Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
Tim Cook on the other hand is no Steve Jobs, and Apple has been sliding ever since losing Jobs' magic.
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This is because Steve Jobs just said: "This is what we offer. If you don't want THIS, we don't want YOU." The people buying Apple while Steve Jobs ran the company weren't so much Apple fans as Steve Jobs fans. (One of my ex-colleagues actually once said: "Why should I think when using a device? Steve Jobs has done that for me already.")
The problem Apple now has is the same as in the beginning of the 90's, when 'they' (the director's board) forced Jobs out of his own company because they thought they could do it better: they went building a bazillion products, and many different versions. Apple sales crashed, and eventually it went almost bankrupt... Apple was saved, ironically, by Microsoft, who invested something like 150 million. This allowed Microsoft to claim that they *didn't* have a monopoly on the computing market. (If they had, they would need to adhere to some very strict rules and laws.)
When Jobs came back in the late 90's, he immediately axed most of the products, putting down a simple line of products with one, or maybe two versions. Now, after Jobs died, Apple is on the 'many-versions' road again, and you immediately see that it's not working for them.
Apple is the Leica of the computing world (and vice versa: Leica is the Apple of the photography world). They have status, and are seen as very expensive and perfect by their users. To maintain that status, their products must be high-end, with NO low-end counterparts (do one thing, and do it very well), expensive, and well designed. If not, their users will run away. Apple is seeing this now, as they saw it in the 90's; and Leica saw the same in the 70's and 80's when it tried to diversify its product lines.
In my eyes, things such as these "home assistants" are just fads; unnecessary products. I'll have a look again when they are up to the standards of the Enterprise D's computer.