I don’t often want to shout “Amen!” after reading a blog post, but I don’t disagree with a single syllable of this. These paragraphs really hit home:
Apple has always been a marketing-driven company, but there’s a balance to be struck. Marketing plays a vital role, but marketing priorities cannot come at significant expense to quality.
I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today: having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it’s an engineering problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher quality.
Tim Cook’s a master of real-world logistics; he needs to exercise those muscles over Apple’s software now more than ever.