I'm convinced that this is the fate of all successful software companies. It's not a result of arrogance or hubris or anything else like that. It's the result of turnover.

Take your favourite rock band and turn over all the musicians until no one is left from the original band. Should we expect the band to continue cranking out chart-topping hits?

There's one further factor that makes the situation even worse than the "Rock Band of Theseus." That's the fact that young software engineers are not interested in stewardship. They want to build their own projects, not fix bugs in someone else's. Across the software industry we see this lead to a continual churn, rewrites and redesigns no one wants, and a huge amount of wasted effort reinventing the wheel (and often making a worse wheel).

It often feels like Apple hires the best hardware and marketing people in the world and holds them to the highest standards, but the software design and engineering people are left to just kind of screw around, redesign stuff for shits and giggles, and laugh as people fill their forums with bug reports and (very obvious) feature requests.