"The Blessing of Failure"

James Allworth wrote a fantastic piece on Apple’s current situation, focusing mostly on the Apple Watch and its lack of intuitiveness. In his piece, he ponders whether Apple is becoming like Microsoft, a company so stuck on the past, that they have a hard time inventing the future.

Apple’s position in the market now is much more analogous to Microsoft’s, back when Microsoft was trying to navigate the shift from the PC to mobile.

And it appears that Apple has fallen into exactly the same trap. Rather than start anew — with a beginner’s mind—what the above reveals to me is that they’ve tried to take the last paradigm and just jam it into the new one. The old has bled into the new. The result, at least as it stands now: just like Microsoft did, Apple knows what needs to be built — a phone-disrupting device. It’s just that they can’t bring themselves to let go of the past in order to do the job properly.

The result is a product that is half intended to rely the iPhone, and half-intended to replace it. It’s part mimicking the iPhone, and halfway to reimagining it.

Well, where I’m from, we have a term for this: one foot on either side of a barbed-wire fence. As a result, Apple are leaving themselves open to exactly the same fate that befell Microsoft back in 2007:

Slipping.

I agree with much of this. The Apple Watch as it stands is a product that relies heavily on the iPhone to do many of its core functions. This is possibly one of the Watch’s biggest shortcomings. Without an iPhone, you’re basically wearing a Watch with a fitness tracker built in.

But I caution Allworth to make assumptions all too quickly. Some of Apple’s older products relied on a hub at the very beginning. The iPod needed a Mac and iTunes. Without either, you couldn’t do much. The iPhone also needed iTunes, but didn’t need a Mac of course because Apple brought iTunes to the PC world. Today, you can buy either and get them both started and on the internet without needing a traditional computer at all.

I believe the same thing will be true of the Watch in the near future. Apple wanted to get this product category out fast, and it’s obvious to me that it wasn’t fully thought through. I’m really curious how different watchOS 3 might be. Between that and the next-generation Apple Watch, we’ll know a lot more about how Apple thinks.

But why is this the case? Why are we waiting three operating systems later, hoping the Watch will be more intuitive? Well, I hate to pull the “If Steve Jobs” card, but I actually believe that’s exactly who they’re missing. Let me explain.

Steve Jobs was Apple’s editor for lack of a better term. He was the guy who was really good at taking everyone’s ideas and deciding which would make the cut, and which wouldn’t. It was his greatest gift to Apple if you ask me.

It’s not that Apple lacks great people with great ideas. That’s alive and well. It’s that there isn’t someone as good as Jobs editing the ideas. I think Tim Cook is a great CEO, but it’s clear to me that he’s not the kind of “product guy” Jobs was. Jony Ive is maybe the closest thing to Jobs, but he’s so deeply involved in designing and creating physical products, that he’s likely not as well tuned as Jobs was.

As wild as this may sound, sometimes you want someone who isn’t an expert in any particular field to come in and edit ideas. Experts are sometimes so deeply focused in their particular field that they’re unable to see the forest for the trees. It takes someone from the outside who doesn’t fully understand the process to point out what’s glaringly wrong. Jobs was exactly that guy.

With all that being said, I’m still optimistic on the Watch. I think it will turn out to be a great product that millions of people will buy. What I think will change, though, is how it becomes that product. I think it’s going to take Apple longer than usual to get there. Not because of lack of talent or ideas, but because of lack of a great editor.

God, I miss Steve.