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Apple's Tim Cook Shares What He Learned From Steve Jobs (businessinsider.com)
Speaking at Oxford, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared a lesson learned from the "spectacular" commercial failure of the Power Mac G4 Cube in 2000 -- and from his mentor Steve Jobs. An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:
"It was a very important product for us, we put a lot of love into it, we put enormous engineering into it," Cook said of the G4 Cube on stage. He calls it an "engineering marvel." At the time, Cook was Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Operations, recruited personally by then-CEO Steve Jobs... While the design was a hit, it was $200 more expensive than the regular Power Mac G4, a more traditional-looking PC with very similar specs. And some Cubes would develop cosmetic cracks in the acrylic cube casing due to a manufacturing flaw. In his talk, Cook says that Apple knew the Cube was flopping "from the very first day, almost..."
Ultimately, Cook says, it was a lesson in humility and pride. Apple had told both employees and customers that the G4 Cube was the future. And yet, despite Apple's massive hype, demand just wasn't there, and the company had to walk away. "This was another thing that Steve [Jobs] taught me, actually," says Cook. "You've got to be willing to look yourself in the mirror and say I was wrong, it's not right." In a broader sense, Cook says that Jobs taught him the value of intellectual honesty -- that, no matter how much you care about something, you have to be willing to take new data and apply it to the situation.
He advised his audience to "be intellectually honest -- and have the courage to change."
And the article points out that today there's a small but enthusiastic community who are still hacking their Power Mac G4 Cubes.
Ultimately, Cook says, it was a lesson in humility and pride. Apple had told both employees and customers that the G4 Cube was the future. And yet, despite Apple's massive hype, demand just wasn't there, and the company had to walk away. "This was another thing that Steve [Jobs] taught me, actually," says Cook. "You've got to be willing to look yourself in the mirror and say I was wrong, it's not right." In a broader sense, Cook says that Jobs taught him the value of intellectual honesty -- that, no matter how much you care about something, you have to be willing to take new data and apply it to the situation.
He advised his audience to "be intellectually honest -- and have the courage to change."
And the article points out that today there's a small but enthusiastic community who are still hacking their Power Mac G4 Cubes.
So... do we get a proper tower mac pro back now?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think you need to look yourself in the mirror again, Mr. Cook, on the matter of those pesky 3.5mm headphone jacks.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
This is exactly the issue - change for the sake of change. There was literally no reason to change the power adapter. None. Removing USB ports? Stupid. It almost certainly still uses USB internally for the camera, keyboard, and trackpad, so it's not like the hardware isn't there. The function keys? This might possibly have been a step forward - at least it has the potential to be better. But internal testing should have revealed it to be annoying rather than more useful.
When they removed the floppy drive I thought it was the right move - same with optical storage drives. It's just too early for external drives and their core market (design and creative professionals) are the ones who are most likely to use external hard drives. As I said, I'll always need them. I have 7+ TB of music on Amazon S3 now, I'm dealing with datasets that are just too big to move around online (we have to ship drives to Amazon for imports).
Do you have ESP?
Back in my management days, I used to regularly regurgitate some variation of the following to all my employees: "I expect you to make mistakes. I'll be happy to share a few of the many mistakes that I've made throughout my career, if you like. The one unpardonable sin that I will not tolerate is to not openly and honestly acknowledge any mistake that you make, because that shows me that you cannot/will not learn. We learn 10X++ more from our mistakes than from banging out a standard project spec. Just tell me what you learned."