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Apple Co-founder Thinks Apple Is Now Too Big a Company To Come Up With the Next Big Thing (9to5mac.com)
When it comes to the next great tech breakthroughs, Steve Wozniak isn't betting on the company he founded. Instead, he believes Tesla is at the forefront of anticipating the world to come. From a report: Interviewed by Bloomberg on what are likely to be the biggest tech breakthroughs in the coming years, and which companies are likely to make them, Woz didn't list Apple as a contender. He said, "look at the companies like Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft that changed the world -- and Tesla included. They usually came from young people. They didn't spring out of big businesses." Small businesses, he argued, take bigger risks -- and their founders create the products they really want, without the dilution that occurs with multiple decision-makers. "I think Tesla is on the best direction right now. They've put an awful lot of effort into very risky things. I'm going to bet on Tesla," he added.
Most large companies aren't blazing the innovation trail. That is why they gobble up smaller companies doing the innovative things - to get the talent and the ideas. This has been going on forever. Congrats to Woz for just realizing this.
I understand "apple cofounder" when used for the benefit of the general population, but this is Slashdot. "Woz says" would be enough clickbait already.
Steve Jobs would say they're not too big, but the people there (especially the executives) lack vision. That is the problem. A lot of the good people quit in the aftermath of the iphone.
If he were honest he might also say that the ideas don't need to be invented at Apple, they just need to be implemented there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, Woz has been too big for 3 decades to come up with anything new...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
but since then Apple has basically refined existing things so they didn't suck.
the ipod was a good mp3 player that they ruined with itunes. of course the point was to sell you music and not a music player, so it made perfect sense that they would shove itunes down your throat.
they they made a cell phone that didn't suck as much as the rest of them. and it's still in that category. android phones are fucking awful since they are google spyware, thanks google.
we need a truly open source mobile phone OS.
that's the next big thing. and apple will have nothing to do with that of course.
Absolute statements are never true
Maybe it's time for Apple to reduce their product lines to four product categories and focus on those for a while.
Of course Apple is too big to come up with the next big thing. Great ideas start in basements and garages, just like Apple when they first started. https://www.retireat21.com/blo...
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Being bought up by a larger company was the reason d'etre of many dot com startups. Today it's just another exit strategy on the VC's checklist when you come begging for money. Something that Antonio Martinez explained in his book, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley".
You could always buy a refurbished MacBook Pro from OWC that cost less and has a warranty.
I have a lot of respect for Woz. But ever since he left the company it seems like he's been overly down on Apple - from downplaying the iPhone through multiple iterations, to now claiming Apple cannot possibly do anything new or big.
He says Tesla is ahead and in a sense that is sort of true - I also think they are at the forefront of self-driving cars. But a large part of that is because they are way ahead in collecting real world data.
Well in a similar fashion, Apple is way ahead of most other companies in terms of knowing how people use mobile devices. Yes Google is also right there in that space, but Apple has a health data collection edge..
The next big things to arrive will unfold naturally from the combination of large data sets and powerful neural network style pattern recognition (I hesitate to label it as AI). Apple is well positioned to come up with something impressive organically out of the mix of what they have and what they are doing.
It's very true that large companies have trouble producing innovation. But the way Apple is structured I think it may still be possible, and Woz is simply being overly negative because that is the way he is wired (and probably why he makes a such a great engineer).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Why can't we xxxxxxxx?
VPs tend to shut down these sorts of quesitons with stock answers, because they want their position to be stable until they jump ship.
Is Steve Wozniak really "Apple co-founder" now? Steve Wozniak is like a household name.
I don't buy it. Apple is just in another "run by suits" lull that they will transition out of or be rudely awoken out of. Tim Cook just happens to wear very peculiar suits.
Renaissance Apple is Apple run by design and engineering. Current Apple is "how can we sell more iPhones this quarter" Apple, which is going to bite them in the ass if this next round of Macs doesn't please the people writing screengames for them.
Oddly, whenever I hear Woz he sounds like the fox with sour grapes just out of his reach.
