineering organization.</p><p><blockquote>周一的笔记一直在不规则的中断，因为我正在写一本书，记录我在科技界流浪汉般的半个世纪。虽然我只在苹果呆了十年，但《地心引力》发挥了它的吸引力，这本书有时感觉以这家让我实现了两个梦想的公司为中心：来到美国和领导一个产品工程组织。</blockquote></p><p> Writing about the early days at Apple led me to contemplate how the ambitious but struggling company became today’s $2T enterprise, how it avoided the “failure formulas” we’ve seen in so many grandees of the industry.</p><p><blockquote>写苹果早期的经历让我思考这家雄心勃勃但苦苦挣扎的公司是如何成为今天价值2T美元的企业的，它是如何避免我们在许多行业巨头身上看到的“失败公式”的。</blockquote></p><p> Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry followed a relatively simple failure recipe. When the first generation iPhone was announced, they dismissed the threat, impugning Apple’s ability to play in their arena. Then Android devices arrived, and the giants refused to back down: ’<i>We know what we’re doing,just look at our numbers!</i>’.</p><p><blockquote>诺基亚、Palm和黑莓遵循了一个相对简单的失败秘诀。当第一代iPhone发布时，他们否认了这一威胁，指责苹果在他们的舞台上发挥作用的能力。然后Android设备出现了，巨头们拒绝让步：<i>我们知道我们在做什么，看看我们的数字就知道了！</i>’.</blockquote></p><p> My good old HP is a much more complicated story. On the technical side, it allowed its superb desktop computing business to be disrupted by “cheap” 8-bit processors, but the real problems were cultural and political: A revolving door in the CEO suite, a Board of Directors that spied on each other, no coherent corporate strategy leading to catastrophic acquisitions followed by spinoffs…</p><p><blockquote>我的好旧惠普是一个复杂得多的故事。在技术方面，它允许其卓越的桌面计算业务被“廉价”的8位处理器扰乱，但真正的问题是文化和政治：首席执行官套房中的旋转门，董事会互相监视，没有连贯的公司战略导致灾难性的收购和随后的分拆……</blockquote></p><p> No company has been as powerful and then fallen as far as IBM. Once known as The Company, its mainframe products and services dominated business computing, its management methods were exemplary. (In the mid-seventies I was given a copy of the all-encompassing Manager’s Guide and was in awe with the depth and scope of the work.) Then, the PC happened, a product category IBM initially seized, only to lose it by letting clones powered by Microsoft software flood the market and kill its margins.</p><p><blockquote>没有一家公司像IBM一样强大，然后又堕落到如此地步。曾经被称为公司，其大型机产品和服务主导了商业计算，其管理方法堪称典范。（70年代中期，有人给了我一本包罗万象的经理指南，我对这项工作的深度和范围感到敬畏。）然后，PC出现了，这是IBM最初抓住的一个产品类别，但由于让由微软软件驱动的克隆产品充斥市场并扼杀了其利润而失去了它。</blockquote></p><p> A decade later when the Internet and networked servers changed the game, IBM wasn’t ready and almost went bust, only to be saved by Lou Gerstner…at least for a while. Unfortunately, Gerstner’s successors were unable to harness the relentless growth of Cloud Computing, and now the company has fractured. The current CEO, Arvind Krishna, recently decided to split IBM into“Two Market-Leading Companies with Focused Strategies”. The larger entity keeps the IBM name, the smaller as yet unnamed company rids IBM of a low-margin, low hope, ferociously competitive IT infrastructure business.</p><p><blockquote>十年后，当互联网和联网服务器改变了游戏规则时，IBM还没有准备好，几乎破产，只是被卢·郭士纳拯救了……至少在一段时间内。不幸的是，郭士纳的继任者无法驾驭云计算的无情增长，现在公司已经分裂。现任首席执行官Arvind Krishna最近决定将IBM拆分为“两家战略专注的市场领先公司”。较大的实体保留IBM的名称，较小的尚未命名的公司使IBM摆脱了低利润、低希望、竞争激烈的IT基础设施业务。</blockquote></p><p> Microsoft offers an interesting counterexample of success after it made an historic, expensive miss. Late to the smartphone game, the company gave Nokia special licensing terms for its Windows Phone OS, only to see the partnership flounder. Despairing, Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2B in 2013 and took a $7.6B writeoff two years later, followed by another $900M the following year. The clean-up job was left to Satya Nadella who took the reins from Steve Ballmer in 2014. Since then, Microsoft has prospered as the company has focused on software and Cloud services for organizations. As a part of that refocus the Microsoft stores, modeled after the Apple Store, have been shuttered.</p><p><blockquote>微软在经历了一次历史性的、代价高昂的失误后，提供了一个有趣的成功反例。在智能手机游戏后期，该公司为其Windows Phone操作系统向诺基亚提供了特殊的许可条款，结果双方的合作陷入了困境。绝望之下，微软于2013年以72亿美元收购了诺基亚，两年后注销了76亿美元，次年又注销了9亿美元。清理工作留给了萨蒂亚·纳德拉，他于2014年从史蒂夫·鲍尔默手中接过了大权。从那时起，随着公司专注于为组织提供软件和云服务，微软蓬勃发展。作为重新聚焦的一部分，仿照苹果商店的微软商店已经关闭。</blockquote></p><p> While these failure stories hold some lessons for Apple, some of them are actually reassuring.