The Apple Way of Design and Marketing

1 Infinite Loop: The Mothership

I figured, "Why not toot my own horn?" and brag about my Apple speaking engagements. I'm surprised how well it's been received, probably because it touches on a some key design, marketing, and branding topics.

I've given The Apple Way of Design and Marketing presentation a number of times, mainly to Chinese delegations of business people touring America's tech companies. Having worked at Apple, I forget the allure of how the company looks from beyond Infinite Loop and what makes Apple unique. Like a beautiful photo, things look amazing from the outside, where you wish you could touch the magic, on the inside.

My presentation touches on a variety of topics such as: why the Apple logo used to be upside down, to Apple's sophisticated unifying branding techniques, to simplifying UX and technology processes, along with Apple's brilliant decisions and mistakes.

1 Infinite Loop Apple Store

Last weekend, the new Apple Store at 1 Infinite Loop reopened, after being closed for remodeling for a few months, and I had a chance to visit it during its opening week.

If memory serves, at the end of the last century, this store was called the Apple Store. After 2001, it was renamed The Company Store since it was unique in the truest sense of the word. Now, it's been rechristened, once again, as the Apple Store, manned by Apple retail employees who comprise 50% of Apple's 110,000+ workforce.

What makes the store at 1 Infinite Loop (called IL1 by Apple employees) unique is it's the only store that sells Apple logoware such as t-shirts, coffee cups, water bottles, pens, etc. I suspect that it's the only Apple Store without a Genius Bar, too.

See the video of the inside of the new Apple Store at IL1, below or, even better, checkout the raw super-high resolution HD video.

  1 Infinite Loop Apple Store.

"Apple Crosses The Line With New iPhone Feature"

Apple Crosses The Line With New iPhone Feature

That's the headline of a piece a friend just sent to me asking if there was genuine cause for concern. When I began reading it, I thought it was a Facebook alarmist post or article from a yellow journalism website:

If you’re setting yourself up to get the new iPhone or get the new iPhone for your kids then you need to make sure you’re aware of the new features. This is something that needs to be shared with friends to let Apple know sneaky behavior will NOT be tolerated. According to Gawker, the new iPhone will be recording video and sound AT ALL TIMES when your camera app is open by default whether you’re taking picture or not. If you’re planning on getting the iPhone 6s BE SURE TO TURN THIS FEATURE OFF.

Obviously, I'm not Tim, today.

No, this quote, complete with bolded capitalization, is not from Fox News or some tin-foil hat blog. Rather, it's from CBS.

So, are these claims true? Well, on a very technical level, yes they are, but there's no cause for concern. Apple calls these features Hey Siri and Live Photos.

This might sound like splitting hairs, but there's a bit of a difference between "listening" and "recording." The key difference between listening and recording is the same as caching and saving. Saving something means it persists until a user deletes it. Caching something means it's temporarily saved, for perhaps a second or two, until it's determined if it's needed. If the content is not needed, it's discarded much like a buffer; or, more likely, erased as new content is recorded over it.

Hey Siri, which is available on currently shipping iPhone models, only works when the phone is charging to save power. With the new iPhone 6s, the Hey Siri feature can be enabled at all times and, much like other listening devices, such as Amazon's Echo, it's constantly listening to sounds to determine if a key phrase is spoken. Let's say that's no more than two seconds of sound. After two seconds, any new sounds are recorded over the previous sounds. The same is true for Live Photos where Apple records video in a cache which is saved when you press the shutter button. With Live Photos, about one second of video is recorded just before and after you press the shutter. If you don't snap a photo, the video is discarded.

This isn't much different than any digital camera, whether it's on a smart phone or point-and-shoot model. Without pressing the shutter button, images are still cached on the LCD display on the back of the point-and-shoot camera for a fraction of a second. You could point a point-and-shoot camera at something I can't see and even if you never press the shutter, I could still record a video of the LCD display on the back of the point-and-shoot camera and capture everything. The key difference with Hey Siri and Live Photos is that no one has access to the cached content while the one or two second loop is recording.

Yellow-journalism is creeping more and more into mainstream media. Anything to get eye balls. Phft. Or, perhaps the joke's on me.

