Tim Cook's long game at Apple
IPhone sales have fallen, stocks are going down, and connoisseurs say Apple is becoming a technological “lump”. But the company, in fact, may be stronger than ever before.
“The goal of our existence is exactly the same as it has always been,” says Tim Cook , Apple CEO. “It’s about making the best products in the world that truly enrich people's lives.”
Eddie Q is not like a man who is in the middle of his worst year in recent decades.
Sporty, light-colored youth shirt, blue jeans, khaki socks, a pair of blue leather sneakers from Germany - Apple 's first vice president of Internet services and software pushes a chair at one of the tables with a marble tabletop in front of Caffé Macs, a restaurant for employees, in the heart of the 23-year-old Apple building complex in Cupertino, 70 km from San Francisco. (The company is going to move to its new “space” main office next year.) Q immediately begins to tell me his latest “horrible” story:
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The collapse two days ago of his favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, in the NBA Finals, which Q had a dubious pleasure to watch from the front row in the hall. “Am I in mourning?” He asks about the loss of his favorites to the Cleveland Cavaliers team led by James LeBron. "Still would! I do not watch ESPN (American cable sports TV channel. Approx. Translator), I do not go to sports websites, I do not read newspapers. When I turn on my TV, I immediately go to the video. "
“Eddie, this is in the record,” comments Craig Federigi, Apple’s first vice president of software engineering, sitting at the same table opposite.
“I have no problem with that,” says Qew, who is such a “Warriors” fan that was captured on the front page of the San Francisco Cronicle after the strong-willed victory of the Warriors in the conference finals a few weeks ago in a photo showing him screaming in a noisy celebration with Stephen Curry. He leans over my interviewing iPhone, and says three words to ensure that they sound loud and clear: "I love LeBron." Then he laughs loudly, and his laugh sounds like fun, then suddenly mournful.
In Cupertino, 17 degrees, the sun is shining, the smell of caraway seeds and garlic from masala sauce to fried chicken fills the air in the cafe, and the noise from talking to the diners of several hundred employees seems alive and joyful. Nowhere is there any hint that “Apple is doomed,” as Forbes and other publications say, or that he is engaged in a “user-hostile and stupid” campaign against his clients ( The Verge ), headed by CEO Tim Cook, a “boring old fart ... compiler supplies ”(art critic Bob Lefsets).
After Cook came to leadership, many people began to think that Apple began to make many mistakes. His latest products didn’t look as good as the stunning iPod – iPhone – iPad series from 2001 to 2010 that was imprinted in the community’s memory. There were public difficulties, such as with the introduction of Maps in 2012 or with a video in 2014, showing the bending and scrapping of the iPhone 6 Plus by experts. The Apple Pay mobile payment system didn’t become a standard for non-cash payments, and Apple Watch is “not the watch we’ve been expecting from Apple,” said John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, an Apple-focused website. Then there were design errors: the Apple Music service turned out to be overloaded with functions, as if it was developed - God forbid! - by Microsoft; the lens on the back of the iPhone 6 fell out; The Apple TV application had a non-sequential interface and confusing remote control.
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Perhaps, people are worried about the situation of the company, Apple is doing too much work at the same time, launching a variety of watches and countless straps for them, iPhones and iPads of various sizes, patented in-ear headphones with Beats headphones. The credible information that the company spends billions of dollars in researching the possibility of developing a car only increases the fear that Apple is too scattered. Steve Jobs was the head of the company, about which it was known that he often said “no” than “yes”, some characteristics, products, business ideas and hiring new employees. Apple's clearly expanding product line supports the view that Cook is not so tough. (And this fear has a basis: in the early and mid-1990s, Apple’s product line was a heap of offers generated by marketing, which adversely affected the company's reputation as a unique manufacturer and its affairs.)
Critical sentiment intensified in April, when Cook said that for the first time in 13 years, Apple's revenue fell by 13% compared with the corresponding quarter of the previous year. IPhone sales dropped even more - by more than 16%, which seemed disturbing, given that smartphones provide 65% of the company's total revenue.
At the same time, competitors rushed forward. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have filled out media with messages about products prepared for release that will use artificial intelligence (AI). Some of them, such as, for example, Cortana from Microsoft, are software applications that promise to anticipate the needs of customers in personalized ways. Others have already built this ability into hardware: in less than two years, Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echo phones — personal assistants with voice control for $ 199. Google with a lot of noise in the media announces plans to release a similar product called Home in May. Critics look at Siri, a voice-guided assistant, Apple’s development five years ago, and complain that the company cannot show anything spectacular enough.
So Apple is doomed? Of course not! John Gruber writes: “Any such statement is just silly chatter.” Apple, which has Macs, iPads, software applications and services, cannot be seen as a highly specialized company like BlackBerry, to use the example of the recent slowdown in iPhone sales, cited by the most worried market participants. Sales for this “disappointing” quarter amounted to $ 50.6 billion - more than the total income of Alphabet Holding, of which Google is a part, (20.3 billion) and Amazon (29.1 billion) over the same period. Profit of 10.5 billion dollars surpasses not only the total profit Alphabet (4.2 billion) and Amazon (513 million), but also that taking into account Facebook (1.5 billion) and Microsoft (3.8 billion) .
“I don’t read all of these media reports that they’re writing about Apple,” Cook told me a few days after my lunch with Q and Federigi. "The way I look at what is happening, I know, is correct." And he is ready to discuss it.
Traditionally, Apple executives give interviews only when the company brings a new product to the table. Often Jobs agreed to cooperate only with those magazines that promised to take a picture of him along with one of the company's devices. But Apple is changing, and not only in the information unit. Apple intends to improve its four operating systems (for Apple TV, iPhone, Mac and watches), services such as Apple Pay and Apple Music, and even change the size of the iMessage ball on the screen of its iPhone. Their structure of retail stores as well as the App Store online store was redesigned. The company makes radical changes to highly criticized products, such as Maps, Siri, and watches. It attracts application developers in completely new ways, knowing that it is their creativity that makes the platform, built on Apple devices, stronger and bringing $ 250 billion a year. Apple - almost certainly - is exploring the possibility of producing a car. These steps are a kind of building block for Apple's consistent development.