</p><p><blockquote>虽然这些失败的故事为苹果提供了一些教训，但其中一些实际上令人放心。</blockquote></p><p> For example, it takes more than one substantial mistake for a large company to begin its decline. The Apple Maps debut and “Antennagate”, as examples, were embarrassing but didn’t do any lasting harm. To be sure, two mediocre iPhone vintages in succession would have a deleterious effect on image and finances, but even that could be survived, especially in today’s quasi-saturated market. And as the Microsoft example shows us, seriously missing an industry wave (smartphones) can be overcome by jumping on a new one (the Cloud aided by the Windows/Office flywheel). This may shed light on Apple’s efforts to give more momentum to the Services business, a flywheel in its own right.</p><p><blockquote>例如，一家大公司需要不止一个重大错误才能开始衰落。苹果地图的首次亮相和“天线门”，作为例子，令人尴尬，但没有造成任何持久的伤害。可以肯定的是，连续两款平庸的iPhone会对形象和财务产生有害影响，但即使这样也可以生存下来，尤其是在当今准饱和的市场上。正如微软的例子向我们展示的那样，严重错过一个行业浪潮（智能手机）可以通过跳上一个新的行业浪潮（由Windows/Office飞轮辅助的云）来克服。这可能会揭示苹果为服务业提供更多动力的努力，服务业本身就是一个飞轮。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s iCloud is a different story. True, “cloud” is a very broad term and many of the company’s cloud services are so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible. For example, iPhone photos live in the petabytes or exabytes of cloud storage that propagates nicely to users’ devices. The same is true for Music and more.</p><p><blockquote>苹果的iCloud是一个不同的故事。诚然，“云”是一个非常宽泛的术语，该公司的许多云服务被认为是理所当然的，几乎是看不见的。例如，iPhone照片存在于数PB或数EB的云存储中，这些存储可以很好地传播到用户的设备。音乐等等也是如此。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> While iCloud as a product has come a long way since the 2008 MobileMe, the Exchange For The Rest Of Us that embarrassed Steve Jobs, it’s often sluggish and buggy (even now as I attempt to use Pages “as we speak”). It lacks the power and polish that Google and Dropbox have to offer. That said, one shouldn’t expect Apple to offer iCloud services in the way that Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure do. In fact, Apple in part depends on AWS and others for its own infrastructure — a contentious internal topic.</p><p><blockquote>虽然iCloud作为一种产品自2008年MobileMe以来已经取得了长足的进步，MobileMe是我们其他人的交换，让史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）感到尴尬，但它经常缓慢且漏洞百出（即使是现在，当我试图使用“我们说话时”的页面时）。它缺乏谷歌和Dropbox所能提供的强大和精致。也就是说，人们不应该指望苹果会像Amazon Web Services、Google Cloud和微软Azure那样提供iCloud服务。事实上，苹果在一定程度上依赖于AWS和其他公司的基础设施——这是一个有争议的内部话题。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s record with Artificial Intelligence (another broad domain) is surely a sore point in the Board Room. Although the company was “there” first with Siri, the company watched as Google and Amazon surpassed them to become the leaders in Intelligent Assistant applications. In everyday life, one can see modest progress in Siri’s usefulness and pervasiveness, and we can hope Senior VP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea, a Google alumnus with a distinguished résumé who joined Apple in 2018, will set things right.</p><p><blockquote>苹果在人工智能（另一个广泛领域）方面的记录无疑是董事会的痛点。尽管该公司凭借Siri首先“出现”，但该公司眼睁睁地看着谷歌和亚马逊超越它们，成为智能助理应用领域的领导者。在日常生活中，人们可以看到Siri的实用性和普遍性取得了适度的进步，我们可以希望机器学习和人工智能战略高级副总裁John Giannandrea（一位拥有杰出简历的谷歌校友，于2018年加入苹果）能够纠正错误。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s strengths are not to be discounted when considering failure modes. Its hardware, software, and supply chain management is unrivaled. But let’s focus on a less lauded advantage, the power of its organizational structure.</p><p><blockquote>在考虑故障模式时，苹果的优势不容忽视。其硬件、软件和供应链管理是无与伦比的。但让我们关注一个不太受人称赞的优势，即其组织结构的力量。</blockquote></p><p> To simplify, there are no <i>divisions</i> at Apple, no iPhone, Mac, or AirPod “subcompany”. Instead, there are <i>functions</i> as sketched by the Apple Leadership chart (helpful job details are accessed when clicking on the names):</p><p><blockquote>为了简化，没有<i>分部</i>在苹果，没有iPhone、Mac或AirPod的“子公司”。