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iPod Engineer Tony Fadell On the Unique Nature of Apple's Design Process
An anonymous reader writes "Often referred to as the godfather of the iPod, former Apple executive and current Nest CEO Tony Fadell played an instrumental part in Apple's resurgence. Recently, Fadell opined on what makes Apple's design process different from the rest of the pack. Fadell explained that a key and yet often overlooked, difference between Apple and other tech companies is that Apple ships 99% of the products that pass certain internal milestones. By way of contrast, during Fadell's tenure at Philips — where he was charged with overseeing the company's audio strategy — the iPod guru noted that Philips would axe 9 projects out of 10, even if a particular product was about to ship."
Sounds like that internal milestone is a special bar. How many projects reach that milestone? Is it more than 1 out of 10?
Or even how long does it take for projects to reach that milestone, they might just keep reworking them.
Excuse me for asking, but... How is "products that pass certain internal milestones" (aka Steve Job's early scrutiny) in any way related or comparable to "9 products out of 10, even if a product was about to ship"?
It would be interesting to know exactly what that internal milestone is. Obviously, the ability to axe projects is core to Apple's business, as evidenced by the tiny number of SKUs they offer at any point in time compared to most electronics companies. And there have been rumors that Jobs could be particularly brutal when it came to shutting down projects that he didn't think were worthy.
The difference must be that while all companies axe projects, Apple makes cuts earlier than other companies and only lets the few chosen projects make any progress in the lifecycle. Whereas other companies take a 'throw everything at the wall and see what sticks' mentality, and only cut projects later when they aren't good enough. Sometimes they cut too late (e.g. MS Kin).
Modern business have degenerated from organizations to make and sell products/services to support systems for management employees, CEOs, and the financial/banking sector to whom they all report to. They are in the business of business for the sake of business. Modern companies honestly see making and selling products as a nuisance that gets in the way of their real goal, which is making sure management gets paid and the stock price stays inflated.
OP's remark about 9/10 products being axed on a whim smells of the terrifying bureaucracy and labyrinthine organization that company must be. Microsoft has been rumored to be organized like a medieval kingdom with lords defending their territory with force, politics, and guile.
Personally, I expect to see an enron-like collapse of any number of large companies in the near future. The cause? Routing loops. Eventually every last function and service will be subcontracted and outsourced. Nobody will be able to tell who makes what, and where anything comes from. Eventually someone will realize that they've attempted to subcontract a product to themselves.. Many times over, the trail going dead after too many iterative loops.
The Odyssey Command Center (Odyssey 3) video game console was axed by Philips just as it was about to ship. It wasn't the strongest offering at the time but it offered backwards compatibility with Odyssey 2 games and was to be expandable with a modem and BASIC.
I was saving my dollars and ready to buy but it was axed shortly after they promoted the hell out of it at the CES and Knoxville World's Fair. Jerks.
Regards, Lex
What he's saying is that Apple has an actual functional interal milestone systems.
Other companies say they have a milestone system, but it's really bullshit lip service. What ships is up to the whim of whoever in charge, and failures are scraped under the rug because whoever in charge met the "milestone" and thus gets his bonus.
Judging how a company performs by how few projects it axes is laughable. Every company when growing heavily invests internally in everything. Every company when not growing heavily does not, and axes a lot of stuff.
This is simple stuff.
Really? what was the form factor precedent for an original Mac? Or a 1st gen iMac? Or a modern iMac? Or an original iPod?
Number of products that Philips actually produces and ships: ~20,000+
Number of products that Apple actually produces and ships: ~50
...Apple ships 99% of the products that pass certain internal milestones. By way of contrast ... Philips would axe 9 projects out of 10, even if a particular product was about to ship. ... "Nine times out of ten, or 99 times out of 100, they would kill the project, either at the beginning, the middle or right before the product was supposed to be shipped."
OK, I ready I read TFA - is this incomprehensible? Does it mean anything? Is there any useful data anywhere in this?
