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by jokethrowaway 151 days ago
Or Google

Large companies struggle to launch anything due to their staff size.

They're as inefficient as a government

2 comments

google makes products, they mostly suck at making platforms, and their most notable platform (android) was purchased, though one can argue gsuite/workspace as a platform, but one might also argue that its more just an amalgamation of projects.

One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).

Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).

how is apple, overall, so good at this?
The fruit company still has an internal culture, especially in hardware-focused teams, with a relentless focus on shipping products followed by iterative refinement.
Is it though?
Their revenue last year was 400 billion dollars... you tell us.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
I'd say it depends on your definition of "good", since the revenue seems to suggest they're doing something most people agree with.
By that logic, the online scam industry is shipping the best products of all time. By some estimates they make over a trillion a year.
have you seen the M chips? to me that revolutionized computing. supercomputer-level latency for in-ram operations on a $2k laptop
Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.

Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.