Haunted Empire by Yukari Iwatani Kane

Author:Yukari Iwatani Kane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Christensen was particularly troubled by a few of Apple’s tendencies. First and foremost was its policy of keeping its products, software, and services proprietary and closed. Having that kind of control over the user experience was beneficial to companies in the first years after an innovation. But Christensen considered it a handicap as the technology matured and rivals caught up.

Apple had so far escaped the trap by jumping to its next product before the previous product matured. But this worked only as long as the innovations kept coming. If Apple stopped, then its proprietary tendencies would begin working against it.

So far, Apple’s reaction to Android seemed to confirm Christensen’s concerns. In courtrooms around the world, it was devoting staggering resources in a vicious protectionist fight. At the same time, Apple was making the classic mistake of evolving along the same trajectory rather than redefining expectations.

For the first few years, when Apple launched new models with incremental improvements such as thinness, camera quality, and screen resolution, customers snapped them up even if there was no material change in design. But its devices were maturing to a point where the upgrades were in danger of overshooting what most of its customers desired in a device. The iPhone was a prime example. As the analyst Horace Dediu said in a discussion with Christensen, “We cannot get better-resolution screens than we have today with retina because our eyes cannot perceive any improvements. We don’t have improvements that we can do in terms of size because they won’t fit in our pockets. We don’t have improvements that we can see in terms of memory because, frankly, we cannot consume what’s on the device before the battery runs out.”

Even if Jobs were still around, this would have been a challenging situation. Many considered Apple to be a disruptor to itself as well as other industries. But it was debatable whether it had truly encountered a disruption like Android in recent times. Apple offered multiple versions of the iPod at various price points, but its intention with the lineup had been to sell them all to every customer for different uses. The iPhone arguably disrupted the iPod business, and the iPad the Mac business, but profit margins for the products were higher than or about the same as the categories they cannibalized.

Tim Cook was a master of spreadsheets, not innovation. Since Cook had taken charge, legions of young MBAs had been hired to help feed the new CEO’s love of data crunching. For Christensen, that was a huge red flag.

“When we teach people to be data-driven, we condemn them to take action when the game is over because there’s no data about the future,” said Christensen, adding facetiously that when he died, he planned to ask God why he only made data available about the past. He put the blame squarely on MBA programs, noting the irony of saying that in a business school office. “In my defense, we have a whole course about disruption and jobs to be done.

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