Three Squirrels
I see more to this "milestone" thing than a single hurdle. It's probably better to look at it as a "product development cycle" where there are several tiers a product has to pass through, with similar but higher requirements at each step.
1. throw some money at it
2. add featuers
3. remove / combine features / refine
4. in-house and user testing
5. decide if it's worth continuing
and then it repeats, with more money, fewer new features, more careful and thorough refining, and more thorough testing at each next stage. Go through that three or more times and you will probably have a few winners out of the hundreds you went in with at the start.
You could call passing each iteration's part 5 a "milestone" I suppose. But most of the discussion above acts like it only hits this point once during development. And I suppose for some, that's true. But that's a bad way to do it. You can't consistently produce a lot of winners and very few bombs if your development tree has no depth to it.
I like how a previous comment discussed Phillips and their "throw a bunch of crap at the wall and see what sticks." That really suggests a 1 or 2 iteration development cycle, and it's going to perform poorly over the long run.
I don't see any idealogical difference between each of these "milestones". Either it's worth continuing on, or it's not. If your development wing is only supposed to bring one product to market, then it's a simple game of "survival". If you start with 250 ideas you can just say you're going to go to the next stage after removing 75% of the ideas, then it's just a simple comparison, and you still have enough "keepers" to carry forward that things that are still "a little iffy" can make the cut, at least once. Do that four times and you are down to ONE idea. No need to change milestone strategies at each stage.
If you've got low depth, say 2 levels, think of how you'd have to do it. Split it evenly, and you have to drop over 90% of your ideas both times. The first cut probably won't be hard, but then having to compare 16 items to come up with the one best, you could easily kill what would have been the best idea. Do a hard cut on the first round and you are down to having to pick so few to keep from amongst so many you may as well pick them by lotto. A deep cut on round 2 I hope everyone sees would be suicidal. Milestone depth is the only solution to this problem.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...yep... or the original iPhone or iPad as full screen multitouch devices, a SUCCESSFUL ultralight notebood w/ SSD...
And no, we don't need example of past failed devices that implemented some of those features. The key word is ESTABLISHED, and in most of the past decade Apple has been the establisher and others the jumpers.
And seriously AC - Philips and Sony haven't done anything new in consumer electronics in years. In fact Philips doesn't even make TVs any more, they just license their name to Funai. And Sony hasn't made most of the parts in their TVs for years, they just buy panels from Samsung and Sharp.
Sounds like that internal milestone is a special bar. How many projects reach that milestone? Is it more than 1 out of 10?
At Apple, the milestone was "Steve approved it." Everywhere else, it's decided by committee. That's why 9 out of 10 are yanked... just like anything else decided by committee.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you think about it, in order to reach 99%, he must have (at minimum) seen 99 projects with only 1 rejected.
It's the lowest number to get 99% (99/100).
I suppose each configuration counts, so 7 colors * 2 to 3 sizes * 5 products (phone, MP3 player small screen, MP3 big screen, MP no screen, tablet) is about 105.
That said, it's pretty sad that he counts "red" as a project. LOL
iControl
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
Apple ships 99% of its products because it makes so few... Phillips axes 9 in 10 because its trying to hit every thing and produces so much, even after axeing 9 in 10, it still would put out magnitudes more products than apple.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
The MS Kin was a special case.
It wasn't so much that it was a loser that should have been culled; rather, it was destroyed by poor decisions from Microsoft middle-management.
Basically, MS bought a successful company, Danger. Danger's "Sidekick" was a feature-phone with a well-chosen feature mix. Kin was to be the next Sidekick, and it should have been the same success the Sidekick was. The most interesting feature: it was supposed to have a special low-cost data plan. Instead of being a full smartphone, it was going to be a "social media" phone; SMS, Twitter, and Facebook wouldn't put too much load on the data network, so Verizon agreed to offer a special low-cost data plan.
Well, a Microsoft middle manager forced the guys working on the Kin to scrap the old Danger code base, and rewrite everything to Windows CE. After all, Microsoft didn't want to have to support two code bases, right?
