Jun
25
“We Want to Be Just Like Apple!”
ByI can’t tell you how many times I hear variations on that quote. Apple is great, they make great products and they are innovative in the design of their hardware and user interfaces. On the other hand, you can’t innovate like Apple unless you are willing to throw away 90% of your work. Or alienate large portions of your customer base in the name of moving the design of your product (and industry?) forward. Apple has tons of momentum and mystique around them these days, but let’s all remember that they are not perfect. No one is; although I would love to be a fly on the wall listening to the discussions that their product management team is having right now with regard to Final Cut Pro X.
Do we know that the product management team is in on the decisions? All evidence so far seems like it is a one man show in that company.
But hey, when the man is Steve that might be ok (unless you are one of the product managers that are reduced to carry out orders, I am guessing).
Christian, the article linked above indicates that the Product Managers were the one’s defending the decisions, which leads me to believe they had a stake in them (I could be wrong). Jobs is a lot of things, but I doubt that he is arrogant enough to start making decisions at the product level for what professional video editors need/want. My intuition tells me that the further you get from the consumer products at Apple, the less day-to-day involvement Jobs has. Of course, that also has to do with the revenue weight of the two types of products as well…
Product manages are not the decision makers at the end of the day even thought they have a name manager it doe’snt make them the ones that give a decision it comes downs to design.