相反，有<i>功能</i>如苹果领导力图表所示（点击姓名即可访问有用的工作详细信息）：</blockquote></p><p> <img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b887dfe02642de363c4b17cc7f5e4f47\" tg-width=\"1050\" tg-height=\"1806\"></p><p><blockquote></blockquote></p><p> When Apple develops a new product — I’ll avoid titillating possibilities — work is organized around<i>projects</i>. A project group is formed by drawing on functions such as Software Engineering, Operations, Hardware Technologies, and so on. Some team members, for activities such as Product Design or Operations, may work on more than one project. The group exists as long as the project exists and is disbanded if the product is canceled or put on the shelf.</p><p><blockquote>当苹果开发新产品时——我会避免挑逗性的可能性——工作是围绕<i>项目</i>通过借鉴软件工程、运营、硬件技术等功能形成项目组。对于产品设计或运营等活动，一些团队成员可能会参与多个项目。只要项目存在，集团就存在，如果产品被取消或上架，集团就解散。</blockquote></p><p> One of the things that beset HP was its divisional structure with the unavoidable rivalries, territorial disputes, and fights over resources. Customers, of course, don’t care about divisons, they care about products. Apple’s robust, flexible,<i>functional</i>organization helps everyone focus on products and customers.</p><p><blockquote>困扰惠普的一个问题是它的部门结构，不可避免的竞争、领土争端和资源争夺战。当然，顾客不关心部门，他们关心的是产品。苹果的强健、灵活，<i>功能性的</i>组织帮助每个人专注于产品和客户。</blockquote></p><p> It’s an extremely valuable Steve Jobs legacy.</p><p><blockquote>这是史蒂夫·乔布斯极其宝贵的遗产。</blockquote></p><p> Does this mean Apple is immune to large scale failure, that it won’t someday take the path HP or IBM did?</p><p><blockquote>这是否意味着苹果对大规模失败免疫，它不会有一天走上惠普或IBM的道路？</blockquote></p><p> No.</p><p><blockquote>没有。</blockquote></p><p> In a quest for the next engine of growth, Apple could take big risks such as trying to enter the auto industry, either in a frontal assault against Tesla, Toyota, and “Deutsche AG” (German car makers), or in more original forms of individual mobility. Or it could be tempted by the humongous amounts of money spent on healthcare.</p><p><blockquote>为了寻找下一个增长引擎，苹果可能会冒很大的风险，比如试图进入汽车行业，要么正面攻击特斯拉、丰田和“德意志股份公司”（德国汽车制造商），要么采取更多原创的个人流动性形式。或者它可能被花费在医疗保健上的巨额资金所诱惑。</blockquote></p><p> And no matter how powerful its organizational structure is, Apple, like every company, is susceptible to personal mediocrity: Insecure B-grade managers hire C-grade players who won’t challenge their authority or their “expertise”, and products suffer as a result. We know the old organization joke: When upper layer people look down, they see brains; when brains in the lower layers look up, they see #$$holes. For an organization, the beginning of the end comes when the brains realize the upper layers are colonized by incompetents and get into Why Bother Mode. I don’t know enough about the company’s hiring and firing practices but, in my nervous mind, this is the biggest risk to Apple. From a distance, it’s impossible to know how hard Apple works to avoid a form of degenerative failure.</p><p><blockquote>无论其组织结构多么强大，苹果和每家公司一样，都容易受到个人平庸的影响：缺乏安全感的B级经理雇佣不会挑战他们的权威或“专业知识”的C级玩家，产品因此受到影响。我们知道一个古老的组织笑话：当上层人士向下看时，他们看到的是大脑；当低层的大脑抬头时，他们会看到#$$洞。对于一个组织来说，当大脑意识到上层被无能者殖民并进入何必模式时，终结就开始了。我对公司的招聘和解雇做法了解不够，但在我紧张的头脑中，这是苹果面临的最大风险。从远处看，不可能知道苹果如何努力避免某种形式的退化性失败。</blockquote></p><p></p>","source":"lsy1616663746307","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple Failure Modes<blockquote>苹果失效模式</blockquote></title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 12.5px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple Failure Modes<blockquote>苹果失效模式</blockquote>\n</h2>\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n<p class=\"head\">\n<strong class=\"h-name small\">Medium</strong><span class=\"h-time small\">2021-03-25 17:15</span>\n</p>\n</h4>\n</header>\n<article>\n<p><i>Apple has avoided the types of failures that have beset so many tech giants. From the HP I dearly loved and the IBM we once feared, to Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, and many more… Will Apple eventually follow a similar trajectory and either disappear or recede into the shadows? Or can Tim Cook continue to keep the Steve Jobs Apple 2.0 miracle alive almost a decade after the magician’s passing?</i></p><p><blockquote><i>苹果避免了困扰众多科技巨头的失败类型。从我深爱的惠普和我们曾经害怕的IBM，到Palm、诺基亚、黑莓等等……苹果最终会遵循类似的轨迹，要么消失，要么退入阴影吗？或者，在魔术师去世近十年后，蒂姆·库克能否继续保持史蒂夫·乔布斯苹果2.0的奇迹？