The future of Apple may turn out to be extremely different from the past of this company, and Cook, Federigi and Q could not move towards it in any other way. “Listen,” says Kew, who somehow manages to look at the same time, like a newly awakened person and a clot of incredible energy, “there is one thing that you know if you were engaged in technology: you are worth exactly as much as the last thing". No one wants to have an original iPod. No one wants to have an iPhone 3GS. "
Apple executives are trying to avoid the impression that the company is moving away from the idea of its founder, but this is exactly what is happening in Cupertino. There is a subtle evolutionary change. Cook gently but persistently moves Apple into a future that is larger and wider than anything Jobs could have accomplished during his too short life. “I want Apple to exist, you know, always,” says Cook.
People whose fears about the future of the company have dried up under the influence of the ambiguous spring news about the dismissal of Cook and his team are unlikely to pay attention to the company's current ambitious aspirations and progress in their implementation. While Amazon, Facebook and Google are noisily promoting their smart ideas, it is Apple that plays a leading role in actually determining our technological future.
The real statements of journalists and experts in the field of information technology to the expectations for Apple in 2016. Never have Apple supporters been so polarized.
“Do you have more flaws than you would consider acceptable to you?”
“Do I have more flaws than I would consider acceptable to myself?” Tim Cook laughs, answering my poorly worded question. “I always had flaws. Is always!"
“Now we are coming to what I would like to know!” I tell him. "You can lie down until the end of the interview."
Cook remains standing, and when his laughter subsides, he answers the question I intended to ask. “Does Apple make more mistakes than we would consider acceptable to ourselves?” I do not follow this. ” Cook, despite the fact that his work during the 5 years of his tenure as CEO becomes more and more complex, it seems he has not aged one iota. It would seem that the fact that your company lost $ 180 billion of market value (this happened to Apple in the last 17 months after my last interview with Cook) should somehow manifest itself, but Tim Cook is still elegant and cheerful, his eyes are alive , a good sense of humor has not changed. “We never said that we were flawless,” he continues. We said that we are committed to this. But we sometimes fail. "
Indeed, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad — and the financial success they engendered — overshadowed the fact that Jobs experienced almost as many failures as there were takeoffs during Apple's ascent: a round mouse, which is almost impossible to use, that came along with the first iMac in 1997, a very beautiful PowerMac G4 "Cube" in 2001, the release of which was discontinued a year later, the music smartphone Rokr, which Apple released with Motorola in 2005, the Ping music-oriented social network built into iTunes and much more.
“The most important thing here is, do you have the courage to admit that you are wrong? And are you ready to change? ”Says Cook. - “The most important thing for me as a CEO is that our team has such courage.”
Critics who speak contemptuously about Apple, led by Cook, because of its shortcomings, also accuse it that the company is always “behind”, whatever technology it may concern. This is nothing new. “Not only now, but all the 18 years that I’m here, with Apple, as a rule, the same thing happens,” says Cook, “some people consistently compare the products that we are doing now with some presentation or some product that someone tells them that someone will create in the future. ”
Over the 40 years of its existence, Apple has repeatedly declared itself lagging behind in music, video, Internet, telephony, wireless communications, content creation, networking, semiconductors, software applications, touch screens, gesture control, technological materials, messaging, aggregation news, social media, voice recognition and mapping. (And this is still far from being an exhaustive list.) However, the company managed to survive by doing the unprecedented work of implementing the most important of these technologies in products that, in the end, were admired by many users. By the time Jobs died, Apple's innovation process — the way the company goes when creating, acquiring, improving, and implementing technology — was fully debugged and confirmed its viability. He was perhaps Jobs's greatest gift to his successor.
Cook used this gift in the most convenient way. Apple CEO is a deeply solid person who has not been blinded by Jobs's brilliant legacy. Jobs was able to perceive the growing nature of innovation only in the second half of his life; but with Cook it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that he understood and accepted this process from birth. His focus on detail is often seen as a weakness. But in five years, under the leadership of Cook, Apple’s revenues tripled, its staff doubled, and its global presence quickly grew. This is a serious result. Cook showed great ability to improve each division of the company and to subsequently deploy the achievements to a wider field of software, hardware and services than Jobs ever had at his disposal. He will never be as bright and catchy as Jobs, but he may just be the perfect CEO for the giant that Apple has become.
“We are a company that studied and adapted when we entered new areas,” says Craig Federigi .
One of the most underrated facts about Apple is that Apple has always been a company that learns on the fly. “I have always thought that there is a lot that is being achieved only at the end of a project,” said John Ive and Brent Schlander to me in 2014, when we interviewed him for the book Become Steve Jobs. “There is an object, the actual product itself, and then there is everything that you have learned. What you have learned is as tangible as the product itself, but much more valuable because it is your future. ”
A continuous learning process is central to the way Cook manages Apple. He accepts the inevitability of shortcomings, but he insists that employees strive for perfection. “I'm less twitching,” Q says eagerly when I ask him about the difference between Jobs and Cook. “No, no, no, just kidding! Steve was noisy, bright, and Tim - more calm, more thoughtful, balanced in his approach. When you do not live up to Tim’s expectations, even though he doesn’t scream at you, the same feeling remains. I never wanted to disappoint Steve, and under no circumstances do I want to let Tim down. Besides, I have a feeling for him as for my father. ”
Perhaps the best example of this continuous improvement under Cook is the restoration by the company of its Maps application, which was mocked from all sides after its introduction in September 2012. A lot of blunders were made in the Maps application: the bridges seemed to plunge into the rivers; hospitals were located at addresses actually owned by shopping centers; the directions were so bad that they confused airport runways with roads. Apple didn't have a billion customers at the time, but it turned out to be more than enough to turn this application into a national ridicule. “Look, the first thing is that you are in an awkward position,” says Q. “Let's take it simply as a fact relating to emotions. These things mean a lot to us, we are working really hard, and therefore you are confused. We have drastically underestimated the project, its complexity. Well, of course, all the roads are known, go ahead! All restaurants are known, there are services Yelp and OpenTable, they have all the addresses. Regular mail is coming. FedEx express mail is coming. Do you know how difficult all this is? ”
Q, dangling her left foot under the table, tells how Apple regrouped after that mess. “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself how important this is? Is this a place where we have to increase efforts threefold or reduce them four times, or have we made a mistake here because this product is not so important for us?We discussed the importance of Maps for a long time, at the level of senior executives, when we thought: would this application be needed in the future and could it be considered as a third-party application? We do not do every application. We are not trying to create a Facebook application. They do a great job. We decided that Maps should be the unifying part of our entire platform. There were a lot of functions that we wanted to build into the product and which depended on this technology, so we could not see ourselves in a position where it would be something we didn’t have. ”
The changes were not easy. Shortly after launching the app, Scott Forstall, a 15-year-old Apple veteran who was in charge of product development, was released from this job. But that was only the beginning.Forstall worked with several dozens of people acting in relative isolation: several thousand employees are now working on Maps. “We had to build up knowledge and skills that we didn’t originally have,” says Federigi, who looks like a mix of Sam Waterston and Anthony Perkins, thanks to his silver hair and black eyebrows flying to the bridge of nose, which made Apple fans call him “Hair Force One ”(the untranslatable pun in English:“ Air Force ”-“ Hair Force ”. Approx. Translator). “Maps creates enormous problems regarding data integration and data quality - that is, things we have to do on an ongoing basis. ”
But the company did more than just increase the number of people involved in this issue. Cook also made relevant managers review and change the way they interact with development teams. Apple, known for its stealth, opened a little. “We have made significant changes to all of our development processes in connection with this product,” says Kew, who now controls Maps. “For all of us living in Cupertino, the maps of these places were not bad at all. Really?Therefore, the problem was not obvious to us. We could not bring Maps to a large number of users to get the desired feedback. Now we got it. "
Apple is now doing public beta testing of its most significant software projects, i.e. that Jobs never liked doing. In 2014, the company asked users to test their Yosemite update for OS X. Last year, Apple introduced iOS beta testing, which is the company's most important operating system. “The reason that you, as a user, will be able to test iOS,” says Kew, “is Maps.”
