Today I happened to hear a song that I really like: "Cathedrals" by the Handsome Family. Aside from being a great piece of gothic country, it has an interesting theme: a skewed view of progress over time. After talking about the cathedral in Cologne, Germany, they sing about a fiberglass cathedral in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, where "kids race go-karts 'round the moat". They go on to talk of trying to find love by the ice machine at their motel, but the comparative study of cathedrals is what always gets me.
Are we moving forward, or are we not? Are we just substituting cheap plastic crap for hand-crafted stonework? Aside from cathedrals, where we seem to have peaked some centuries ago, I am a believer in progress. We see stuff getting better, faster, and cheaper, especially in the tech arena.
That's why Steve Jobs' recent defense of the iPhone 4 was so disappointing. He said that the rumors of poor performance are just that, because, in truth, the data show that the iPhone 4 only drops 1 percent more calls than the iPhone 3. Because it's only a little bit worse, people should just get off his back! Imagine saying, "our plastic cathedral is only 1 percent more tacky than the previous version, and it's no more tacky than everyone else's plastic cathedral." While he was at it, Jobs said that the problem's not unique to the iPhone 4, naming his major competitors as just as bad, and claimed that the data says that the issue has been blown "so out of proportion". Hmmm... not great PR or competitive strategy, and not very aspirational.
Steve Jobs, historically, has not set the bar so low for himself. Hopefully, he'll return to form and Apple will go back to giving us better, faster, cheaper products, like we have come to expect.
There is no "forward."
ReplyDeleteAs for Apple, both the original antenna problem and Jobs' reaction seem like a bad decision to walk away from their core iPod/iPhone strategy: to sell them as the fruit of Jobs' obsessive attention to design and quality. If that's Apple's VRIN capability, then why ignore it?
My best guess is that it was Jobs' obsession with design that required the iPhone's poor antenna placement (in back, under a metal plate, right where people put their hands).
So this might be a case of a VRIN capability becoming a rigidity, or it just could be a trade-off dictated by a differentiating strategy.