Their computer strategy is one example. Idiots have decided the computer market is dying. ... um.. no it's just saturated. It's a replacement market, not an expanding market. There is still HUGE money to be made, just not on an ever expanding scale. ... and Apple have virtually abandoned the computer market. They let Jony destroy their computer line and essentially handed the market to companies like RedHat on a platter. Their Laptops are underpowered with no ports. The iMac has gotten worse with every revision as Jony removed features and expandability. Their server is an underpowered trash can that won't fit into a rack.
Microsoft has made a mess of the data center. They created a huge security nightmare defined by forced outages because every time you touch a Windows box you have to reboot it. Something that was considered a cardinal sin before M$ came alone. Linux has become the server platform of choice for any data center where the CTO isn't an idiot. Why? because Apple wasn't there to pick up the pieces when they should have been. Big companies trust big companies. OSX was just BSD UNIX with a usable GUI. Reliability was right up there with UNIX and Linux... and as companies started getting hacked and Windows boxes became a huge support nightmare, companies started looking for alternatives. Apple being a big company known for 'it just works' would have been the obvious choice... but there is no Apple server. There is no Apple RDP client for Windows->OSX. Instead Steve Jobs died, and Tim Cook made Jony Ive god and they flushed the server business completely. This allowed the Linux guys to finally say "we're here, and we're ready for you!" Companies would not have looked at them except they were backed into a corner and a few tech guys convinced management to put their toe in the open source water and now Apple hasn't a prayer to take it back. Linux IS the server of choice for companies with a clue.
As a consultant, I have recently seen old-school Windows-everywhere companies nuke Windows all over the place in favor of Linux. And don't think M$ didn't notice. MS-SQL on Linux? YUP! Visual Studio on Linux? YUP! Even a Linux subsystem on Windows! YUP! I am betting there will be an Office for Linux next. now that the compiler works, someone in the back room is trying to get the compile errors cleaned up as we speak. As long as Windows dominates the desktop, you won't see it. But the FIRST hint of a Linux desktop migration, and poof! Office for Linux will pop out of the woodwork in about 10 seconds.
Where does this leave Apple?
Apple doesn't have to innovate currently, they have the most loyal customers.
That's the reason they won't come up with the next big thing. Same reason the telcos couldn't take over cloud computing. all they looked at was how to best server their existing locked-in customer base. Cable Television was in prime position to take over the internet, but they couldn't forgo the massive profits of over-charging for useless content and they didn't push back against ESPN's usurious rates.
Many people here are saying things like "Apple/Woz hasn't innovated since [insert really old Apple product]" and it is not true.
Part of "innovation" is closing the loop and making it happen.
That's what I think Woz has in mind when he said this:
Good ideas die in meetings ('to thunderous applause') in other words. Big companies are difficult to make things happen in. It's practically by design. The whole point of a publicly held company is that it will generate reliable returns and/or keep a stable, growing stock price.
Woz sees that happening at Tesla. I'm not sure if I completely agree with him there (they do have cool robot factories), but I can see why he'd say that.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I sometimes wonder if Steve Jobs' greatest skill was keeping Jony Ive in check.
"I love the design, Jony - but removing all the useful ports seems idiotic."
#DeleteChrome
When you build your own computing platform from the ground up without Google at your disposal.... you get to have an opinion. Once you have to fame, money and nerd street-cred.... who really gives a shit what you've done lately? He's probably forgotten more than you'll ever know about electronics engineering.
Oh noes, I said something bad about Apple in your safe space!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How is the view from the sidelines, Woz? I mean, the guy did some amazing things and he is a great advocate and philanthropist, I won't deny any of that. But it's real easy to be critical of a company that you have no part in, outside of your stock holdings and a yearly stipend. It just feels like sour grapes to me. What's your next big thing, Woz?
So I guess it's pretty hard.
All three of them originated from Apple when it was already a big company.
This is the sort of brilliant forward-thinking analysis I come to /. for.