Update: Just to beat a dead horse, Apple chimed in to confirm that none of the Hey Siri or Live Photo content is leaving the iPhone 6S.

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit ... pic.twitter.com/z69rArKELG

— Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) June 24, 2014

Apple Pencil

Yes, when the iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs, in 2007, he panned the stylus since the iPhone used a touchscreen. Now, Apple's announced the Apple Pencil which is a stylus for the iPad Pro, seemingly reversing Steve's original convictions, and some news sites are harping on that.

There are two points to take note of. First, Steve's changed his stance (publicly) on other features Apple shipped. For example, he pointed out that no one wanted to watch video on a tiny iPod Classic screen, and then he allowed video playback in a future iPod.

My second point is more salient in that, early PDAs required a stylus just as today's computers require a mouse or trackpad. And, now, just as a creative person would buy a Wacom pen tablet, so will they buy an Apple Pencil. Optional, yet empowering.

What did I think of the rest of today's keynote?

RIP Apple Online Store: 1997 – 2015

It brings a tear to my eye that Apple shut down the Apple Online Store, yesterday.

When I worked at the Apple Online Store, almost a decade ago, it fell under Apple's Engineering department. More specifically, the online store fell under Eddy Cue who also oversaw the iTunes Music Store, as it was originally called since it initially only sold music. That changed, about half a dozen years ago, when the online store moved out from Engineering, into Apple's IT department (IS&T).

Of course you can still buy Apple hotness at apple.com, but there isn't a separate tab for the store. Instead, you add items to your shopping bag, directly from a product's marketing page.

I've always enjoyed telling people about my experience at the Apple Online Store. Before each of Steve Jobs's Keynote speeches, we'd turn off the store then Steve Jobs would take the stage and announce the new products we, the store software engineers, didn't even know about. After he walked off stage we'd turn the store back on under a huge load. Most customers would skip the marketing pages for the new projects and immediately go to the online store and add the new products to their cart to see the prices, configurations, and order ship times. I learned some important load balancing and stress testing lessons while working at the Apple Online Store, especially for scaling servers and writing fault tolerant code.

Does this change make sense? Of course. Looking back, I ask myself why it wasn't this simple in the first place. Probably because this was how it was done in the 1990s. Now, without an explicit store, each product's marketing page is where you browse and the shopping bag has become the checkout portion of the old online store. At first, I was wondering where I'd find accessories. It turns out those are under each of the respective product tabs (Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Watch). So, it all works out. As Apple grows bigger and bigger, streamlining and simplifying processes pays the company dividends.

What Makes Apple Unique?

Presented with a gift of a Chinese fan stamped with their company logo.

I was recently invited to the Bay Area to give a talk to a group of business people from China about Apple's marketing and design philosophies. Putting together the presentation was simple, since I've written and discussed what makes Apple unique, in the past.

The interesting part was speaking through a translator – a first, for me. I'm not sure exactly what the translator said when she introduced me, but the group seemed impressed.

The best part of this gig was how quickly it came together. A woman I never met contacted me on a Tuesday and asked me if I was willing to fly up the following Tuesday to give my talk. When I agreed, she immediately transferred half the payment to me. She paid the second half to me at breakfast, before I spoke. No contract, SOW, schedules, or exhibits. It worked out so well that we'll probably do it again. I can get used to this.

Software Cities

Yesterday, Dave Winer posted about why in software, we're always starting over. Software engineering is about managing complexity, and it seems to be approaching an asymptotic limit of what can be managed by individuals and companies. It's not that we won't be able to create more sophisticated software, we will; but the growth will be slower and the benefits less noticeable. We're running out of low hanging fruit; we're running out of simple software that performs a useful service as software engineering becomes more prolific.

The real world problem I'm seeing today is that software is becoming so complex that it won't work as expected. Our expectations need to readjust. Yesterday, I couldn't play iTunes Radio or iTunes Match because iTunes simply skipped from song to song without playing any of them. It's not that Apple engineers are incompetent – that's far from the case. Rather, it's a two fold problem. First is what I've already mentioned: software is becoming more and more complex. Second is the fact that new engineers come into the workforce that need to understand legacy software and then either build upon it or reengineer it. Either way, it requires a lot of time and effort. And, unless there's a simplification breakthrough, it's going to result in more complexity for the software engineer.

