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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.
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.
Like what did Woz ever do? He isn't even there for any of Apple's most successful era.
Without Woz and the Apple computer, Jobs would be selling sugar water .
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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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.
seems to be working reasonably well though, seeing as the brakes are completely shot on the AAPL train
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?
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 don't know..... he created a line of reasonably ok 8-bit 6502 machines that lived from 1977 into the '90's FAR past their prime and kept the company afloat while the early Mac 128 and 512 were flopping like a fish? I can't think of a single school I attended as a kid that wasn't chock full of ugly Apple IIe's and the occasional IIgs.
Apple was far from unsuccessful in those days. You know, back when they were actually a computer company instead of peddling shiny consumer-grade content consumption devices to over-privileged hipster brats.
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
John Scully would be selling sugar water. Jobs would have simply found another Woz - and as good as he was, there were many like him.
Without Jobs, however, Woz would have sold a few dozen system boards to hobbyists and faded into history.
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.
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If you're going to correct somebody, make sure you have your own facts straight. It was John Sculley who was hired from Pepsi to run Apple. He was actually hired by Steve Jobs, whose pitch was, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.