> As a result lots of big companies have competing “pulls” — eg fiefdoms.
Exactly. Why? Because they suck plain and simple. My wife (a highly paid and educated professional) just wasted 3 hours today trying to get a simple new cable box installed from Verizon. Earlier she tried to have Best Buy do a simple TV pickup and ended up having to cut her losses cancel Best Buy and just get 800junk to pick it up (at a higher cost). There is ZERO reason large companies can't get things like that right that they do over and over and over again every day.
I say this as someone who has actually operated and run a small company and had employees. Yes it was not a large corporation. But it had way less resources available and very generally not even enough people to get done what needed to get done. Don't let anyone tell you different. It's the same thing people have had shoved down their throats ever since (ironically) 1981 when the IBM PC came out along with that crap that Microsoft put on it. 'It's not us it's you'. People just buy that thinking and that is why companies get away with what they do. (There is also consumers and businesses making poor choices and not wanting to pay for quality for sure).
Corporations are officially aligned with the interests of shareholders, and unofficially aligned with the interests of management, many of whom are more interested in turf wars and power plays than in doing their jobs.
Customers come at the bottom of that list.
In a worker-hostile culture, employees at all levels can easily become passive aggressive towards customers, because they're caught between bullying by management, which they have no control over, and pushback from angry customers, which they also have no control over.
MS has always operated like this. It's a huge machine that spends far more energy on internal politics, PR and impression management, and status games than it does on producing solid, reliable, beautifully crafted products. Personally my experience of MS products has been that the absolute best products are ok, I guess, while the worst have been so incompetently made they've been barely usable.
Apple has begun to operate like this. Jobs was User Number 1 and could push back on UX he didn't like. He wasn't always right, and he couldn't cover everything, but his influence was always there.
Cook is more of an autocrat and I strongly suspect he has an unconscious passive aggressive stance towards users. Apple has consistently produced high-profile user frustrations during his tenure - Maps, keyboard-gate, the reluctance to support pro users, Catalina, general software quality, among others - and there's been no move to make structural and cultural changes that could make future mistakes less likely.
The original iPad UI would have been just a blown up iPhone UI without any accordances to the larger screen if Jobs had of had is way. There was push back from other developers at Apple. This came out in some of the Debug podcast’s interviews with former Apple employees.
Also don’t forget that all of the pre iCloud service disasters happen under SJ including MobileMe.
Apple moved away from “Pro users” under Jobs. It was clear that he even said before he came back to Apple that if he was in charge he would “milk the Mac for all its worth and move on to the next big thing”.
Until you cannot remember (and frankly, don’t care about) the names of all your employees any more, I don’t think you can call something a large company.
There is theoretically zero reason why a large company should be so inefficient, but practically that’s always what happens.
Exactly. Why? Because they suck plain and simple. My wife (a highly paid and educated professional) just wasted 3 hours today trying to get a simple new cable box installed from Verizon. Earlier she tried to have Best Buy do a simple TV pickup and ended up having to cut her losses cancel Best Buy and just get 800junk to pick it up (at a higher cost). There is ZERO reason large companies can't get things like that right that they do over and over and over again every day.
I say this as someone who has actually operated and run a small company and had employees. Yes it was not a large corporation. But it had way less resources available and very generally not even enough people to get done what needed to get done. Don't let anyone tell you different. It's the same thing people have had shoved down their throats ever since (ironically) 1981 when the IBM PC came out along with that crap that Microsoft put on it. 'It's not us it's you'. People just buy that thinking and that is why companies get away with what they do. (There is also consumers and businesses making poor choices and not wanting to pay for quality for sure).