When pondering this issue, holistically, I look for other examples where I've seen similar problems. Instead of looking at it as a software engineering issue, I look at it as a systems engineering issue. This analogy works well when breaking down problems. For example, we can think of data packets transversing the Internet as cars (packets) carrying payloads of people (data). In this example, we see the redundancy of our roads. Destroying a bridge in Syria has no effect on the roads in the U.S. Or, destroying the Internet's "single point of failure," i.e. DNS, would be the dire equivalent of removing every road sign in the world. As systems fail in ways we didn't imagine, other pathways must handle the load resulting in cyber traffic congestion or even failure to access a network node endpoint.

Gentrification of Software

Software engineering has many similarities to constructing homes and buildings. We even use the same word, architect, in both disciplines. But, in the world of software, we are no longer simply creating buildings. In other words, we are no longer simply making standalone software applications. Instead, we are building entire cities, which, like computers, are networked together. And, like a city, every road can't be open all the time – there's constant construction preventing access. Most of the time, we can plan ahead. But, similar to real world infrastructure failures, like a water main break, we have problems, usually in the form of bugs or hardware failures, in the online world. 

All software needs to be checked for bugs, either by a compiler, coder, tester, or customer. Every new line of code increases complexity, but this is an oversimplification since we usually don't want to compress four lines of code into one. Code written must be debuggable and there's a balance between engineering, over-engineering, and making code intuitive for people to read. One never wants to be too clever when writing code. Too-clever code can end up fooling everyone like debugging a multithreaded race condition. I'm not aware of a formula to compute how dense code is, but an experienced software engineer will get an intuitive feel for it with years of experience. 

As towns and cities require building codes and permits, we may see the same thing in high-tech. Obviously, a bridge failing is catastrophic while Amazon going down is comparatively minor, no one is physically hurt in the latter. Lost revenue is vastly different than lost lives, but, that will change. What if an airplane auto-pilot breaks in-flight? Or, worse, what if it begins misreporting or misinterpreting flight data? In the physical world, our building codes are about safety. Online, our issues are about security – and the two are related. Our online world focus is on attacks rather than infrastructure failings.

While I don't see a need for software performance inspections by third parties, I do see a day when software will be inspected by independent agencies for security. 

Thoughts on Apple Watch

I'm somewhat excited to try out the Apple Watch. This is a different product for Apple since it's a fashion play. And, to make it fashionable, it had to fit into a form factor that's existed for a long time.

Making technology fashionable takes decades. A perfect example is the automobile which is probably one of the most impactful inventions of the 20th Century – after all, entire cities are built around it. What you drive, car and color, says a little bit about you. Fashion is the key reason Google Glass is no more, while the Pebble Watch is king of wearable high tech.

The downside of the Apple Watch is that it doesn't replace anything.

The iPod, which I didn't "get" at first, seemed pricy at $399. My primary reason for buying it was that it was half-price for Apple employees. Then, once I loaded it up, I totally "got it." With 1,000 songs in my pocket I realized that I had every piece of music I owned, at my fingertips. No more opening jewel cases to find it had the wrong CD in it. Or, even worse, no more empty cases because I had lent them out months before and forgotten about them. At the time, the iPod was a big deal for Apple, but it wasn't important for consumers because you could own one and not use it for weeks.

The iPhone was revolutionary because it replaced three things: your cell phone, iPod, and, to a useful degree, it replaced e-mail and a web browser.  Obviously, technology that enables and improves communications will always be important.

The iPad turned out to be more than just a large iPhone, but it only replaced your main computer to a limited degree. It's great for backward leaning content consumption, but it lacks the forward leaning knowledge work and creation benefits we get from a computer.

So, the Apple Watch adds to my digital luggage. Fifteen years ago, when I traveled, I only took my laptop. Now, I'm going to feel the need to bring along my iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad, and Apple Watch. But, that's not a big deal for me since I already wear a watch, so it might as well tie-in with my iPhone; and it helps that I'm a bit of a fashion snob since I mostly wear Brooks Brothers. :^D

Principles of Apple

This is one of the best Tim Cook interviews about Apple explaining the differences between Apple and other tech companies. In a nutshell, it's about Apple's culture, philosophy, and principles, not stock price, market share, or profitability.