Maps criticism has noticeably weakened, and although the most well-known technical reviewers still prefer Google, everyone acknowledges the significant improvement in Apple Maps. (Also, this service on iOS is much more popular than Google Maps.) But the improvements introduced by Q and his team affected more than just this one application. Maps is now embedded in many popular iOS applications, incl. Airbnb, Foursquare, Yelp and Zillow. Improving the platform, such as Maps, for example, benefits the support environments that reside on Apple products. “Maps is the central organizing structure for the physical world in which you interact,” Federigi explains. "The map is the basis for creating all kinds of things that are valuable on the platform, the same basis as our operating systems."
Both managers do not want to discuss what will happen next with Maps, although it seems there will be many characteristics that give the service more artificial intelligence than it already has. (An example of working basic artificial intelligence is Maps, which takes you to a different route than recommended from the beginning.) Kew tells us what he would like to see, for example. “Let's say I’m writing an email at home before I go to work,” he says. “I would like to hear from Maps:“ Do not leave now. Your travel time will be reduced by 15 minutes if you stay at home a little bit. ” That would be very helpful. ”
What Apple has done with Maps is an example of “born in torment” innovation, but this happens all the time in the company. You do not hear much about this, perhaps because such information does not support the beautiful myth of the arrival of a new under blinding flashes that lead to previously unimaginable products. When critics peck Apple for its failure to introduce "breakthrough" devices and services, they do not understand the three key facts about technology: firstly, that the "breakthrough" moments are unpredictable results of continuous incremental incremental innovations; secondly, that continuous, invisible at a superficial glance, innovations bring a lot of useful things, even if they do not generate some kind of exceptional momentary breakthrough; and, thirdly, that new technologies can only earn at full power,when the bulk of the participants are ready for them and have an urgent need for them. “The world thinks we gave out breakthrough products every year when Steve was here,” says Q. "But, in fact, these products have been developed for a long time."
In recent years, artificial intelligence - in the broad sense, the ability of machines to “think” for us, processing enormous amounts of data, has become one of the technical directions that has captured the public’s imagination, and all activity with it seems to be happening somewhere but not in Cupertino. At his last IO conference, Google promised to rebuild some of its products under artificial intelligence - a movement that was rated as unreal. The most advanced consumer product with the functions of artificial intelligence is not from Apple - it is Echo from Amazon with its indication of the world in which computing tools just surround us. Who needs portable devices when you can just flush a question into the air and get an answer from the furniture?
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After Steve Jobs appointed Cook as CEO in 2011, Apple's revenue has tripled. Over a billion people are now using the company's products.
A closer look reveals, however, that Apple’s product development, Siri, its most consumer-oriented artificial intelligence service, comes largely from the company's clear and widely undervalued approach to the deployment of new technology. Apple has used various types of artificial intelligence for many years, for example, for personalized recommendations available through iTunes since 2003. Siri was launched to the market at the end of 2011 - nine months before Google Now and three years before Cortana from Microsoft and Alexa from Amazon.
Apple relies on a simple, two-pronged approach to developing Siri. This approach makes it possible to understand why Apple is not worried about who is ahead or behind. For company executives, it’s important how successfully Apple brings its own ever-improving product to users.
First, the company is constantly working to improve the underlying technology. Siri - just like Maps - is in a special position at Apple, having a continuously updated online service, unlike those products that are updated only when the base operating system is upgraded. Users are attracted by the fact that Siri successfully answers a lot of questions: it currently processes 2 billion requests per week - twice as much as it was a year ago.
Secondly, Apple is regularly looking for new places where Siri can help its customers. In the iPhone, Siri processes voice commands and questions when entering applications and provides answers. In cars equipped with Apple's CarPlay system with a display dashboard, Siri recommends driving directions, helps find restaurants and performs other functions. Siri can be used with Apple watches (assuming you didn’t put them anywhere in the glove compartment). Through Siri, you can also control the TV using the Apple TV remote control.
Unlike Maps, Siri is not a substitute for any analog from the real world. Therefore, Kew says: "You are trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways in which it can work, really, well, what customers are looking for and what products you can make that could improve their lives." Kew explains, in part, why Apple opened Siri for application developers this summer, although only in seven categories: fitness, messages, payments, photos, transport calls, the CarPlay car system, and voice communications. Siri should be allowed to manifest where this system can be most valuable to users.
Currently, Siri operates in approximately the same way as other similar devices in this market area. Using voice to control Google Now for a few days seems fun, but then disappoints; Reviewers have reported that Cortana’s impressions are also mixed. Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant in the Echo device, needs to be commended for the speed of answering many questions, but my son often screams at him in annoyance. Alexa can also be used to control your TV via Amazon Fire TV Stick, but not in cars.
If artificial intelligence becomes popular with major customers, then Apple, a company that seems to be quite far behind, is better positioned than anyone else to use it successfully. None of Apple’s competitors offer at the same time a wide range of products and the corresponding rich experience of interaction with customers. Apple may introduce Siri to work in all types of available services and products. Users will see this next fall, when it will be possible to use Siri on Mac computers. They will also discover more artificial intelligence features in Photos that make it easier to access and organize photos. Drivers with a CarPlay system will probably sense more artificial intelligence on their cars. Not having such an extensive product platform,Apple's competitors have less attractive options: they must limit their use of artificial intelligence, develop entirely new products built on this technology (like Amazon did with Echo), or rely on partners to introduce this technology through products from other companies.
