I'm not comparing management, but iCloud reminds me of the non-dropcam part of Nest - basically unable to deliver.
I've been contacted by both for roles and just think why would one want to be part of a dysfunctional after thought?
https://techpinions.com/apple-shouldnt-cross-that-road-till-...
Apple operates one of the biggest consumer services portfolios out there. Little things like iTunes, AppStore, iMessage, photos, find my iPhone, iCloud backup.
I think it makes sense that Apple would align its normal vertically integrated model.
> But I don’t think Ben Thompson is actually arguing that it would be great if Apple created a new services division. I think he’s arguing that Apple should create a new services division if they want Services to be great. Ben Thompson is doing what good analysts do. He’s not giving us the right answer. He’s asking us the right question.
The rebuttal does a nice job of expanding the discussion around that question.
Is anyone aggregating discussions like this today?
NYT has some opinion pieces and shares rebuttals, but I haven't seen long-form opinion aggregators around.
That's something I'd like to see as an official feature on HN or reddit. In addition of normal comments on the article you can also add "additional information from a qualified source" (which can be either a qualified user or another article from another reputable journalist).
But I am not sure if that would work. Perhaps it would be fine on HN, but it would be difficult to enforce and moderate on reddit.
But a lot of what would make Services profitable isn't necessarily good for the rest of Apple: squeezing people harder to upgrade storage space for pay, paywalling popular features like Find My Phone, or selling iCloud for Android might all make Services look better on paper but hurt Apple as a whole.
Your proposed compromise, if anything, might make Services worse -- take it from someone who's been there, there's nothing more demotivating and worse for productivity than being held responsible for the bottom line while not having any authority to do anything that would improve it.
And if you're not going to hold the Division responsible for its financials, there's no benefit to moving it out of Engineering.
As I understand it, the "jewels" (retail/consumer) do depend on AWS...they supposedly are strong on "eating your own dog food". But, they have roughly equal footing and representation. There is the difference that Amazon's services can be sold standalone, rather than just bundled, I suppose.
As noted in other comments here, Apple's products and services are both consumer-focussed; ideally, you're trying to sell the consumer both of them, so the outcomes for the two are co-dependent. Amazon doesn't really care about how many instance-hours AWS sells; the iCloud team cares a lot about how many devices Apple sells.
It's hard to get services right and even harder to keep them right. I am of course not saying Apple can't get there but merely separating the hardware and software/services isn't a meaningful first step.
Pretty sure Eddy Cue runs a division called "Internet Software and Services" which is iCloud/Maps/Siri etc: http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/eddy-cue.html
Article: 0 Fact: 1
Stop making things and start providing services around the things you used to make.
Weird.
https://stratechery.com/2013/why-microsofts-reorganization-i...
Edit: I see you found it
and how that can layer onto a hardware / device Org.. they never seem compatible
However, then it goes on to say a few things that I think are harder to defend. The author talks about how it's hard for Apple to build good services since they're so focused on achieving perfection with a tightly integrated device that has a new release once or twice a year. Basically, the thesis is that since the market penalty for releasing a bad device is so high, Apple has thrown a lot of resources into getting the device right the first time, which makes it very hard for them to think or operate at the tempo you need when operating services:
"You only get one shot to get a device right, so all of Apple’s internal rhythms and processes are organized around delivering as perfect a product as possible at a specific moment in time."
This isn't right in a couple ways. First, Apple has released all kinds of sub-par hardware in the past. And will likely do so in the future. Apple says they are looking to achieve perfection, and it sounds noble, but it's more of an iterative process than this article makes it sound like.
Second, many of a device's features, especially the integration that the author lauds, are actually in software. Particularly the integration pieces that make the device seem like magic. And those are updated often as one can see with the release tempo of iOS updates. The pattern has been the same for a long time--release a bunch of new features in iOS X.0, then do point releases to fix bugs, plug security holes, and make minor tweaks to fix annoying things and make the user experience feel more smooth.
The other conclusion I don't agree with is that the author says that in order for them to build better services, they need more accountability, which would be achieved by tracking profit and loss for each service and making the leaders financially accountable. I agree that accountability is something that's required to create strong services, but it's not the primary lever I would use. And I certainly wouldn't bring P&L into the accountability equation since that incentivizes the different service orgs to grow adversarial relationships. It's old company thinking IMO.
Instead, I feel you need to build better services by building a better infrastructure culture. A lot of people look at situations like this and look for punitive or regressive measures to fix the problem, i.e. using the stick instead of the carrot. I think however they would build better services by focusing on other levers like open communication (the heavy siloing meant a lot of duplicated work), being open to criticism (lots of politics and defensiveness meant fiefdoms and grudges were created), a focus on instrumenting and measuring performance of services to have the right picture for how everything is working together (instrumentation and visualization of performance was terrible), a culture of learning from mistakes instead of assigning blame, having embedded SRE-like engineers who focus on production quality and availability instead of having separate second-class ops teams, etc. I could go on, but I have a really strong objection to boiling all their problems down to not making each service unit financially accountable. That won't fix things, it will instead make the internal culture on the infrastructure side much worse.