What was Steve Jobs's greatest invention? Was it the Apple 2, the Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc? Nope, Steve Jobs's greatest invention was Apple, the company, or more precisely the culture he created within the company.

Apple focuses on principles. Principles are fundamental ideas that don't change. This is why they do what they do. We (people and companies) implement principles in the form of values. Our values can change depending on the situation, but the underlying principles never change. A good example of the difference between values and principles is the difference between a map and the lay of the land. A consumer, surveyor, and pilot may all use maps, but each requires a different type of map such as Google Maps for roads, surveyor maps for contour lines, or an aeronautical chart for mountains, towers and airports. As long as your values represent the underlying principles, then you have harmony; wrong map for the wrong land and you've got a problem.

Companies focus on metrics to attain goals. (It's important to note that Apple, like many other companies, has no mission statement.) The key metric for success is profitability. Obviously, Apple has that one nailed. However it's not their ultimate goal. But, Microsoft is profitable too. The key difference is in how a company attains their goals. There are different ways to do that. Microsoft does it by going after market share. In order to maintain market share Microsoft is reluctant to walk away from legacy products. Other companies may sacrifice future earnings for a good showing in the latest quarter. Apple chooses to focus on making the best products and that's measured, holistically, by customer experience, from when you walk into an Apple retail store, to buying, unboxing, using and calling for support. Steve's focus was not on quarter to quarter profits or Apple's stock price. Instead, his priority was maintaining a responsibility to the long-term. Sure, it's important for the price of Apple's stock to go up otherwise the executives lose their jobs, but that's a pleasant byproduct of making the best products in the world.

And, keep in mind, that not every one of Apple's products is a home run. Don't forget about the Apple G3 Cube (sexy, but too expensive), iPod Socks (too generic), iPod Hi-Fi (expensive and poorly designed). Make the best possible products that are simple to use and recognize the bad ones as soon as possible. In other words, do not reinforce failure; do not throw good money after bad.

Uploading iOS Voice Memos into iTunes Match

Last night, I listened to friends perform at a jazz jam. Their music was phenomenal. I enjoyed it so much that I recorded most of the jam session. When I got home, I discovered that moving a voice memo into iTunes Match (iCloud) was a small challenge requiring a little trial an error.

The problem with moving an iOS voice memo into iTunes Match is iTunes considers voice memos "ineligible" for the iTunes Match service. That means there wasn't a simple way for me to get my jazz recording into a playlist that could be shared across my computers and iOS devices.

I reread my 2007 blog post about legally converting iTunes Store purchases into MP3s and that gave me an idea. Since iTunes won't sync voice memos across devices, I converted it to an AAC format which solved my problem. I'm not sure exactly what happens during the conversion process, since the pre and post converted files are both AAC, but twice the size. Perhaps it simply took the mono recording and doubled it into a stereo file. Regardless, it worked and the newly converted file successfully uploaded into iTunes Match.

The conversion process is easy. In iTunes, simply right-click (control-click) on the voice memo and select "Create AAC Version." Once you've converted the voice memo, you can choose "Update iTunes Match" from the Store pull-down menu to put it into the cloud. That's it.

Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation, Part II

How do you innovate on a book? Sure, you can update the content, but it's still a book. You could always make a coffee table book about coffee tables that turns into a coffee table, but that's fiction, not fact.

About a year and a half ago I reviewed a beautiful book, ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation. The author, Jonathan Zufi, who is also the creator of The Shrine of Apple has published a collection of over 650 unique Apple photos. His book included not only virtually every Apple product, but prototypes and packaging too. Zufi recently republished an updated book with more than a dozen new pages and photos. But that, alone, wouldn't be enough to make it innovative. His latest edition is ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition. This magnum opus is delivered in a clamshell case with a custom printed circuit board (PCB) designed to pulse an LED embedded inside the case. The result is that the LED in the case cover respirates like a sleeping Apple computer when the book case is picked up.

What makes life interesting is the story behind the story. In the case of The Ultimate Edition, it's the elegantly designed and incorporated PCB that makes it uniquely interesting. Unique in the truest sense of the word.