Apple will sometimes push its customers out of their comfort zone, as will happen this fall if the headphone jack is removed from the iPhone 7. But the company never forces users to switch to state-of-the-art introductions without thorough verification. At the end of 2015, Apple quietly acquired a voice-activated artificial intelligence startup called VocalIQ, which, supposedly, will work on the next generation of Siri, but you can be sure that this technology will be used in devices only when Apple thinks that it will ready. Artificial intelligence is an extremely attractive concept - machines thinking for us! - but it can also lead to unforeseen consequences. Apple provides its billions of users with a comfortable amount of artificial intelligence, becausedespite the common misconception, Apple is not a fan company.
“People like what they can do right now, and not just dream about something,” says Cook. “I was thinking about the Jetson family as a child. But sometimes you want the fiction of the Jetson family films to become a reality. This is the power of Apple: the development, release and bringing to the user of such products so that the user can be part of them. "
In the mid-1970s , when the replay of the Jetson family seriesThey were still skating on TV on Saturday morning, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started making an Apple computer with the goal of selling a new type of machine to users, the number of which they estimated at several hundred. As the company grew, its mission expanded. When Jobs returned in 1997, he strongly stressed the fact that Apple was selling "craftsmanship" that could not be replicated by other manufacturers. At first, “mastery” consisted in using such a computer, in which the software from the company and the computer it made were inextricably merged. Jobs hoped that the excellent quality of Apple personal computers could bring an additional 1% market share - an increase that would stabilize Apple's financial condition. By the time Tim Cook became CEO,The concept of “Apple's skill” has grown to own and use three Apple devices (iPad, iPhone and Mac) connected to each other and the Internet.
However, the “mastery” currently sold by Apple has gone far beyond the borders of these three devices. Q says, laughing at his own ambitions: “We want to be with you from the moment you wake up, before you decide to go to sleep.” Cook himself is just a little less impudent in saying: “Our strategy is to help you in any area of your life where we can,” he says, “whether you are in the living room, in the living room, do you work on the desktop? computer, whether you call or are located in your car. ”
The future of Apple and the problems of Cook cannot be understood without realizing the fact that the “mastery” currently sold by Apple is not just a complex of devices: it is the most complex structure of hardware and software and services, which, in turn, are connected with other networks of applications and services from other companies. These other networks include everything from “application economics,” which already runs on Apple software and devices, to suddenly emerging directions, such as smart home and car with network capabilities, as well as wearable computing tools. To achieve its goal of round-the-clock customer service, Apple must do more than just ensure that its own products work beautifully.- It should also try to get them to work flawlessly with these many other heterogeneous networks. The company is required to be a significant reliable player on platforms that it does not own.
Apple does exceptional work, earning revenue from areas in which the company already plays a role, and its future revenues will depend on it even more. Horace Dediu, an influential analyst currently working at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Revolutionary Innovations in Boston, believes that Apple users bring her an astronomical $ 40 per person per month compared to a few cents collected on Facebook and Google, and a few dollars, received by Amazon. This is primarily the result of the high price of devices that Apple customers buy. But subscription services, such as Apple Music and iCloud storage, began to bring significant funds. Service revenue now stands at 12% of Apple’s total sales — last year it was 9%.In fact, revenue from Apple services exceeds Facebook’s total revenue. And Cook says the company is just starting. "Oh yeah! I expect there will be a great thing, ”he says, smiling; his speech sluggishness inherent in natives of Alabama becomes more pronounced when he gives good news.
IPhone sales may have declined in the quarter, but that's okay. The company's ability to interact with other products is its strategic advantage, and it remains central to what analyst Neil Kybarth already calls the “Apple Era of Excellence”. “In your car or in your home there may be dozens of microprocessors, but all of them are wordless and fragmented,” says Dediu. “When a smartphone enters this environment, the environment unites and your car or your home becomes“ smart ”.” Your iPhone stores your personal preferences, as well as the latest software for managing the environment around you, such as the thermostat in your home or the Philips Hue lighting fixtures. Think about the way in which the iPhone automatically connects via Bluetooth to the sound system of your car,and you can try to imagine the role that he could play as users have more and more devices with built-in sensors.
The iPhone will continue to transform in ways designed to ensure its place as the main way in which we interact with and manage our technological environment for the foreseeable future. Apple will sell more devices, but its evolution will also allow it to explore new revenue opportunities. So Apple adapts. He expands his set of proposals based on the foundation laid by previous products. This steady growth has made the company broader and more powerful than any other technology company focused on the general consumer.
Tim Cook is on stage at the 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference.
It is possiblethat Apple will never again bring to the market such a universally demanded product like the iPhone. This does not mean that she does not wish to continue to be a great company. “The iPhone has entered the market, which was the largest in the world for electronic devices,” Cook says to me when we finish our interview. "Why is that? This is because, ultimately, everyone in the world will have such a device. There are not too many things in the world like this. ”
Then Cook notes another thing that can be missed, if you don’t understand the meaning that he attaches to each word: “It’s hard to imagine some other market counted in pieces - not in income - it’s so big.”
From the point of sale in units, yes, another iPhone may never appear. But in terms of revenue, well, look at the industries that Apple is entering or is rumored to be considering. The media and entertainment have a $ 550 billion global market. The global car ownership business is $ 3.5 trillion. Annual global investment in health exceeds $ 9 trillion. And while Apple cannot currently dominate any of these sites, remember that analysts once thought that the company would be successful if it received 1% of the mobile phone business.
When we say goodbye, Cook and I stumble upon a discussion of medical care, and it revives again. “We became interested in the health care industry and began to look into health prevention, which gave us thoughts about research, and this thread led us to some patient care systems, followed by considerations about other systems,” says Cook. “When you look at most of the solutions, whether they are devices or products coming from pharmaceutical companies, it is clear that, first of all, they are aimed at receiving a refund from the insurance company. Thoughts that helps the patient, no! Therefore, if you do not take care of the reimbursement - and we have such an advantage - it may turn out that even the smartphone market will seem small. ”
One percent of $ 9 trillion is $ 90 billion. Even Apple can call it a good business.
