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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (144104)	10/31/2012 11:14:00 PM
From: Doren	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Cook should have the final say and I think he will. However good design is a process. Sometimes, many times something that looked unpromising from one angle becomes absolute genius from another. Here's how it works. You are assigned a project. For example: Team here is IBMs new Micro Hard drive. What can we do with this that is amazing? The team goes to work. You have several ideas. Usually one seems best at first. You show your ideas to ALL the others on the design team during a critique. They criticize the weaknesses HOWEVER they also make suggestion about how a change can make a design better, and sometimes what seemed weak becomes a killer if a small aspect is changed. Every member of the design team has several ideas. Eventually the ones that are most promising will emerge. The iPod. I'm sure every member of Ive's team has dozens of ideas. Apple must be disciplined enough to quickly decide which ideas may bear fruit and which are obviously no goes. They have to winnow it out until they have just a few very strong ideas/designs. Jobs was great at that because Apple was originally terrible at it, allowing designers to work on pie in the sky stuff far longer than they should have. I think he probably schooled Cook on the winnowing process. Once the designs are finalized its fairly usual for there to be a consensus about which is the better, then you tweak the ones that your are going to produce until they are perfect. Its a process. I would expect a fair amount of consensus this way inside Apple. A good idea like the iPhone or iPod is obvious once you get the main ideas fleshed out. However just because something is designed well or even extraordinarily well does not guarantee it will sell well or be profitable or fit in with the ecology of a company. And THAT is what Cook has to decide. Jobs became great at that because of his disasters like LISA. An amazing computer that failed miserably. Or the Cube. I think Cook understands that. ----- Interface design is a completely different thing from creative design generally. Interface design has scientific fact behind it, and a good interface designers should be fanatical about being knowledgable about perception studies. They should also know how to do a effective usabilty study for cheap. I said generally but there are always opportunities for interface designers to creatively come up with a better way to do something. My guess is Ive is well educated enough to know a lot about how interface/usabilty design works. He seems like a guy who is absolutely in love with all these things, materials, finish and interface/usablity design. My guess is he will be an absolute fanatic about getting the right people and getting them to do their work right too. My guess is he's really wanted to get this right for a long time.

To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (144104)	11/1/2012 12:06:26 AM
From: slacker711	2 Recommendations Respond to of 213177

we both agree the product has stagnated, where we appear to disagree is in assigning which side was the root source of the stagnation. If one were to assume it's from Cook's side, then Forstall's "challenging" nature would be cast in a different light. While I do see Cook as more of a delegator, it is obviously possible that he could have been the one pushing for a particular ship date on the mapping product. However, take Maps out of it, do you really think that it is Cook that is making the feature decisions on iOS? the architectural decisions on Siri? Absent some evidence that he has gone power mad, I have to believe that he is leaving the underlying design decisions to the people in charge...and even outside of Maps, I view the last two upgrades as decidedly underwhelming. Let me put it this way, I give credit to Ive for the physical design of the iPhone 5. Similarly, if iOS5/6 were amazing, I believe that Forstall would deserve the credit...but since they are not, I think it is quite fair to let him shoulder the blame. Slacker

To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (144104)	11/1/2012 6:09:06 AM
From: Cogito	3 Recommendations Respond to of 213177

I think you and I are just reading it in opposite ways. We both agree there was conflict, we both agree the product has stagnated, where we appear to disagree is in assigning which side was the root source of the stagnation. If one were to assume it's from Cook's side, then Forstall's "challenging" nature would be cast in a different light. There are two sides to every story. I'm sure Forstall would have very interesting things to say about his soon-to-be-former colleagues, and all those colleagues would have interesting things to say about him. And none of them would be completely wrong or completely right. Decisions like this one can't be easy to make, particularly given the intense scrutiny focused on Tim Cook's every move. At no point can anyone be certain whether the choices being made are the best ones. But I have no doubt they were taken with due consideration and solemnity. I'm focusing now more upon the men who make up the current team. Whatever Forstall contributed, it's no longer part of the picture. What matters now is what happens next. The people who comprise the new team are an extremely talented bunch of people, and they've all contributed a lot to Apple, as well. And another important consideration, I think, is that Tim Cook knows all of these people very, very well. He's been working with them all for years. He ought to have a pretty good idea of what they can and can't do. Incidentally, I have no doubt that Jony Ive has given a lot of thought, over the years, to human interfaces, as he worked with various iterations of OS X and even OS 9. So I think it's very cool that he has been put in charge of that. And that's just one aspect of the new org chart that makes sense to me. But obviously everything can look great on paper and absolutely not work in the real world. We can't know yet about this. I wish Cook luck, and hope that this realignment will turn out well.