The circuit is powered by the high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller which combines 1KB in-system programming flash memory, 32B SRAM, 4 general purpose I/O lines, 16 general purpose working registers, a 16-bit timer/counter with two pulse-width modulation channels, internal and external interrupts, programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator, an internal calibrated oscillator, and 4 software selectable power saving modes.

In true fashion, ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition is designed with the tender loving care and attention to detail only seen in Apple products.

Questioning Steve Jobs

At Apple, the engineers are the talent. They're the ones who innovate. And, thanks to great designers, technology is turned from engineer-ugly into intuitive elegance. All the consumer facing products used to go through Steve. If you ate lunch, every day, at Caffè Macs you'd probably see Steve eat there once or twice a week.

Steve once sat one or two tables away from me with a developer. It surprised me how quiet Steve was. He simply asked the engineer questions and then listened, very closely. It was a one-on-one brain storming session about integrating services across different products. Steve would ask, "What if we did this?" or, "How would that look?" Steve focused on his conversation and was immune to the casually intense glances from passerbyers.

I worked as a software engineer at the Apple Online Store. We'd have an annual online store summit that lasted a couple days, usually in Apple's Town Hall auditorium. The high point was if and when Steve would speak to us and take our questions. Just before lunch, the last year I worked at Apple, we were told that Steve would be holding a Q&A session.

Excellent! This was spring of 2007 and the iPhone had just been announced but it wasn't yet shipping. The iPhone was on everyone's mind. When Tim Cook spoke to us at our summit he whipped out his iPhone, for a moment, and said, "This is so cool!" Our mouths watered.

Since Steve would be meeting with us, this was a perfect time for me to ask him about iPhone marketshare. He had forecast, during the Macworld Keynote, a few months earlier, that iPhone would sell 10 million units the first year. This seemed a bit high, to me, since it would only be available in the U.S. in 2007; and only on Cingular which had 58 million subscribers. To my ear, it sounded like Steve was expecting one out of six Cingular subscribers to shell out $499 or $599 for an iPhone.

One secret to corporate success is to never embarrass your boss. So, during lunch, I gave a heads up to my boss and the director of the Apple Online Store that I'd be asking Steve a question. We chatted about it, briefly, and it was a perfectly sensible question. So, I was cleared to ask away.

Just before Steve entered Town Hall we were told not to ask any questions about future products. We were also told that we'd have to give him a standing O when he was done with the Q&A. No problem. Steve walked in to the Town Hall. This was a rare time that I've seen Steve take the stage from the back of the room, rather than from backstage. He spoke for a little while and then it came time for questions.

One of my coworker engineers asked Steve a question that stumped him. Or, perhaps, he didn't want to answer it candidly. "Steve, what companies do you admire most?" Steve thought about it for a long, silent, half a minute.

"I don't know. I'd have to think about it," Steve answered.

I'd really like to know what he was thinking. Was it simply that he couldn't think of any companies he admired or was he worried that his answer would be made public?

Then it was my turn to ask Steve a question.

"Steve, you mentioned during your iPhone Keynote that Apple would sell 10 million iPhones the first year. That would mean one in six Cingular customers would be using an iPhone. That seems like a lot of marketshare for the first year," I said.

Steve simply clarified what he said during the Keynote. The 10 million unit statistic was at the end of the first full year of sales – in other words, at the end of 2008, not 2007 – and, by that time, Apple would be selling the iPhone in Asia, with other wireless carriers.

I doubt that his answer could have been any less climactic for me. Questioning Steve is easy when he's right.

Of course, Steve's 10 million iPhone estimate was a bit low. Better to under-promise and over-deliver. By the end of 2008, Apple sold more than 17 million iPhones – 70% more than his initial estimate.

iOS Spotlight Bug

Without noticing it, I've installed well over 100 apps on my iPhone. Obviously, the ones I use most frequently are on my first home screen with a couple stragglers on the second screen. Occasionally, I need an app that's buried somewhere on the other 15 screens. To find those apps, I, like most everyone, pull down on the home screen to reveal the Spotlight search text field.

Unfortunately, after most iOS updates or after restoring a phone from a backup, Spotlight seems to stop finding apps until I open the app I'm looking for, for the first time.