“The goal of our existence is exactly the same as it has always been,” says Tim Cook , Apple CEO. “It’s about making the best products in the world that truly enrich people's lives.”
Eddie Q is not like a man who is in the middle of his worst year in recent decades.
Sporty, light-colored youth shirt, blue jeans, khaki socks, a pair of blue leather sneakers from Germany - Apple 's first vice president of Internet services and software pushes a chair at one of the tables with a marble tabletop in front of Caffé Macs, a restaurant for employees, in the heart of the 23-year-old Apple building complex in Cupertino, 70 km from San Francisco. (The company is going to move to its new “space” main office next year.) Q immediately begins to tell me his latest “horrible” story:
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The collapse two days ago of his favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, in the NBA Finals, which Q had a dubious pleasure to watch from the front row in the hall. “Am I in mourning?” He asks about the loss of his favorites to the Cleveland Cavaliers team led by James LeBron. "Still would! I do not watch ESPN (American cable sports TV channel. Approx. Translator), I do not go to sports websites, I do not read newspapers. When I turn on my TV, I immediately go to the video. "
“Eddie, this is in the record,” comments Craig Federigi, Apple’s first vice president of software engineering, sitting at the same table opposite.
“I have no problem with that,” says Qew, who is such a “Warriors” fan that was captured on the front page of the San Francisco Cronicle after the strong-willed victory of the Warriors in the conference finals a few weeks ago in a photo showing him screaming in a noisy celebration with Stephen Curry. He leans over my interviewing iPhone, and says three words to ensure that they sound loud and clear: "I love LeBron." Then he laughs loudly, and his laugh sounds like fun, then suddenly mournful.
In Cupertino, 17 degrees, the sun is shining, the smell of caraway seeds and garlic from masala sauce to fried chicken fills the air in the cafe, and the noise from talking to the diners of several hundred employees seems alive and joyful. Nowhere is there any hint that “Apple is doomed,” as Forbes and other publications say, or that he is engaged in a “user-hostile and stupid” campaign against his clients ( The Verge ), headed by CEO Tim Cook, a “boring old fart ... compiler supplies ”(art critic Bob Lefsets).
After Cook came to leadership, many people began to think that Apple began to make many mistakes. His latest products didn’t look as good as the stunning iPod – iPhone – iPad series from 2001 to 2010 that was imprinted in the community’s memory. There were public difficulties, such as with the introduction of Maps in 2012 or with a video in 2014, showing the bending and scrapping of the iPhone 6 Plus by experts. The Apple Pay mobile payment system didn’t become a standard for non-cash payments, and Apple Watch is “not the watch we’ve been expecting from Apple,” said John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball, an Apple-focused website. Then there were design errors: the Apple Music service turned out to be overloaded with functions, as if it was developed - God forbid! - by Microsoft; the lens on the back of the iPhone 6 fell out; The Apple TV application had a non-sequential interface and confusing remote control.
Head of Marketing Service Apple Music Bozhova St. John: it's about passion, not about algorithms
The head of the global consumer marketing division of Bozhova St. John gives us a sense of passion driving the streaming service.
Perhaps, people are worried about the situation of the company, Apple is doing too much work at the same time, launching a variety of watches and countless straps for them, iPhones and iPads of various sizes, patented in-ear headphones with Beats headphones. The credible information that the company spends billions of dollars in researching the possibility of developing a car only increases the fear that Apple is too scattered. Steve Jobs was the head of the company, about which it was known that he often said “no” than “yes”, some characteristics, products, business ideas and hiring new employees. Apple's clearly expanding product line supports the view that Cook is not so tough. (And this fear has a basis: in the early and mid-1990s, Apple’s product line was a heap of offers generated by marketing, which adversely affected the company's reputation as a unique manufacturer and its affairs.)
Critical sentiment intensified in April, when Cook said that for the first time in 13 years, Apple's revenue fell by 13% compared with the corresponding quarter of the previous year. IPhone sales dropped even more - by more than 16%, which seemed disturbing, given that smartphones provide 65% of the company's total revenue.
At the same time, competitors rushed forward. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have filled out media with messages about products prepared for release that will use artificial intelligence (AI). Some of them, such as, for example, Cortana from Microsoft, are software applications that promise to anticipate the needs of customers in personalized ways. Others have already built this ability into hardware: in less than two years, Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echo phones — personal assistants with voice control for $ 199. Google with a lot of noise in the media announces plans to release a similar product called Home in May. Critics look at Siri, a voice-guided assistant, Apple’s development five years ago, and complain that the company cannot show anything spectacular enough.
So Apple is doomed? Of course not! John Gruber writes: “Any such statement is just silly chatter.” Apple, which has Macs, iPads, software applications and services, cannot be seen as a highly specialized company like BlackBerry, to use the example of the recent slowdown in iPhone sales, cited by the most worried market participants. Sales for this “disappointing” quarter amounted to $ 50.6 billion - more than the total income of Alphabet Holding, of which Google is a part, (20.3 billion) and Amazon (29.1 billion) over the same period. Profit of 10.5 billion dollars surpasses not only the total profit Alphabet (4.2 billion) and Amazon (513 million), but also that taking into account Facebook (1.5 billion) and Microsoft (3.8 billion) .
“I don’t read all of these media reports that they’re writing about Apple,” Cook told me a few days after my lunch with Q and Federigi. "The way I look at what is happening, I know, is correct." And he is ready to discuss it.
Traditionally, Apple executives give interviews only when the company brings a new product to the table. Often Jobs agreed to cooperate only with those magazines that promised to take a picture of him along with one of the company's devices. But Apple is changing, and not only in the information unit. Apple intends to improve its four operating systems (for Apple TV, iPhone, Mac and watches), services such as Apple Pay and Apple Music, and even change the size of the iMessage ball on the screen of its iPhone. Their structure of retail stores as well as the App Store online store was redesigned. The company makes radical changes to highly criticized products, such as Maps, Siri, and watches. It attracts application developers in completely new ways, knowing that it is their creativity that makes the platform, built on Apple devices, stronger and bringing $ 250 billion a year. Apple - almost certainly - is exploring the possibility of producing a car. These steps are a kind of building block for Apple's consistent development.
