Roger Fingas
Under Tim Cook — who assumed the CEO reins from Steve Jobs in 2011 — Apple has become a more hierarchical company, where people largely stick to the tasks they were hired for, according former Apple engineer Bob Burrough.
"At Apple in 2007, organizationally it was the wild west," Burrough said to CNBC. The interview came in the wake of a series of Twitter comments by him referring to the Jobs-era company as "thin, competitive, dynamic."
In his view, Cook has tried to eliminate executive conflict within Apple and grow middle management — but in doing so has crippled the Mac maker's old spirit.
Burrough explained to CNBC that while Apple hired him under a specific manager, his first two years were spent on projects outside that manager's main role, because projects took precedence over corporate structure. He compared the current company to his time at defunct phone maker Palm, where teams were "highly organizational" and responsibilities stayed narrow.
"There was a clear sense [at Palm] that each person had a clear responsibility, and rarely deviated from it," he said. "When you went to someone for help solving a problem 'not my job' was a common response."
Burrough's criticisms of Apple have been challenged by others, and indeed Tony Fadell — once the senior VP of Apple's iPod division — recently suggested that there was "never a competition" at Apple, at least when it came to developing the original iPhone.
Wrong!!! There was never a competition. We, together, were searching for the best solution. Steve asked us to test all the possibilities... https://t.co/DNkT2WZnqV
— Tony Fadell (@tfadell) January 11, 2017
Cook was formerly Apple's chief operating officer, and has actually doubled annual revenues under his tenure from $108.2 billion to $215.7 billion. At the same time, critics and supporters alike have suggested that Apple has become too dependent on the iPhone, and unable to break out with new device categories like the Apple Watch or its rumored self-driving car.
Apple is currently said to be concentrating solely on a self-driving platform, having shelved work on a first-party car design until at least late 2017. A shipping vehicle, made by Apple or otherwise, is likely several years away.
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83 Comments
I have no idea if this is true, but change is not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bigger company today, after all.
Jobs would not have wanted Apple's structure and processes to remain frozen at the time of his death. The company has to evolve.
The tricky part is to make sure that the benefits of changes outweigh the cost. Since all humans make mistakes, some changes will be mistakes. What's imperative is to recognize when a change is a mistake and to fix it.
We have evidence that Cook can recognize mistakes and change course. His rapid replacement of that retail guy with Ahrendts is a great example.
It remains to be seen if Cook can identify and correct the mistakes (whatever they are -- it's hard to tell from the outside) that have led to the stagnation of the Mac.
This BI article doesn't go into the whole ordeal. The ex-engineer's Twitter thread is here if anyone's interested in going through it
This is also what he says RE: Scott Forstall's firing
https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/821574147083902976
One person's opinion is not a trend. He seems more like whiner than a gifted engineer.
I believe what he is saying is mostly true, when Steve is focus on a product he pulled people in as needed. However, you can not run a 100,000 employee company like the wide west, you can not have people just bouncing around from project to project without some semblance of order. However, I bet that there are still people at the company who do move from project to project and are not narrow focused, But those people are few among the many.