But the delay caused by the rewrite was fatal. The special low-cost data plan evaporated (Verizon was pissed at the delays), and instead of being a low-cost phone with a low-cost data plan, it became a phone that cost about the same as other phones, and had a data plan exactly as expensive as other phones, but wasn't a smartphone so the built-in apps couldn't be added to. That last was really stupid: since the Kin guys were forced to rewrite to Windows CE, it should have been possible to put a Windows Phone app store on the device, and the Kin team wanted to do it. They were denied, again a stupid decision by MS management (and I guess internal MS politics).
Had the Kin shipped 18 months earlier, even 12 months earlier, with the less-expensive data plan? It should have been a big hit like the Sidekick. Had it shipped as a smartphone with an app store, it might have had some sort of a chance. But as a featurephone that cost like a smartphone, it was instantly doomed.
So yeah I guess MS should have culled it rather than endured the embarrassment around the Kin disaster. But better still they should have had less broken decision-making by their own middle management.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post-mortem-of-kins-tragic-demise/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/life-and-death-of-microsoft-kin-the-inside-story/
maybe not reworking but waiting for tech to catch up with the idea.... don't forget the iphone was born of the ipad.
i guess at the time, given current technology, Apple could't reach that milestone in a 10" formfactor, but they could in 4"
"I thought, 'My God we can build a phone out of this,"' Jobs said at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference in Rancho Palos Verdes.
Apple must have had the ipad idea as early as ~2000.. (phone launched in 2007, assuming 5 years in the oven... the idea came to him in 2002.. so the ipad must have been researched/prototyped at least a year ot two before that before they decided 2002/3/4 technology wasn't going to work for an ipad)... 8-10 years or so before the ipad actually made it to shelves.
Dunno if Sony still does this, but at one time it was not uncommon for them to have multiple teams working on the same concept without any knowledge of each other. Best one wins.
I worked on an outsourced project (insourced? From Japan to U.S.) that was similar to WebTV, though it was meant for the Japanese market. (Dig that - product for the Japanese market designed - or at least implemented - in the U.S.) This was more than 10 years ago.
Turns out there was a second team doing the same thing.
Then they licensed WebTV and canned both of the other projects.
Great fun watching Beavis and Butthead videos (Cornholio) at 2AM (on a Death March) with the "Sony spy", a junior engineer obstensively sent because he wrote the software for the front-panel processor.
Well, while you're thinking of the numbers, let's look at the product lineups. Philips has bajillions of products from light bulbs to shavers to stereos to all kinds of miscellany whatnot. So how many products were killed in development if this anecdote is anywhere near correct? Apple has the iPx mobile things, a handful of laptops and desktops, a server or two, and accessories for all the aforementioned. Do they have even 1,000 current products?
Whatever the exact number, the real point is that It sounds like everything at Apple is really tightly driven with a focus on only even bothering to start products that have a place in the lineup whereas Philips has a shotgun approach.
Apple's superpower = Making the most money. Isn't that why companies are in business?
CEOs should care about details
CEOs should care about details that are important to customers and the company's long-term success. There are lots and lots of details a CEO should NOT care about.
For example, I have worked at smaller companies where the CEO wanted to review each travel request to see if they could find a lower airfare - and the usual result was that by the time they checked it, the airfare cost had gone up. So if your CEO asks you "what is the customer experience for this product, end to end, and are we delivering on everything we are promising?" then you have a good detail-oriented CEO. If your CEO wants to reorganize your company's office parking spaces with the highest titles closest to the front door, you have a bad detail-oriented CEO.
From what I understand, Steve Jobs was both - but he was lauded because his accomplishments as the former outweighed his annoying tendencies as the latter.
"95% of all Slashdot
The big difference between Philips and Apple isn't whether projects are killed earlier or later.
The difference is how the projects come to be and reach these milestones.
Philips uses a "technology platform" system, or at least did during the time Tony was there. I don't know what they use now. That means someone in a technology division at the company develops a technology. Then they develop some platforms that use the technology. They then produce reference platforms or designs that use the technology. Then they take those reference designs around the company and try to find a product group in the company that wishes to ship a product like that.