</i></blockquote></p><p> <img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/028afa8092cf5134580f1cb4b8bd6596\" tg-width=\"1050\" tg-height=\"590\"></p><p><blockquote></blockquote></p><p> The Monday Note has been on an irregular hiatus as I labor on a book chronicling my picaresque half century in the tech world. While I only spent ten of those years inside Apple, gravity exerts its pull and the book sometimes feels centered on the company that allowed me to fulfill two dreams: Coming to the US and leading a product engineering organization.</p><p><blockquote>周一的笔记一直在不规则的中断，因为我正在写一本书，记录我在科技界流浪汉般的半个世纪。虽然我只在苹果呆了十年，但《地心引力》发挥了它的吸引力，这本书有时感觉以这家让我实现了两个梦想的公司为中心：来到美国和领导一个产品工程组织。</blockquote></p><p> Writing about the early days at Apple led me to contemplate how the ambitious but struggling company became today’s $2T enterprise, how it avoided the “failure formulas” we’ve seen in so many grandees of the industry.</p><p><blockquote>写苹果早期的经历让我思考这家雄心勃勃但苦苦挣扎的公司是如何成为今天价值2T美元的企业的，它是如何避免我们在许多行业巨头身上看到的“失败公式”的。</blockquote></p><p> Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry followed a relatively simple failure recipe. When the first generation iPhone was announced, they dismissed the threat, impugning Apple’s ability to play in their arena. Then Android devices arrived, and the giants refused to back down: ’<i>We know what we’re doing,just look at our numbers!</i>’.</p><p><blockquote>诺基亚、Palm和黑莓遵循了一个相对简单的失败秘诀。当第一代iPhone发布时，他们否认了这一威胁，指责苹果在他们的舞台上发挥作用的能力。然后Android设备出现了，巨头们拒绝让步：<i>我们知道我们在做什么，看看我们的数字就知道了！</i>’.</blockquote></p><p> My good old HP is a much more complicated story. On the technical side, it allowed its superb desktop computing business to be disrupted by “cheap” 8-bit processors, but the real problems were cultural and political: A revolving door in the CEO suite, a Board of Directors that spied on each other, no coherent corporate strategy leading to catastrophic acquisitions followed by spinoffs…</p><p><blockquote>我的好旧惠普是一个复杂得多的故事。在技术方面，它允许其卓越的桌面计算业务被“廉价”的8位处理器扰乱，但真正的问题是文化和政治：首席执行官套房中的旋转门，董事会互相监视，没有连贯的公司战略导致灾难性的收购和随后的分拆……</blockquote></p><p> No company has been as powerful and then fallen as far as IBM. Once known as The Company, its mainframe products and services dominated business computing, its management methods were exemplary. (In the mid-seventies I was given a copy of the all-encompassing Manager’s Guide and was in awe with the depth and scope of the work.) Then, the PC happened, a product category IBM initially seized, only to lose it by letting clones powered by Microsoft software flood the market and kill its margins.</p><p><blockquote>没有一家公司像IBM一样强大，然后又堕落到如此地步。曾经被称为公司，其大型机产品和服务主导了商业计算，其管理方法堪称典范。（70年代中期，有人给了我一本包罗万象的经理指南，我对这项工作的深度和范围感到敬畏。）然后，PC出现了，这是IBM最初抓住的一个产品类别，但由于让由微软软件驱动的克隆产品充斥市场并扼杀了其利润而失去了它。</blockquote></p><p> A decade later when the Internet and networked servers changed the game, IBM wasn’t ready and almost went bust, only to be saved by Lou Gerstner…at least for a while. Unfortunately, Gerstner’s successors were unable to harness the relentless growth of Cloud Computing, and now the company has fractured. The current CEO, Arvind Krishna, recently decided to split IBM into“Two Market-Leading Companies with Focused Strategies”. The larger entity keeps the IBM name, the smaller as yet unnamed company rids IBM of a low-margin, low hope, ferociously competitive IT infrastructure business.</p><p><blockquote>十年后，当互联网和联网服务器改变了游戏规则时，IBM还没有准备好，几乎破产，只是被卢·郭士纳拯救了……至少在一段时间内。不幸的是，郭士纳的继任者无法驾驭云计算的无情增长，现在公司已经分裂。现任首席执行官Arvind Krishna最近决定将IBM拆分为“两家战略专注的市场领先公司”。较大的实体保留IBM的名称，较小的尚未命名的公司使IBM摆脱了低利润、低希望、竞争激烈的IT基础设施业务。</blockquote></p><p> Microsoft offers an interesting counterexample of success after it made an historic, expensive miss. Late to the smartphone game, the company gave Nokia special licensing terms for its Windows Phone OS, only to see the partnership flounder. Despairing, Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2B in 2013 and took a $7.6B writeoff two years later, followed by another $900M the following year. The clean-up job was left to Satya Nadella who took the reins from Steve Ballmer in 2014. Since then, Microsoft has prospered as the company has focused on software and Cloud services for organizations. As a part of that refocus the Microsoft stores, modeled after the Apple Store, have been shuttered.