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2016 was the year Cook's Apple lost the plot

by on05 January 2017


Its numbers are ok but it forgot who its users are 

A top Silicon Valley veteran has blasted Apple for its terrible performance last year.

Writing in his bog, Chuq Von Rospach, who previously worked at Apple, has lambasted the company for, among other things, how it has handled the Mac Pro, a lineup that hasn't seen any refresh in ages, and the AirPort routers, which too have been reportedly abandoned.

He said that in his day, when he was running most of Apple's e-mail systems for the marketing teams, he went to them and suggested that Apple should consider dumping the text-only part of the emails it was building, because only about four percent of users used them.

At the time, Apple said that it was a small group of people, but a strategic one, since it was highly biased towards developers and power users and the two-part emails stayed. Von Rospach said Apple was right and it made no sense from a business standpoint to continue to develop these emails as both HTML [and] text, but it made significant strategic sense to keep its key user base happy with Apple.

However, Apple over the last year, appears to have forgotten this and its latest configurations seem designed by what will fit the biggest part of the user base with the fewest configuration options.

“They've chopped off the edges of the bell curve -- and big chunks of their key users with them,” Von Rospach said.

He said that one of the issues of Apple this year is that they have only been interested in “the numbers” which have been OK. But 2016 was a year where Apple did terrible things including missing shipping dates and misjudging supply.

“The iPhone SE clearly surprised them with a much higher demand than expected... Apple seems to not have a good view of their user base, because the user base reaction to products isn’t matching up with their forecast models. Something is out of sync between Apple and its users, and bad forecasting is one place where this becomes visible.”

He said that a big percentage of complaints over the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the “power” user.

“I think a better way to define this is that these units define “power user” different than many people who see themselves as power users do, and they’re upset (justifiably) that there aren’t options that allow them to solve their needs,” he wrote.
Apple’s view of its users doesn’t match its users, he said.

“Apple’s lost sight of its users. It clearly has a model of what their user base is, but there have been multiple instances in the last 18 months where the user reaction has clearly been much different than Apple expected it to be.”

Software wise Apple is getting sloppy with far too many bugs slipping into releases, weird design choices, usability problems and general “lack of polish” and the trend line on the quality of OS and app releases is headed in the wrong direction, Von Rospach moaned.

Last modified on 05 January 2017
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