The problem with this is that it is pushing a rope. You frequently will make up products that show off a technology but that few people would want to use let alone buy. This system was commonplace with companies at the time. You can still see this system if you look at something like dealextreme or meritline. You will see many companies (barely more than entrepreneurs in these cases) who make products simply because the technology lends itself to them, regardless of whether anyone would want to use it.
The big difference in how Apple did it, and still does it, is that Apple identifies a product people would want to use and doesn't currently exist or at least doesn't broadly exist in an easily usable form. Then Apple goes out and buys, develops or partners with a company to develop technologies that make that product work or work better. The company then evaluates the product before shipping it, deciding if the product is really something people would use. Rarely does the company have a change of heart about the basic product, but sometimes products get killed because the result doesn't really work in a way the customer would like it. For example, if a product doesn't work smoothly, it may be delayed until faster processors come along. The G5 MacBook Pro was fully developed and then killed because (among some other issues) the battery life was so short no one would find it useful.
And that's why Apple products usually ship, because they were designed to ship from day 0. Philips products started out being made simply because they could be, and so many of them died on the vine when it was realized no one wanted them or even if they just can't convince any product division they would like to ship that product.
Sources: I know people who worked at Philips. I have worked at Apple. And I've talked to these Philips people and Tony Fadell specifically about these particular differences between Philips and Apple.
Sounds like that internal milestone is a special bar. How many projects reach that milestone? Is it more than 1 out of 10?
Apple decides to not even start on projects, or cancels them EARLY, if they won't reach that milestone. Compare that with companies that devote time and thought and energy to products that get killed or suck at launch because they're not good enough.
Jobs in 1997:
Well, Dell ships more computers than Apple, as well. Samsung ships tons more phones, yes, but not many of them are their flagship ones. Every Samsung smartphone is called a Galaxy something, and they range from the completely free crap phones with crappy screens, to the S-III. Heck, Samsung just introduced their S-II something with a huge screen but... 800x480 screen.
So yes, Samsung better ship more phones, because they have probably over 50 smartphones in their entire product line, including ones that run Windows Phone, amongst others. Apple only had 3 models, 2 of which are laughable just to have a price point. Of course, Dell has a similar situation - they probably have hundreds of PCs, while Apple has what, 7 different ones?
These days, Apple's not about marketshare. Just the part of the market they want to make money on. (It helps that that part of the market is willing to spend money as well, because it's why iOS App Store is #2 in developer money (#1 is Blackberry, believe it or not), followed by Amazon App Store at #3 (about 50% of the Apple App Store). Distant last is Google Play - under 50% of what the Amazon app store brings.)
1960's Braun products by Dieter Rams:
http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What Jobs brought to the table was unquestionable authority, which is what Bill Gates had during MS's heyday. He gave the marching orders, and people under him performed.
Tim Cook is doing quite a good job, but he is a CEO. He may have the authority to hire/fire, but he doesn't have the "mandate" that made Apple under Jobs a cohesive entity. There is no RDF anymore.
Ultimately, Apple is going to need to find new markets if they are going to grow, as opposed to just stay still and try go squeeze more out of existing markets. There are still plenty of niches out there that would become rules by iDevices.
One idea would be a home audio "head" that would essentially be an iPod on steroids, designed to offer pro-level/audiophile-level audio. It would not just do what an iPod does, but because of the larger form factor, offer recording, playback, streaming of radio stations, high quality digital audio out (AES/EBU, S/PDIF), equalizing, and more DSP controls that could be packed in an iPod form factor. If Apple promised that it would not change dimensions or docking connectors for 10 or so years, third parties would be falling over themselves to make home audio systems that would accept the Apple "brains". It might even be useful in studios, provided it had a Thunderbolt connector for low-latency tracking/sequencing/recording.
Another would be car audio. Apple makes a 1-2 DIN "head", with some decent security features [1], have it do all the functions of an iPod Touch except with streaming, and Apple would have that market in a heartbeat.