</p><p><blockquote>微软在经历了一次历史性的、代价高昂的失误后，提供了一个有趣的成功反例。在智能手机游戏后期，该公司为其Windows Phone操作系统向诺基亚提供了特殊的许可条款，结果双方的合作陷入了困境。绝望之下，微软于2013年以72亿美元收购了诺基亚，两年后注销了76亿美元，次年又注销了9亿美元。清理工作留给了萨蒂亚·纳德拉，他于2014年从史蒂夫·鲍尔默手中接过了大权。从那时起，随着公司专注于为组织提供软件和云服务，微软蓬勃发展。作为重新聚焦的一部分，仿照苹果商店的微软商店已经关闭。</blockquote></p><p> While these failure stories hold some lessons for Apple, some of them are actually reassuring.</p><p><blockquote>虽然这些失败的故事为苹果提供了一些教训，但其中一些实际上令人放心。</blockquote></p><p> For example, it takes more than one substantial mistake for a large company to begin its decline. The Apple Maps debut and “Antennagate”, as examples, were embarrassing but didn’t do any lasting harm. To be sure, two mediocre iPhone vintages in succession would have a deleterious effect on image and finances, but even that could be survived, especially in today’s quasi-saturated market. And as the Microsoft example shows us, seriously missing an industry wave (smartphones) can be overcome by jumping on a new one (the Cloud aided by the Windows/Office flywheel). This may shed light on Apple’s efforts to give more momentum to the Services business, a flywheel in its own right.</p><p><blockquote>例如，一家大公司需要不止一个重大错误才能开始衰落。苹果地图的首次亮相和“天线门”，作为例子，令人尴尬，但没有造成任何持久的伤害。可以肯定的是，连续两款平庸的iPhone会对形象和财务产生有害影响，但即使这样也可以生存下来，尤其是在当今准饱和的市场上。正如微软的例子向我们展示的那样，严重错过一个行业浪潮（智能手机）可以通过跳上一个新的行业浪潮（由Windows/Office飞轮辅助的云）来克服。这可能会揭示苹果为服务业提供更多动力的努力，服务业本身就是一个飞轮。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s iCloud is a different story. True, “cloud” is a very broad term and many of the company’s cloud services are so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible. For example, iPhone photos live in the petabytes or exabytes of cloud storage that propagates nicely to users’ devices. The same is true for Music and more.</p><p><blockquote>苹果的iCloud是一个不同的故事。诚然，“云”是一个非常宽泛的术语，该公司的许多云服务被认为是理所当然的，几乎是看不见的。例如，iPhone照片存在于数PB或数EB的云存储中，这些存储可以很好地传播到用户的设备。音乐等等也是如此。</blockquote></p><p></p><p> While iCloud as a product has come a long way since the 2008 MobileMe, the Exchange For The Rest Of Us that embarrassed Steve Jobs, it’s often sluggish and buggy (even now as I attempt to use Pages “as we speak”). It lacks the power and polish that Google and Dropbox have to offer. That said, one shouldn’t expect Apple to offer iCloud services in the way that Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure do. In fact, Apple in part depends on AWS and others for its own infrastructure — a contentious internal topic.</p><p><blockquote>虽然iCloud作为一种产品自2008年MobileMe以来已经取得了长足的进步，MobileMe是我们其他人的交换，让史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）感到尴尬，但它经常缓慢且漏洞百出（即使是现在，当我试图使用“我们说话时”的页面时）。它缺乏谷歌和Dropbox所能提供的强大和精致。也就是说，人们不应该指望苹果会像Amazon Web Services、Google Cloud和微软Azure那样提供iCloud服务。事实上，苹果在一定程度上依赖于AWS和其他公司的基础设施——这是一个有争议的内部话题。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s record with Artificial Intelligence (another broad domain) is surely a sore point in the Board Room. Although the company was “there” first with Siri, the company watched as Google and Amazon surpassed them to become the leaders in Intelligent Assistant applications. In everyday life, one can see modest progress in Siri’s usefulness and pervasiveness, and we can hope Senior VP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea, a Google alumnus with a distinguished résumé who joined Apple in 2018, will set things right.</p><p><blockquote>苹果在人工智能（另一个广泛领域）方面的记录无疑是董事会的痛点。尽管该公司凭借Siri首先“出现”，但该公司眼睁睁地看着谷歌和亚马逊超越它们，成为智能助理应用领域的领导者。在日常生活中，人们可以看到Siri的实用性和普遍性取得了适度的进步，我们可以希望机器学习和人工智能战略高级副总裁John Giannandrea（一位拥有杰出简历的谷歌校友，于2018年加入苹果）能够纠正错误。</blockquote></p><p> Apple’s strengths are not to be discounted when considering failure modes. Its hardware, software, and supply chain management is unrivaled. But let’s focus on a less lauded advantage, the power of its organizational structure.</p><p><blockquote>在考虑故障模式时，苹果的优势不容忽视。其硬件、软件和供应链管理是无与伦比的。但让我们关注一个不太受人称赞的优势，即其组织结构的力量。