Thanks, I hadn't seen that. For what it's worth, I think the rebuttal misses that Thompson wasn't actually arguing for a Services division - he was arguing that if Apple is serious about creating better services, as they are currently claiming to be, then that's what they should do. But that doesn't mean that they should be serious about services! That's basically the same conclusion that is drawn by the article you linked. (Thompson goes into this a bit more on last week's Exponent podcast, if you're into this sort of thing.)
I'm a fan of Thompson, but he's all over the map on this one. The podcast made almost zero sense.
Apple operates one of the biggest consumer services portfolios out there. Little things like iTunes, AppStore, iMessage, photos, find my iPhone, iCloud backup.
I think it makes sense that Apple would align its normal vertically integrated model.
For what it's worth, the author of the rebuttal does address your point (from "Conclusion"):
> But I don’t think Ben Thompson is actually arguing that it would be great if Apple created a new services division. I think he’s arguing that Apple should create a new services division if they want Services to be great. Ben Thompson is doing what good analysts do. He’s not giving us the right answer. He’s asking us the right question.
The rebuttal does a nice job of expanding the discussion around that question.
I think Thompson is walking back from his blog. His blog and podcast do not align. I would expect him to use the givens (Apple product culture) and come up with a strong theory around why Apple should not venture into Services.
> Is anyone aggregating discussions like this today?
That's something I'd like to see as an official feature on HN or reddit. In addition of normal comments on the article you can also add "additional information from a qualified source" (which can be either a qualified user or another article from another reputable journalist).
But I am not sure if that would work. Perhaps it would be fine on HN, but it would be difficult to enforce and moderate on reddit.
I'd love for a TechMeme style site that sorts and organizes the articles more intelligently ( sort out the articles that just say the same thing without adding anything new, mark and organize responses and followup third party articles as 'informative', 'rebuttal', or 'support', etc.
His opinion is interesting, and leads to the question: Why shouldn't apple start a services division, with it's own process, managers and internal profit and loss, but that would have somewhat limited independence, by definition - in major decisions they would have to consult the CEO and the other divisions to make sure this doesn't interfere with the hardware products.
The idea behind Divisional Organization is that you'd motivate Services by holding them responsible and measuring success and failure via quantifiable things like turning a profit.
But a lot of what would make Services profitable isn't necessarily good for the rest of Apple: squeezing people harder to upgrade storage space for pay, paywalling popular features like Find My Phone, or selling iCloud for Android might all make Services look better on paper but hurt Apple as a whole.
Your proposed compromise, if anything, might make Services worse -- take it from someone who's been there, there's nothing more demotivating and worse for productivity than being held responsible for the bottom line while not having any authority to do anything that would improve it.
And if you're not going to hold the Division responsible for its financials, there's no benefit to moving it out of Engineering.
Great read. The big risk that Kirk doesn't mention is that Apple's hardware offerings could start to falter if they don't at least keep up with the service offerings of their competitors. Apple has been famous for creating the whole widget, the software and hardware. These days that software is services.
The question is can they compete with Amazon Prime and Microsoft OneDrive and Google Photos, etc or should they instead focus on building a great electric car to compete with Tesla.