[1]: Apple has always made devices where if they are locked, there is a method of resetting them, although it might cause the contents to be lost. With an audio deck, Apple would have to find a way of being able to have them lock when removed, and do it in such a way that there is no easy way to reset them. Even then, there is always just parting out the unit and selling the components. One ideal might be to have the unit come with not just a passcode that is typed in if the battery power goes out, but perhaps some type of physical key similar to how some Blaupunkt decks used to work.
For Apple to not stagnate, they will have to expand their market, and as a devicemaker with a good amount of cash, this probably can be done fairly easily.
Of course, there is always the enterprise. Apple historically has not been an "enterprise" vendor, but they can easily make inroads in the market given some thought.
The iPhone was released a little bit too early I think, and Apple has been paying for it ever since. For example, due to lack of processing/GPU power and a desire to make apps look slick they decided to go with a fixed resolution and mono-tasking. Now they are stuck with making every new screen a multiple of the original iPhone or iPad resolution, and suffering from black borders when they wanted to go widescreen. They can't easily introduce multitasking either, just a kind of bodge for a few select applications.
In the medium term it has worked for them, but in the longer term they built a platform with many of the limitations that desktop operating systems suffered from in the 80s. Many never overcame those limits, and when they did it was often with a horror show like Windows 95.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This comment is the most interesting/informative thing I've read all week. I'd just add that, as I recall, the marketing campaign that accompanied the Kin was abysmal. Not only was it trying too hard to be 'hip,' but it came across instead as creepy, focusing on a guy stalking his ex-girlfriend or something ridiculous like that. How can an organization stuffed with so many 'professional managers' come up with an advertizing campaign that hits so far off the mark? (yeah, I know, I know).
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Really? what was the form factor precedent for an original Mac?
Vectrex
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
just about every other company takes the monkey approach to design. They throw shit on a wall and see what sticks.
Takes smart TV's how many companies producing smart TV will provide software support for those TV's until the end of life of said TV's?
There are days when i believe most businesses succeed not by being good at what they do but just by not being shitty at it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think this is going to be the undoing of the iPhone as well. Some of the new droid handhelds can do split screen.
I saw a co-worked demo watching a video while texting, and actually though "I kinda want that.."
If you are watching a video on a long bus ride, it sucks to have someone text you the iPhone.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
1. Take existing product that basically sucks
2. Put some real design effort into it
3. Produce first product of the type that actually works well
Consumer GUIs sucked before the Mac, MP3 players sucked before the iPod, smart phones sucked befor the iPhone, tablets sucked before the iPad.
This might have something to do with the industrial designer being one of the senior VPs in the company, answerable only to the CEO, and the hardware engineering VP is right next to him. Look at the Dell or HP executive ranks and you will find no equivalent.
I agree that they launched a little bit too early. But the symptom of that was the unavailability of a native SDK at launch, and the associated nonsense about web apps being the platform. Also the original lack or cut'n'paste.
But not these...
For example, due to lack of processing/GPU power and a desire to make apps look slick they decided to go with a fixed resolution and mono-tasking. Now they are stuck with making every new screen a multiple of the original iPhone or iPad resolution, and suffering from black borders when they wanted to go widescreen. They can't easily introduce multitasking either, just a kind of bodge for a few select applications.
Neither of those are true.
Fixed resolution has nothing to do with limited CPU/GPU power. It's a positive design decision. That on a small screen apps need to be specifically designed for a particular screen, not be resizable.
And of course Apple could quite easily introduce traditional multitasking. It's intrinsic to the unix that underlies the OS. And all the levels above that were already created with multitasking ability, as they were adapted from OSX. And the CPU was certainly enough to support it. The iPhone CPU from the start was far more powerful than the original Mac CPUs that OSX ran on. The very easiest thing to do would be to introduce traditional multitasking.
They didn't for two reasons.
a) Battery life. You see it on Android very often that some crappily written app that's still running in the background takes hours off the battery life. That doesn't happen on iOS.
b) Simplicity of the UI for users. Phones are supposed to be simple devices, with app interactions typically being seconds rather than minutes or hours. Nor do Phones don't have overlapping windows, nor screen real estate for permanent docks/task bars - the indicators of multiple apps running on desktop OSs. So some other form of app switcher/manager is required for multitasking. The original concept was that this was too heavyweight for a phone.