The future of Apple may turn out to be extremely different from the past of this company, and Cook, Federigi and Q could not move towards it in any other way. “Listen,” says Kew, who somehow manages to look at the same time, like a newly awakened person and a clot of incredible energy, “there is one thing that you know if you were engaged in technology: you are worth exactly as much as the last thing". No one wants to have an original iPod. No one wants to have an iPhone 3GS. "
Apple executives are trying to avoid the impression that the company is moving away from the idea of its founder, but this is exactly what is happening in Cupertino. There is a subtle evolutionary change. Cook gently but persistently moves Apple into a future that is larger and wider than anything Jobs could have accomplished during his too short life. “I want Apple to exist, you know, always,” says Cook.
People whose fears about the future of the company have dried up under the influence of the ambiguous spring news about the dismissal of Cook and his team are unlikely to pay attention to the company's current ambitious aspirations and progress in their implementation. While Amazon, Facebook and Google are noisily promoting their smart ideas, it is Apple that plays a leading role in actually determining our technological future.
Accidentally heard at a party in Apple
The real statements of journalists and experts in the field of information technology to the expectations for Apple in 2016. Never have Apple supporters been so polarized.
“Do you have more flaws than you would consider acceptable to you?”
“Do I have more flaws than I would consider acceptable to myself?” Tim Cook laughs, answering my poorly worded question. “I always had flaws. Is always!"
“Now we are coming to what I would like to know!” I tell him. "You can lie down until the end of the interview."
Cook remains standing, and when his laughter subsides, he answers the question I intended to ask. “Does Apple make more mistakes than we would consider acceptable to ourselves?” I do not follow this. ” Cook, despite the fact that his work during the 5 years of his tenure as CEO becomes more and more complex, it seems he has not aged one iota. It would seem that the fact that your company lost $ 180 billion of market value (this happened to Apple in the last 17 months after my last interview with Cook) should somehow manifest itself, but Tim Cook is still elegant and cheerful, his eyes are alive , a good sense of humor has not changed. “We never said that we were flawless,” he continues. We said that we are committed to this. But we sometimes fail. "
Indeed, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad — and the financial success they engendered — overshadowed the fact that Jobs experienced almost as many failures as there were takeoffs during Apple's ascent: a round mouse, which is almost impossible to use, that came along with the first iMac in 1997, a very beautiful PowerMac G4 "Cube" in 2001, the release of which was discontinued a year later, the music smartphone Rokr, which Apple released with Motorola in 2005, the Ping music-oriented social network built into iTunes and much more.
“The most important thing here is, do you have the courage to admit that you are wrong? And are you ready to change? ”Says Cook. - “The most important thing for me as a CEO is that our team has such courage.”
Critics who speak contemptuously about Apple, led by Cook, because of its shortcomings, also accuse it that the company is always “behind”, whatever technology it may concern. This is nothing new. “Not only now, but all the 18 years that I’m here, with Apple, as a rule, the same thing happens,” says Cook, “some people consistently compare the products that we are doing now with some presentation or some product that someone tells them that someone will create in the future. ”
Over the 40 years of its existence, Apple has repeatedly declared itself lagging behind in music, video, Internet, telephony, wireless communications, content creation, networking, semiconductors, software applications, touch screens, gesture control, technological materials, messaging, aggregation news, social media, voice recognition and mapping. (And this is still far from being an exhaustive list.) However, the company managed to survive by doing the unprecedented work of implementing the most important of these technologies in products that, in the end, were admired by many users. By the time Jobs died, Apple's innovation process — the way the company goes when creating, acquiring, improving, and implementing technology — was fully debugged and confirmed its viability. He was perhaps Jobs's greatest gift to his successor.
Cook used this gift in the most convenient way. Apple CEO is a deeply solid person who has not been blinded by Jobs's brilliant legacy. Jobs was able to perceive the growing nature of innovation only in the second half of his life; but with Cook it is impossible to get rid of the feeling that he understood and accepted this process from birth. His focus on detail is often seen as a weakness. But in five years, under the leadership of Cook, Apple’s revenues tripled, its staff doubled, and its global presence quickly grew. This is a serious result. Cook showed great ability to improve each division of the company and to subsequently deploy the achievements to a wider field of software, hardware and services than Jobs ever had at his disposal. He will never be as bright and catchy as Jobs, but he may just be the perfect CEO for the giant that Apple has become.
“We are a company that studied and adapted when we entered new areas,” says Craig Federigi .
One of the most underrated facts about Apple is that Apple has always been a company that learns on the fly. “I have always thought that there is a lot that is being achieved only at the end of a project,” said John Ive and Brent Schlander to me in 2014, when we interviewed him for the book Become Steve Jobs. “There is an object, the actual product itself, and then there is everything that you have learned. What you have learned is as tangible as the product itself, but much more valuable because it is your future. ”
A continuous learning process is central to the way Cook manages Apple. He accepts the inevitability of shortcomings, but he insists that employees strive for perfection. “I'm less twitching,” Q says eagerly when I ask him about the difference between Jobs and Cook. “No, no, no, just kidding! Steve was noisy, bright, and Tim - more calm, more thoughtful, balanced in his approach. When you do not live up to Tim’s expectations, even though he doesn’t scream at you, the same feeling remains. I never wanted to disappoint Steve, and under no circumstances do I want to let Tim down. Besides, I have a feeling for him as for my father. ”
Perhaps the best example of this continuous improvement under Cook is the restoration by the company of its Maps application, which was mocked from all sides after its introduction in September 2012. A lot of blunders were made in the Maps application: the bridges seemed to plunge into the rivers; hospitals were located at addresses actually owned by shopping centers; the directions were so bad that they confused airport runways with roads. Apple didn't have a billion customers at the time, but it turned out to be more than enough to turn this application into a national ridicule. “Look, the first thing is that you are in an awkward position,” says Q. “Let's take it simply as a fact relating to emotions. These things mean a lot to us, we are working really hard, and therefore you are confused. We have drastically underestimated the project, its complexity. Well, of course, all the roads are known, go ahead! All restaurants are known, there are services Yelp and OpenTable, they have all the addresses. Regular mail is coming. FedEx express mail is coming. Do you know how difficult all this is? ”
Q, dangling her left foot under the table, tells how Apple regrouped after that mess. “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself how important this is? Is this a place where we have to increase efforts threefold or reduce them four times, or have we made a mistake here because this product is not so important for us?We discussed the importance of Maps for a long time, at the level of senior executives, when we thought: would this application be needed in the future and could it be considered as a third-party application? We do not do every application. We are not trying to create a Facebook application. They do a great job. We decided that Maps should be the unifying part of our entire platform. There were a lot of functions that we wanted to build into the product and which depended on this technology, so we could not see ourselves in a position where it would be something we didn’t have. ”
The changes were not easy. Shortly after launching the app, Scott Forstall, a 15-year-old Apple veteran who was in charge of product development, was released from this job. But that was only the beginning.Forstall worked with several dozens of people acting in relative isolation: several thousand employees are now working on Maps. “We had to build up knowledge and skills that we didn’t originally have,” says Federigi, who looks like a mix of Sam Waterston and Anthony Perkins, thanks to his silver hair and black eyebrows flying to the bridge of nose, which made Apple fans call him “Hair Force One ”(the untranslatable pun in English:“ Air Force ”-“ Hair Force ”. Approx. Translator). “Maps creates enormous problems regarding data integration and data quality - that is, things we have to do on an ongoing basis. ”
But the company did more than just increase the number of people involved in this issue. Cook also made relevant managers review and change the way they interact with development teams. Apple, known for its stealth, opened a little. “We have made significant changes to all of our development processes in connection with this product,” says Kew, who now controls Maps. “For all of us living in Cupertino, the maps of these places were not bad at all. Really?Therefore, the problem was not obvious to us. We could not bring Maps to a large number of users to get the desired feedback. Now we got it. "
Apple is now doing public beta testing of its most significant software projects, i.e. that Jobs never liked doing. In 2014, the company asked users to test their Yosemite update for OS X. Last year, Apple introduced iOS beta testing, which is the company's most important operating system. “The reason that you, as a user, will be able to test iOS,” says Kew, “is Maps.”