</blockquote></p><p> To simplify, there are no <i>divisions</i> at Apple, no iPhone, Mac, or AirPod “subcompany”. Instead, there are <i>functions</i> as sketched by the Apple Leadership chart (helpful job details are accessed when clicking on the names):</p><p><blockquote>为了简化，没有<i>分部</i>在苹果，没有iPhone、Mac或AirPod的“子公司”。相反，有<i>功能</i>如苹果领导力图表所示（点击姓名即可访问有用的工作详细信息）：</blockquote></p><p> <img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b887dfe02642de363c4b17cc7f5e4f47\" tg-width=\"1050\" tg-height=\"1806\"></p><p><blockquote></blockquote></p><p> When Apple develops a new product — I’ll avoid titillating possibilities — work is organized around<i>projects</i>. A project group is formed by drawing on functions such as Software Engineering, Operations, Hardware Technologies, and so on. Some team members, for activities such as Product Design or Operations, may work on more than one project. The group exists as long as the project exists and is disbanded if the product is canceled or put on the shelf.</p><p><blockquote>当苹果开发新产品时——我会避免挑逗性的可能性——工作是围绕<i>项目</i>通过借鉴软件工程、运营、硬件技术等功能形成项目组。对于产品设计或运营等活动，一些团队成员可能会参与多个项目。只要项目存在，集团就存在，如果产品被取消或上架，集团就解散。</blockquote></p><p> One of the things that beset HP was its divisional structure with the unavoidable rivalries, territorial disputes, and fights over resources. Customers, of course, don’t care about divisons, they care about products. Apple’s robust, flexible,<i>functional</i>organization helps everyone focus on products and customers.</p><p><blockquote>困扰惠普的一个问题是它的部门结构，不可避免的竞争、领土争端和资源争夺战。当然，顾客不关心部门，他们关心的是产品。苹果的强健、灵活，<i>功能性的</i>组织帮助每个人专注于产品和客户。</blockquote></p><p> It’s an extremely valuable Steve Jobs legacy.</p><p><blockquote>这是史蒂夫·乔布斯极其宝贵的遗产。</blockquote></p><p> Does this mean Apple is immune to large scale failure, that it won’t someday take the path HP or IBM did?</p><p><blockquote>这是否意味着苹果对大规模失败免疫，它不会有一天走上惠普或IBM的道路？</blockquote></p><p> No.</p><p><blockquote>没有。</blockquote></p><p> In a quest for the next engine of growth, Apple could take big risks such as trying to enter the auto industry, either in a frontal assault against Tesla, Toyota, and “Deutsche AG” (German car makers), or in more original forms of individual mobility. Or it could be tempted by the humongous amounts of money spent on healthcare.</p><p><blockquote>为了寻找下一个增长引擎，苹果可能会冒很大的风险，比如试图进入汽车行业，要么正面攻击特斯拉、丰田和“德意志股份公司”（德国汽车制造商），要么采取更多原创的个人流动性形式。或者它可能被花费在医疗保健上的巨额资金所诱惑。</blockquote></p><p> And no matter how powerful its organizational structure is, Apple, like every company, is susceptible to personal mediocrity: Insecure B-grade managers hire C-grade players who won’t challenge their authority or their “expertise”, and products suffer as a result. We know the old organization joke: When upper layer people look down, they see brains; when brains in the lower layers look up, they see #$$holes. For an organization, the beginning of the end comes when the brains realize the upper layers are colonized by incompetents and get into Why Bother Mode. I don’t know enough about the company’s hiring and firing practices but, in my nervous mind, this is the biggest risk to Apple. From a distance, it’s impossible to know how hard Apple works to avoid a form of degenerative failure.</p><p><blockquote>无论其组织结构多么强大，苹果和每家公司一样，都容易受到个人平庸的影响：缺乏安全感的B级经理雇佣不会挑战他们的权威或“专业知识”的C级玩家，产品因此受到影响。我们知道一个古老的组织笑话：当上层人士向下看时，他们看到的是大脑；当低层的大脑抬头时，他们会看到#$$洞。对于一个组织来说，当大脑意识到上层被无能者殖民并进入何必模式时，终结就开始了。我对公司的招聘和解雇做法了解不够，但在我紧张的头脑中，这是苹果面临的最大风险。从远处看，不可能知道苹果如何努力避免某种形式的退化性失败。</blockquote></p><p></p>\n<div class=\"bt-text\">\n\n\n<p> 来源：<a href=\"https://mondaynote.com/apple-failure-modes-a5c9e1c9ffb0\">Medium</a></p>\n<p>为提升您的阅读体验，我们对本页面进行了排版优化</p>\n\n\n</div>\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"source_url":"https://mondaynote.com/apple-failure-modes-a5c9e1c9ffb0","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1139908626","content_text":"Apple has avoided the types of failures that have beset so many tech giants. From the HP I dearly loved and the IBM we once feared, to Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, and many more… Will Apple eventually follow a similar trajectory and either disappear or recede into the shadows? Or can Tim Cook continue to keep the Steve Jobs Apple 2.0 miracle alive almost a decade after the magician’s passing?