I believe Woz is mostly right, but the reason is somewhat different. Most startups fail, probably around to 80% or 90% after 10 years. They do a lot of trial and error but mostly error (flopping). An established company cannot usually afford experimental R&D that fails 90% of the time. Who would let you run an R&D department with a 10% success rate?
Thus it's not that big co's cannot innovate, it's that innovation requires high-risk investors, perhaps suckers even, who are willing to (or inadvertently) absorb mass failures.
Table-ized A.I.
Apple doesn't need to come up with the next big thing. They just need everybody to think they've come up with the next big thing. Which, by the way, they are very very good at. And they've got 300 billion in the bank to prove it. Apple has, in public perception, made the perfect transition from technology company to Fashion Brand without anybody really noticing.
As one expert put it a few weeks ago: There isnt a Market for smartwatches, there is a market for the apple watch. No other company could pull a stunt like that and get away with it.
Yes they build innovative tech, but only as a means to their end. Their end is selling flashy products, tech innovation is just their way of achieving that goal.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Companies run by founders tend to take more risks and often come up with disruptive technology products.
Cases in point were Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Cray, Tesla, Microsoft, Tandem Computers, Amazon, Oracle, eBay, etc.
Once they go public and the founders retire, quit, die or get terminated, the companies tend to be run by MBAs that don't have the ability to invent. In theory, they should delegate the tasks to those who do know but it's been my observation that the MBAs just tend to acquire companies, run them in to the ground and do anything to make the next quarterly report look good.
The Army used to be made of REAL MEN. It's a disgrace what its become. Could you imagine someone like Chelsea Manning storming the beaches of Normandy?
Actually, speaking of D-day, there wren't only REAL MEN storming on the beaches of Normany - e.g.: Martha Ghellhorn, Ernest Hemingway's ex-wife (though a natural-born woman, but still definitely not a REAL MAN) managed to be among the first waves on the beach (even before her ex-husband) by first hiding on a boat and then disguising as a combat medic (though her actual profession was war journalist).
There *WAS DEFINITELY* a pair of boobs under one of the uniforms running on the beaches of Normandy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Any other employee would probably be fired, or at least admonished, for such spontaneous PR.
The fact is, Woz comes from the breed of "garage engineers / tinkerers" which help make startup businesses famous .... not mega-corps who care about style over substance and who make as much money reselling entertainment created by other artists as building the tools that help artists make original content.
Many of the great computer companies were formed because of engineering-minded innovators. HP, for example -- where both founders were focused on scientific test equipment and computers as useful analytical tools. Certainly, one could say the same about IBM, back in the day.
Unfortunately, there's the inevitable trend towards catering to the masses, including chasing trends and pop-culture. That does seem to guarantee a continued revenue stream, but squashes real innovation.
Today's Apple can be summed up by looking at the software "change list" for something like the latest major iOS update. Prominent new features include emojis and animated icons in the iMessages chat program. "Details" so minor, they're not typically mentioned include replacing the entire core file system with a new one!
It's not like Jobs never did anything in the absence of Woz. When he formed Next, Inc, he didn't have any of the big names w/ him, but built that company from scratch. Ultimately, it became viable enough that when Apple kept slipping on the delivery of Copland, they ultimately acquired Next, and Jobs w/ it.
Yeah, they could have purchased Be, Inc. instead, and history would have been different. Next may then have ended up maybe as a part of Sun or SGI or HP.
they're not too big. they're washed up and void of innovation. amazon keeps coming up with crazy stuff. changing direction every few years to invent the next big thing. they started as selling books. then they became the largest online retailer, and now they sell infrastructure/cloud space?
Name a single "innovation" from any company and I will [easily] show how that was an incremental step from some previous idea. This notion that new technology has to be "completely new and not based on any previous tech" is a BS concept that is only ever applied to Apple. There has literally been no new technology ever by that definition.
If the word "innovation" has any meaning at all, then it simply has to apply to the seminal products that launched entirely new categories of electronics.