Maps criticism has noticeably weakened, and although the most well-known technical reviewers still prefer Google, everyone acknowledges the significant improvement in Apple Maps. (Also, this service on iOS is much more popular than Google Maps.) But the improvements introduced by Q and his team affected more than just this one application. Maps is now embedded in many popular iOS applications, incl. Airbnb, Foursquare, Yelp and Zillow. Improving the platform, such as Maps, for example, benefits the support environments that reside on Apple products. “Maps is the central organizing structure for the physical world in which you interact,” Federigi explains. "The map is the basis for creating all kinds of things that are valuable on the platform, the same basis as our operating systems."
Both managers do not want to discuss what will happen next with Maps, although it seems there will be many characteristics that give the service more artificial intelligence than it already has. (An example of working basic artificial intelligence is Maps, which takes you to a different route than recommended from the beginning.) Kew tells us what he would like to see, for example. “Let's say I’m writing an email at home before I go to work,” he says. “I would like to hear from Maps:“ Do not leave now. Your travel time will be reduced by 15 minutes if you stay at home a little bit. ” That would be very helpful. ”
What Apple has done with Maps is an example of “born in torment” innovation, but this happens all the time in the company. You do not hear much about this, perhaps because such information does not support the beautiful myth of the arrival of a new under blinding flashes that lead to previously unimaginable products. When critics peck Apple for its failure to introduce "breakthrough" devices and services, they do not understand the three key facts about technology: firstly, that the "breakthrough" moments are unpredictable results of continuous incremental incremental innovations; secondly, that continuous, invisible at a superficial glance, innovations bring a lot of useful things, even if they do not generate some kind of exceptional momentary breakthrough; and, thirdly, that new technologies can only earn at full power,when the bulk of the participants are ready for them and have an urgent need for them. “The world thinks we gave out breakthrough products every year when Steve was here,” says Q. "But, in fact, these products have been developed for a long time."
In recent years, artificial intelligence - in the broad sense, the ability of machines to “think” for us, processing enormous amounts of data, has become one of the technical directions that has captured the public’s imagination, and all activity with it seems to be happening somewhere but not in Cupertino. At his last IO conference, Google promised to rebuild some of its products under artificial intelligence - a movement that was rated as unreal. The most advanced consumer product with the functions of artificial intelligence is not from Apple - it is Echo from Amazon with its indication of the world in which computing tools just surround us. Who needs portable devices when you can just flush a question into the air and get an answer from the furniture?
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After Steve Jobs appointed Cook as CEO in 2011, Apple's revenue has tripled. Over a billion people are now using the company's products.
A closer look reveals, however, that Apple’s product development, Siri, its most consumer-oriented artificial intelligence service, comes largely from the company's clear and widely undervalued approach to the deployment of new technology. Apple has used various types of artificial intelligence for many years, for example, for personalized recommendations available through iTunes since 2003. Siri was launched to the market at the end of 2011 - nine months before Google Now and three years before Cortana from Microsoft and Alexa from Amazon.
Apple relies on a simple, two-pronged approach to developing Siri. This approach makes it possible to understand why Apple is not worried about who is ahead or behind. For company executives, it’s important how successfully Apple brings its own ever-improving product to users.
First, the company is constantly working to improve the underlying technology. Siri - just like Maps - is in a special position at Apple, having a continuously updated online service, unlike those products that are updated only when the base operating system is upgraded. Users are attracted by the fact that Siri successfully answers a lot of questions: it currently processes 2 billion requests per week - twice as much as it was a year ago.
Secondly, Apple is regularly looking for new places where Siri can help its customers. In the iPhone, Siri processes voice commands and questions when entering applications and provides answers. In cars equipped with Apple's CarPlay system with a display dashboard, Siri recommends driving directions, helps find restaurants and performs other functions. Siri can be used with Apple watches (assuming you didn’t put them anywhere in the glove compartment). Through Siri, you can also control the TV using the Apple TV remote control.
Unlike Maps, Siri is not a substitute for any analog from the real world. Therefore, Kew says: "You are trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways in which it can work, really, well, what customers are looking for and what products you can make that could improve their lives." Kew explains, in part, why Apple opened Siri for application developers this summer, although only in seven categories: fitness, messages, payments, photos, transport calls, the CarPlay car system, and voice communications. Siri should be allowed to manifest where this system can be most valuable to users.
Currently, Siri operates in approximately the same way as other similar devices in this market area. Using voice to control Google Now for a few days seems fun, but then disappoints; Reviewers have reported that Cortana’s impressions are also mixed. Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant in the Echo device, needs to be commended for the speed of answering many questions, but my son often screams at him in annoyance. Alexa can also be used to control your TV via Amazon Fire TV Stick, but not in cars.