The fixed screen size decision is a good one that has stood the test of time. iPhone apps ARE better for being specifically designed for the size of screen. And doubling is the perfect answer to higher resolution technology being available.
The longer screen size is fine, as in practice, the tricky dimension is the width. Most apps are list based, so having more of a list shown doesn't change the app design. Whereas changing the width would mean different text limits/layout of list items.
The initial design decision of no multitasking didn't last. But it's no bad thing to start with a very simple UI design, then add more complicated features later. And they did keep the battery conservation plan by only allowing system services at actually run in the background.
in the longer term they built a platform with many of the limitations that desktop operating systems suffered from in the 80s. Many never overcame those limits, and when they did it was often with a horror show like Windows 95.
Haven't a clue what you're talking about here. Presumably it's something about the lack of pre-emptive multitasking on early OSs. But the iPhone HAS pre-emptive multitasking. It just doesn't allow multiple apps to run arbitrary code at the same time. That's not the same thing.
For an ecosystem to thrive and survive, it needs marketshare (enough to sustain it), but it also needs money.
If you take the situation like on PCs where Windows became the dominant OS, you see the problems. Remember stuff like shareware which was extremely popular? It pretty much died out because Windows users became cheap and stopped paying for it, leading to demoware/crapware and these days, adware. However, the concept didn't die out - Mac users, all 10 of them practically, still have a flourishing ecosystem because they were more apt to opening their wallets and paying for it.
Of course, the final nail would've been open-source, but I digress.
For mobile, we have healthy competition. We have Android at the top with over 60%, iOS with 35%, and Windows Phone 8, Blackberry, etc. with the leftovers. You would think as a developer that Android would be the best platform to write for, after all it has the most. But most of those users bought cheap smartphones - the $0-for-10 type deals in the end where the carriers are literally throwing phones at people. The end result is that Google Play doesn't really make much money - the only way to make money thorugh Google Play is to put in ads, lots of ads, and submit your contacts and other personal information to be spammed and such. (After all, developer money made through Google Play is basically a joke).
It's why the Amazon App Store, the bane of developers for being too Apple-like in its approvals process, and too bullyish for having the free app a day thing (like Amazon is to distributors) ends up making devs much more money, despite being a much smaller proportion of the market.
iOS makes devs a lot of money - turns out those same people who give Apple the profit tend to have a bit of spending money in their pockets and end up spending a lot more money in the ecosystem.
Blackberry is just an anomaly, but it surpassed the Apple App Store sometime in the past couple of years.
The other thing is - what is the biggest ecosystem? Android, for having the most devices, or as console people like to say, also most likely the worst attach rate? Or iOS, which has less devices, but higher attach rate? Or how it seems gaming has moved to consoles, which have way smaller markets than PC gamers (close to a billion on PC vs. couple hundred million tops for console), but the latter being far more profitable?
Or to consider it another way - while PC makers were all busy running themselves into the ground (see IBM, which exited the market, and HP, now in trouble, and Dell, who can see the writing on the wall). Hell, while they were all killing themselves over netbooks ($300 PCs seem to be the limit of profitability - everyone was trying to make more profitable $400+ netbooks), Apple released the iPad, which cost WAY more than any netbook (and you could probably buy two netbooks for what the iPad cost), but now PC makers were scrambling and tripping over themselves to release tablets.
In the end, the platform that makes money wins. Being biggest helps, like we saw with Windows and having 90% marketshare and everyone was forced to develop for it because to do otherwise was foolhardy (though, if you're a small developer, going for the niches like Mac would prove lucrative, like Blackberry is right now).
Of course, with Android being so big, the advantage is the apps being ported from iOS has increased significanty. Though that's usually after tapping out the iOS market first.
AND... The Fanbois and Apple faithful come out in force with nary a fact between them. But boy, do they get riled up!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!