\n\nThe Monday Note has been on an irregular hiatus as I labor on a book chronicling my picaresque half century in the tech world. While I only spent ten of those years inside Apple, gravity exerts its pull and the book sometimes feels centered on the company that allowed me to fulfill two dreams: Coming to the US and leading a product engineering organization.\nWriting about the early days at Apple led me to contemplate how the ambitious but struggling company became today’s $2T enterprise, how it avoided the “failure formulas” we’ve seen in so many grandees of the industry.\nNokia, Palm, and Blackberry followed a relatively simple failure recipe. When the first generation iPhone was announced, they dismissed the threat, impugning Apple’s ability to play in their arena. Then Android devices arrived, and the giants refused to back down: ’We know what we’re doing,just look at our numbers!’.\nMy good old HP is a much more complicated story. On the technical side, it allowed its superb desktop computing business to be disrupted by “cheap” 8-bit processors, but the real problems were cultural and political: A revolving door in the CEO suite, a Board of Directors that spied on each other, no coherent corporate strategy leading to catastrophic acquisitions followed by spinoffs…\nNo company has been as powerful and then fallen as far as IBM. Once known as The Company, its mainframe products and services dominated business computing, its management methods were exemplary. (In the mid-seventies I was given a copy of the all-encompassing Manager’s Guide and was in awe with the depth and scope of the work.) Then, the PC happened, a product category IBM initially seized, only to lose it by letting clones powered by Microsoft software flood the market and kill its margins.\nA decade later when the Internet and networked servers changed the game, IBM wasn’t ready and almost went bust, only to be saved by Lou Gerstner…at least for a while. Unfortunately, Gerstner’s successors were unable to harness the relentless growth of Cloud Computing, and now the company has fractured. The current CEO, Arvind Krishna, recently decided to split IBM into“Two Market-Leading Companies with Focused Strategies”. The larger entity keeps the IBM name, the smaller as yet unnamed company rids IBM of a low-margin, low hope, ferociously competitive IT infrastructure business.\nMicrosoft offers an interesting counterexample of success after it made an historic, expensive miss. Late to the smartphone game, the company gave Nokia special licensing terms for its Windows Phone OS, only to see the partnership flounder. Despairing, Microsoft bought Nokia for $7.2B in 2013 and took a $7.6B writeoff two years later, followed by another $900M the following year. The clean-up job was left to Satya Nadella who took the reins from Steve Ballmer in 2014. Since then, Microsoft has prospered as the company has focused on software and Cloud services for organizations. As a part of that refocus the Microsoft stores, modeled after the Apple Store, have been shuttered.\nWhile these failure stories hold some lessons for Apple, some of them are actually reassuring.\nFor example, it takes more than one substantial mistake for a large company to begin its decline. The Apple Maps debut and “Antennagate”, as examples, were embarrassing but didn’t do any lasting harm. To be sure, two mediocre iPhone vintages in succession would have a deleterious effect on image and finances, but even that could be survived, especially in today’s quasi-saturated market. And as the Microsoft example shows us, seriously missing an industry wave (smartphones) can be overcome by jumping on a new one (the Cloud aided by the Windows/Office flywheel). This may shed light on Apple’s efforts to give more momentum to the Services business, a flywheel in its own right.\nApple’s iCloud is a different story. True, “cloud” is a very broad term and many of the company’s cloud services are so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible. For example, iPhone photos live in the petabytes or exabytes of cloud storage that propagates nicely to users’ devices. The same is true for Music and more.