Steve jobs on why xerox failed

Steve Jobs articulated xerox's failure well, which I think applies mostly to kodak, some to intel, and I've no clue about VW. tldr: Sales and marketing were the main groups who could impact the company's bottom line. So those were the folks that got promoted and pushed to the top. When they lead the company, they don't focus on products+innovation. Because they failed to innovate (or capitalize on their innovation - e.g. their gui) competitors did (e.g. apple). They fail to make great products. See ▶ this video (I recommend watching this, its short!)

Two thoughts on this. First, it is incredibly difficult to pivot a large organization because there are too many competing interests, too many fiefdoms people have built and too much organizational inertia. A new company has the advantage of a singularity of purpose. Google has to compete with internal interests about AI disrupting search, ad revenue and so on. This can slow you down and limit the resources you get. It's why companies get disrupted, particularly when they reach monopoly status. Steve jobs said it best [1]. Second, Gogole's path here (IMHO) is to make their own hardware. They've already done this with their TPUs but need to be able to compete with NVidia offerings. NVidia controlling the price, features and, most importantly, who gets to buy them is bad for Google. This is what Google should be pouring billions into. The beauty of this is that success is easily measurable against metrics like price-per-petaflops, performance-per-Watt and so on. Throw money at some key Nvidia engineers and have them design silicon for you for TSMC to fab. I still believe that Google is positioned to survive the (IMHO) inevitable AI bubble popping. [1]: ▶ this video

In the future two companies will be heavily studied in business school for how badly they blew their technical lead and proficiency to the point that it may be the daeth of them. Those companies are Boeing and Intel. I would posit in both cases the problem is extreme financialization. Both companies had such a large market share (and even a monopoly in certain segments) that the much-quoted but apropos Steve Jobs quote [1] applies. All these modern CEOs seem capable of doing is stock buybacks, cutting costs and raising prices where they can. In the 2000s, Intel faced a serious challenge from AMD with the Athlon/Opteron architecture. Intel's failures were a continuation of their Pentium 4 architecture and the company was only saved by the Pentium 3, which became the Pentium-M and the Centrino platform then the Core Duo and the modern CPUs we have now. They're all Pentium 3 descendants. What we've seen over the last decade is most people have enough CPU power so the move has been towards smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient CPUs. We've seen this in phones and then tablets and now CPUs. Apple's move to ARM was really the nail in the coffin for Intel as it culminated a decade of not being able to respond to the market. Intel is seemingly unable to respond to this trend. All Intel CPUs still have super-high TDPs and haven't adopted any silicon to boost AI performance, which is increasingly going to matter. I fully expect this to be further integrated into the M4 and later CP

I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything. I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices. It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today. Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2]. [1]: link [2]: ▶ this video

> focus on the basics instead of marketing gimmicks This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about Xerox[0]. After achieving market leadership in their industry, engineering at iRobot seems to have been pushed aside in the company's decision making process. Is this a consequence of being a publicly traded company? After all, pushing consumables and subscription services requires less capital and makes more money compared to developing a better robot. The $1.7B exit seems like a good outcome for a stagnant (relative to its peers) company. [0] ▶ this video

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie advertising) too. I once again return to the Steve Jobs take on why Xerox failed [1]. An effective monopoly devalued the tech such that Xerox became a sales and finance company. So, returning to Netflix. I agree Netflix isn't a tech company anymore because Netflix ultimately is about serving several thousand VODs and that problem is solved. Now Netflix's core business is about making content, licensing content and acquiring and retaining customers. Obviously doing this (or anything) at scale is a lot harder than it sounds but at the end of the day Youtube is monumentally more technically challenging than Netflix due to the number of videos, the number of viewers, the advertising and live streaming. "Tech company" is still a useful classifier IMHO. [1]: ▶ this video

I'm reasonably bullish on intel, but Jobs explained the problem well ▶ this video When tech companies become a dominant force in their market they lose their ability to innovate, and it's very hard to change culture once that's happened.

> Does anyone know why this happens? Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. They want a formula to produce content that can be predicted, projected and tracked. Here's another key point: everything you do as a company either adds to or subtracts from your brand value. For example: Square Enix giving discounted subscriptions and a general mea culpa around the original FF14 release, brand value add. Blizzard adding micro-transactions to classic TBC? That's nothing more than the short-term extraction of brand value into money. It's a bit like delivering pizza. You're trading long term car depreciation and maintenance for short-term cash. [1]: ▶ this video

The Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] strikes again. The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years. This effort seems like it's part of the ruthless approach to controlling costs that slowly strangle a company from within. I believe WoW is the #2 property (after CoD) at Acti-Blizzard and it's clearly changed from one of delivering a game to simply extracting as much money as possible from each customer much like how almost all mobile games do. The state of California's complaint is bad. I mean really bad. The fact that 3-4 different people from AB all released different statements in the last week should tell you exactly how bad it is. That's classic panic mode. There should only be one. This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits. Honestly, the heads of J Allen Brack and Bobby Kotick in particular should roll over this lawsuit. [1]: ▶ this video EDIT: commenters have noted (correctly) that I overlooked Overwatch. This was a significant release but it seems to also have waned in popularity and Overwatch 2 is inextricably going in some weird PVE direction. Other tha

Obligatory (Steve Jobs on why Xerox failed): ▶ this video He summarises the whole process, Intel is now at the sales and marketing people running it.

They're a victim of their own success. They became a monopoly and the quality of their product stopped mattering. They're an example of Steve Job's comments on Xerox's failure[0]. It happened at Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. It's happening now at Apple, Intel and Google. [0]: ▶ this video