This is a reproducible problem that I've noticed for at least a year. Here's what it looks like along with my workaround.

1. Confirm that the Applications option is checked and it's at the top of your Spotlight search setting.

2. Search for the app that Spotlight can't find. In my case, I was looking for my little-used eBay app. Sure enough, it didn't show up in Spotlight.

3. Search for the app in the Apple App Store. The App Store knows if you've already installed an app so that you don't need to redownload it. If an app is already installed on your iPhone, the GET or $x.xx button will say OPEN. Tap the OPEN button and the App Store, which is hundreds or thousands of miles away, will find and open the app that Spotlight, running on your own phone, couldn't find.

4. Once I've opened the app and then closed it, it magically appears in future searches. As a matter of fact, once I've gone through this exercise it seems that Spotlight is now primed to find other apps too.

Postscript: I've also seen a similar issue when searching for people or text in the iPhone's Messages app, but I haven't found a work around for that, yet.

Super Stellar Service

As a consumer, nothing makes me happier than superior customer service.

Yesterday, I effortlessly exchanged an iPhone case at my local Apple Store. When I was done with the exchange, the Apple employee took me through the iPhone Apple Store app. This app allows customers to self-checkout items rather than hailing an Apple employee to process the transaction. This works for all their products except for the two serialized items they sell on the floor: Apple TV and the wireless basestations. That's amazing. As far as I know, it's the only place where customers can self-checkout without supervision. Obviously, that makes pilferage easy, but Apple doesn't seem too worried about that.

This afternoon, I caught a lift with a Uber driver from Ethiopia. Like most San Diego Uber drivers from East Africa, my driver was a former taxi driver. Since I used to live in East Africa, we had a great rapport. I couldn't help commenting how nicely his iPhone 6 was connected to his car vent. He popped it off and gave it to me so I could have a closer look. It was a Kenu car vent mount that snuggly held an iPhone without having to remove the case.

This evening, I took a trip back to the Apple store and bought a Kenu case. Of course I checked myself out. It was my first experience with Apple Pay and I was hooked. On the way through Bloomingdales I bought a Brooklyn t-shirt, that caught my eye, using Apple Pay and that was dangerously easy for this impulse purchase. Before leaving the mall I used Apple Pay, for the third time in an hour, at The Container Store. That, too, was a breeze.

The Apple Pay transactions happen so fast that I almost missed them except for the part where I had to sign; after all, it's still a credit card transaction. The cashier at The Container Store told me a previous customer said that the store receipt had the wrong last-four credit card digits. I took a look at my paper receipt and, sure enough, the last four digits didn't match my credit card. But, then it hit me that Apple Pay generates a unique, one-time, credit card number for each transaction.

Service with a smile in the blink of an eye. What more could I ask for?

The Disruptive Apple

This infographic captures how much Apple has grown. Like Apple, this image is big, so you'll have to click on it to see the details.

Apple Continuity and Handoff

Summary:
1. Make sure your devices are compatible.
2. Turn Bluetooth on, on all your devices.

Apple released Yosemite (OS X 10.10), last week, and iOS 8.1 today. Together, with supported hardware, these two OSes enable the Continuity feature-set; one specific feature is Handoff. In a nutshell, these features let you start a task on one device, such as writing an e-mail or document, and pickup where you left off on another. They also allow your phone to handoff phone calls and SMS text messages to your Mac.

It took a little digging to figure out how to coordinate this. Here are the detailed details [sic]:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6337

In a nutshell, your devices need to be on the same WiFi network and Bluetooth needs to be turned on for the them to see each other. FaceTime needs to be turned on and logged into the same iCloud account. It seemed that FaceTime didn't realize that example@mac.com, example@me.com, and example@icloud.com were the same account. I had to uncheck the latter two before I could check the "iPhone Cellular Calls" preference in FaceTime on my Mac.

When my first non-iPhone SMS came through, I had to enter a PIN on my Mac that appeared on my iPhone to confirm I had physical access to both devices.

So far, Continuity seems to be working fairly well.