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If artificial intelligence becomes popular with major customers, then Apple, a company that seems to be quite far behind, is better positioned than anyone else to use it successfully. None of Apple’s competitors offer at the same time a wide range of products and the corresponding rich experience of interaction with customers. Apple may introduce Siri to work in all types of available services and products. Users will see this next fall, when it will be possible to use Siri on Mac computers. They will also discover more artificial intelligence features in Photos that make it easier to access and organize photos. Drivers with a CarPlay system will probably sense more artificial intelligence on their cars. Not having such an extensive product platform,Apple's competitors have less attractive options: they must limit their use of artificial intelligence, develop entirely new products built on this technology (like Amazon did with Echo), or rely on partners to introduce this technology through products from other companies.
Apple will sometimes push its customers out of their comfort zone, as will happen this fall if the headphone jack is removed from the iPhone 7. But the company never forces users to switch to state-of-the-art introductions without thorough verification. At the end of 2015, Apple quietly acquired a voice-activated artificial intelligence startup called VocalIQ, which, supposedly, will work on the next generation of Siri, but you can be sure that this technology will be used in devices only when Apple thinks that it will ready. Artificial intelligence is an extremely attractive concept - machines thinking for us! - but it can also lead to unforeseen consequences. Apple provides its billions of users with a comfortable amount of artificial intelligence, becausedespite the common misconception, Apple is not a fan company.
“People like what they can do right now, and not just dream about something,” says Cook. “I was thinking about the Jetson family as a child. But sometimes you want the fiction of the Jetson family films to become a reality. This is the power of Apple: the development, release and bringing to the user of such products so that the user can be part of them. "
In the mid-1970s , when the replay of the Jetson family seriesThey were still skating on TV on Saturday morning, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started making an Apple computer with the goal of selling a new type of machine to users, the number of which they estimated at several hundred. As the company grew, its mission expanded. When Jobs returned in 1997, he strongly stressed the fact that Apple was selling "craftsmanship" that could not be replicated by other manufacturers. At first, “mastery” consisted in using such a computer, in which the software from the company and the computer it made were inextricably merged. Jobs hoped that the excellent quality of Apple personal computers could bring an additional 1% market share - an increase that would stabilize Apple's financial condition. By the time Tim Cook became CEO,The concept of “Apple's skill” has grown to own and use three Apple devices (iPad, iPhone and Mac) connected to each other and the Internet.
However, the “mastery” currently sold by Apple has gone far beyond the borders of these three devices. Q says, laughing at his own ambitions: “We want to be with you from the moment you wake up, before you decide to go to sleep.” Cook himself is just a little less impudent in saying: “Our strategy is to help you in any area of your life where we can,” he says, “whether you are in the living room, in the living room, do you work on the desktop? computer, whether you call or are located in your car. ”
The future of Apple and the problems of Cook cannot be understood without realizing the fact that the “mastery” currently sold by Apple is not just a complex of devices: it is the most complex structure of hardware and software and services, which, in turn, are connected with other networks of applications and services from other companies. These other networks include everything from “application economics,” which already runs on Apple software and devices, to suddenly emerging directions, such as smart home and car with network capabilities, as well as wearable computing tools. To achieve its goal of round-the-clock customer service, Apple must do more than just ensure that its own products work beautifully.- It should also try to get them to work flawlessly with these many other heterogeneous networks. The company is required to be a significant reliable player on platforms that it does not own.
Apple does exceptional work, earning revenue from areas in which the company already plays a role, and its future revenues will depend on it even more. Horace Dediu, an influential analyst currently working at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Revolutionary Innovations in Boston, believes that Apple users bring her an astronomical $ 40 per person per month compared to a few cents collected on Facebook and Google, and a few dollars, received by Amazon. This is primarily the result of the high price of devices that Apple customers buy. But subscription services, such as Apple Music and iCloud storage, began to bring significant funds. Service revenue now stands at 12% of Apple’s total sales — last year it was 9%.In fact, revenue from Apple services exceeds Facebook’s total revenue. And Cook says the company is just starting. "Oh yeah! I expect there will be a great thing, ”he says, smiling; his speech sluggishness inherent in natives of Alabama becomes more pronounced when he gives good news.
IPhone sales may have declined in the quarter, but that's okay. The company's ability to interact with other products is its strategic advantage, and it remains central to what analyst Neil Kybarth already calls the “Apple Era of Excellence”. “In your car or in your home there may be dozens of microprocessors, but all of them are wordless and fragmented,” says Dediu. “When a smartphone enters this environment, the environment unites and your car or your home becomes“ smart ”.” Your iPhone stores your personal preferences, as well as the latest software for managing the environment around you, such as the thermostat in your home or the Philips Hue lighting fixtures. Think about the way in which the iPhone automatically connects via Bluetooth to the sound system of your car,and you can try to imagine the role that he could play as users have more and more devices with built-in sensors.
The iPhone will continue to transform in ways designed to ensure its place as the main way in which we interact with and manage our technological environment for the foreseeable future. Apple will sell more devices, but its evolution will also allow it to explore new revenue opportunities. So Apple adapts. He expands his set of proposals based on the foundation laid by previous products. This steady growth has made the company broader and more powerful than any other technology company focused on the general consumer.
Tim Cook is on stage at the 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference.
It is possiblethat Apple will never again bring to the market such a universally demanded product like the iPhone. This does not mean that she does not wish to continue to be a great company. “The iPhone has entered the market, which was the largest in the world for electronic devices,” Cook says to me when we finish our interview. "Why is that? This is because, ultimately, everyone in the world will have such a device. There are not too many things in the world like this. ”
Then Cook notes another thing that can be missed, if you don’t understand the meaning that he attaches to each word: “It’s hard to imagine some other market counted in pieces - not in income - it’s so big.”
From the point of sale in units, yes, another iPhone may never appear. But in terms of revenue, well, look at the industries that Apple is entering or is rumored to be considering. The media and entertainment have a $ 550 billion global market. The global car ownership business is $ 3.5 trillion. Annual global investment in health exceeds $ 9 trillion. And while Apple cannot currently dominate any of these sites, remember that analysts once thought that the company would be successful if it received 1% of the mobile phone business.
When we say goodbye, Cook and I stumble upon a discussion of medical care, and it revives again. “We became interested in the health care industry and began to look into health prevention, which gave us thoughts about research, and this thread led us to some patient care systems, followed by considerations about other systems,” says Cook. “When you look at most of the solutions, whether they are devices or products coming from pharmaceutical companies, it is clear that, first of all, they are aimed at receiving a refund from the insurance company. Thoughts that helps the patient, no! Therefore, if you do not take care of the reimbursement - and we have such an advantage - it may turn out that even the smartphone market will seem small. ”
One percent of $ 9 trillion is $ 90 billion. Even Apple can call it a good business.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307680/
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