\nWhile iCloud as a product has come a long way since the 2008 MobileMe, the Exchange For The Rest Of Us that embarrassed Steve Jobs, it’s often sluggish and buggy (even now as I attempt to use Pages “as we speak”). It lacks the power and polish that Google and Dropbox have to offer. That said, one shouldn’t expect Apple to offer iCloud services in the way that Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure do. In fact, Apple in part depends on AWS and others for its own infrastructure — a contentious internal topic.\nApple’s record with Artificial Intelligence (another broad domain) is surely a sore point in the Board Room. Although the company was “there” first with Siri, the company watched as Google and Amazon surpassed them to become the leaders in Intelligent Assistant applications. In everyday life, one can see modest progress in Siri’s usefulness and pervasiveness, and we can hope Senior VP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea, a Google alumnus with a distinguished résumé who joined Apple in 2018, will set things right.\nApple’s strengths are not to be discounted when considering failure modes. Its hardware, software, and supply chain management is unrivaled. But let’s focus on a less lauded advantage, the power of its organizational structure.\nTo simplify, there are no divisions at Apple, no iPhone, Mac, or AirPod “subcompany”. Instead, there are functions as sketched by the Apple Leadership chart (helpful job details are accessed when clicking on the names):\n\nWhen Apple develops a new product — I’ll avoid titillating possibilities — work is organized aroundprojects. A project group is formed by drawing on functions such as Software Engineering, Operations, Hardware Technologies, and so on. Some team members, for activities such as Product Design or Operations, may work on more than one project. The group exists as long as the project exists and is disbanded if the product is canceled or put on the shelf.\nOne of the things that beset HP was its divisional structure with the unavoidable rivalries, territorial disputes, and fights over resources. Customers, of course, don’t care about divisons, they care about products. Apple’s robust, flexible,functionalorganization helps everyone focus on products and customers.\nIt’s an extremely valuable Steve Jobs legacy.\nDoes this mean Apple is immune to large scale failure, that it won’t someday take the path HP or IBM did?\nNo.\nIn a quest for the next engine of growth, Apple could take big risks such as trying to enter the auto industry, either in a frontal assault against Tesla, Toyota, and “Deutsche AG” (German car makers), or in more original forms of individual mobility. Or it could be tempted by the humongous amounts of money spent on healthcare.\nAnd no matter how powerful its organizational structure is, Apple, like every company, is susceptible to personal mediocrity: Insecure B-grade managers hire C-grade players who won’t challenge their authority or their “expertise”, and products suffer as a result. We know the old organization joke: When upper layer people look down, they see brains; when brains in the lower layers look up, they see #$$holes. For an organization, the beginning of the end comes when the brains realize the upper layers are colonized by incompetents and get into Why Bother Mode. I don’t know enough about the company’s hiring and firing practices but, in my nervous mind, this is the biggest risk to Apple. From a distance, it’s impossible to know how hard Apple works to avoid a form of degenerative failure.","news_type":1,"symbols_score_info":{"AAPL":0.9}},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":2297,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"EN","currentLanguage":"EN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":21,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ORIG"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"isTiger":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"url":"/m/post/358371702"}
精彩评论