Replacing the Legend at Apple

Apple HQ: 1 Infinite Loop

My uncle's worked on Wall Street for half a century. There are two pieces of advice he's repeatedly told me. "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered," and "You can't replace the legend."

It's the advice about replacing the legend that's interesting. When the legend leaves a great company, things change, almost always for the worse since the legend can't be replaced. Ford at Ford, Dell at Dell, Gates at Microsoft, Perot at EDS, Hewlett and Packard at HP. There's no shortage of great 20th Century companies whose best days are behind them. Companies tend to decline when the founders relinquish control.

This begs the question I've been repeatedly asked over the last three years, "How will Apple do without Steve Jobs?" Is Apple so different that they can transcend this pattern? After all, it's crystal clear that Steve Jobs was the leader who made Apple great. He founded the company and created the personal computer era for the first decade. Then the Apple board of directors pushed Steve out under direction from then CEO, John Sculley. During the decade that Steve was gone, the company came within 90 days of bankruptcy. Steve returned. Apple fans call it the Second Coming. It's crystal clear that Steve made all the difference. Not by going after marketshare. Rather, by creating great products and answering the fundamental question, "Why?" as in, "Why are we doing this?"

Steve's Greatest Invention

What was Steve's greatest invention? It wasn't the Mac, iPod, or iPhone. Steve always believed his greatest invention was Apple, the company. Steve's focus was simply on creating the best possible customer experience, from womb to tomb. Initially, Apple employees learned this by osmosis. When Steve returned to Apple, he made sure this cultural thinking was instilled into the DNA of Apple.

Steve focused on nearly every aspect of Apple. This worked well before the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Since then, Apple's operations have become almost overwhelmingly complex.

The logistical coordination for Apple to ship their products requires a herculean effort. Tim Cook is certainly the person to manage this. He did an outstanding job as COO. Now, as CEO, he's changed some of Apple's processes to fit his style. Steve relied on small teams. Tim, on the other hand, now cross-coordinates large teams when designing and building new products. These teams have a long term focus on financial discipline.

Steve had the vision. Tim made it happen. I think Tim had the insight of seeing the operational mistakes Steve made. This weekend showed that Apple is still plagued by the same high-quality problem. They simply can't make enough of their products. But, only time will tell if Tim can succeed Steve. The success of the  Watch will be a crucial indicator.

Innovation Chasm

Hard copy print out of the Internet with yesterday's news.

As companies grow, seemingly small changes become difficult. Change is even more difficult when companies have been around for a long time. Most companies think in terms of what they do rather than focusing on the benefits they provide. It's hard for many companies to recognize they could be left behind when technology changes. The classic example is the ice trade of the 1800s. More recently, we saw it in the newspaper industry over the past decade.

One clear example of this is SMS. It is a shrinking technology. Since 2005, the cost of sending a single text message rose steadily from 5¢ to 25¢ over the next few years. This falls under category #3 of the The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models.

Rarely do people send SMS text messages through their computer. It would be a simple feature, but the carriers didn't implement it. Other companies have stepped in because the wireless carries didn't innovate SMS. It was Grand Central that brought texting via computer to the masses. Apple has taken this one step further with Messages. Messages strongly encrypts the content and deliveries it to multiple devices at the same time at no cost.

The markets are bigger than any one person or company. A company can fight change by controlling or cornering the market, but that won't last forever in high tech. The companies that tend to fight it and succeed for long stretches of time tend to be oligopolies (Think: Big, as in Big Media, etc). It lasts for a while, but what companies truly last for centuries?

Apple Rant™ – The Failure of Technology

Technology has come to life. It has come to life in such a way that it's failing us due to its complexity. Technology should be the lubricant of life, not the friction and now everything is broken.

The most anticipated Apple keynote since the iPhone, announcing the Apple Watch, was an abortion. From an inaccessible live feed to 45 minutes of listening to an Asian translator is not the best possible customer experience.

Apple Watch

"Soup Nazi:" No Keynote for you: two hours.

Here's a key problem with the Apple Watch: it doesn't replace anything – rather, it adds. It adds another device to manage thereby adding complexity to my life. The iPhone replaced my cell phone, iPod, and, to a certain degree, my computer when it came to e-mail and surfing the web. Nowadays, when I travel on business, I feel it necessary to bring my iPhone, MacBook Air, and iPad. Six months from now, will I need to bring a fourth item, too? Sure, this is great for the Apple investor; but I want to simplify my life. We all do.

Apple Epidemic

On top of this, I'm a bit frustrated after spending half an hour failing to download the new U2 album. Then I spent ten minutes figuring out how to submit a support request about the U2 album because the web form had a bug.

Forty years ago, when we changed the channel on our TV, the new station tuned in instantly. I'm at a loss, when explaining to my mother, why using an app has a lag, especially when network connectivity isn't a factor. What good are billions of cycles of CPU power that make me wait. I shouldn't have to wait longer and longer due to launching, buffering, syncing, I/O and latency.

My 500 GB MacBook Air hard drive is full. Each time it drops below 10 GB I have to find something else to delete. You'd think 7 GB sounds like a lot of space. But, after a day or so it dwindles down to a few hundred megabytes and OS X becomes unusable until I reboot. Am I really expected to delete my personal photos?

Duplicated iOS Note of this blog post draft.

Why is Siri worse today than in 2011? Or perhaps it is the same, but the novelty has worn off? Why did my Time Capsule wireless base station freeze, requiring a restart, resulting in this iOS Note being duplicated multiple times?

Here's the kicker, Apple solves these First World grievances of mine better than any other company. Yet I am more and more frustrated. Technology must move out of the way to enhance our lives, not complicate it.

Technology is alive and it's not just getting a cold, it's getting cancer. As a consumer, I want to live my life and focus on my passions, not my technology. As a software engineer, I'll deal with all the technical headaches, but I won't tolerate it as a consumer. Technology seems to be failing us faster than it's helping us.

Apple Epilogue

Obviously, I've reconsidered some things I've said in the previous 24 hours. Dave's right, Apple Pay is the big deal. Or, technology that's embedded in my body, as he suggested, would be very interesting.

Tomorrow's Apple Keynote: What to Expect

Tomorrow is Apple's Keynote. New iPhones are a given. They'll probably introduce mobile payments too. Then there's the talk of an iWatch. Most people don't wear watches, so could it really be a big deal? My thinking is, "Yes."

Entertainment

The iPod was a pivotal change for Apple. Steve decided to build a product for the right reasons: to make something he loved that would be better designed and integrated than any before it. Obviously it was a success. Then, in typical Apple fashion, after starting with well over 90% market share, they let it erode since they moved on to the next thing. Here are two key points. Apple doesn't go after market share for market share sake. Also, the iPod was about listening to music and, at the end of the day, it was only an entertainment product.

Communications

Next came the iPhone. Before the iPhone, getting apps, ring tones, wallpaper, etc., on to your mobile phone was a lousy experience. Plus, the wireless carriers dictated what could go on a phone and how it could be used. Remember the Rokr E1? Apple partnered with Motorola to put iTunes into a phone. But it wasn't an Apple product. One key limitation was that its firmware restricted it to only holding 100 songs. Other carriers placed similar restrictions on their phones such as not allowing tethered syncing. Rather, they wanted their users to transfer files and photos over-the-air so they could charge them for data usage.

An iPod owner could go days, weeks, or months without using their iPod, but iPhone owners use their phone every single day. For many of us, it's the last piece of technology we touch when going to sleep and the first thing we touch before getting out of bed.

Health

While we may need to communicate every day, we need to live every second. What if the iWatch has the ability to monitor our health in a nonintrusive way? So much can be told just from our basic vitals like our heart rate, temperature, respiration, and sleep cycles. As a runner, I've worn a heart rate monitor for nearly every one of my runs over the past 20 years. It gives me an absolute indication of my effort level based on my health. If I'm coming down with something or it's a hot day, or I'm dehydrated then my heart rate monitor indicates that. But, I only wear it when I'm running. What's going on with my body the rest of the day?

Twenty years ago, I didn't carry a mobile phone. This afternoon, I ventured a block away without my iPhone. I knew I'd be gone for only a few minutes. Yet, as I crossed the street, I seriously considered going back to get it – not that I was expecting any calls, e-mails, or texts. I simply felt unconnected. Could an iWatch become so ingrained into our health that we'd feel exposed without it?