My thanks to Eric Jackson for his thoughtful questions and post on Forbes.com. You can read full interview here but I repeat a few non-biographical questions and answers here for discussion:

An Interview With Horace Dediu: On Blogging, Apple And What’s Next

Q: Turning to Apple, where is it at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period?

A: Still too early to tell. They seem to be cooking a lot of things and the great experiment of whether a company can be Jobsian without Jobs is still going on. I have been trying to put together a picture of how it operates. It’s hard because that’s their biggest secret. It’s also a picture that few people have ever seen, even those who worked there a long time. The glimpses so far are tantalizing but there is so much we don’t know and thus can’t assess how robust it is. One thing that is clear to me is that there is no absorption by mainstream observers of what makes Apple tick. It’s hiding in plain sight because what it is isn’t anything anyone can recognize. Case in point is the functional and integrated dimensions. It’s the largest functional organization outside the US Army and more integrated than Henry Ford’s production system. Just describing it sounds medieval and it’s so far outside convention that it’s not something reasonable people are willing to believe actually exists.

Q: Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.

Look at it another way: I subscribe to the idea that any sufficiently large company is a system and needs to be analyzed using a lost art called “Systems Analysis”. This is a complete review of all parts and the way they inter-relate. However, since for most of its life Apple was personified as an individual, what came to pass for Apple analysis was actually the psychoanalysis of that individual. It makes for great journalism and best selling books. It’s also banal and almost certainly wrong. The proof is in the vastness of complexity and number of people involved. Engineers tend to think about constraints and the constraints on companies are innumerable.

Q: You’ve written extensively on the post-PC period, when will we come to the post-phone period – if ever?

Continue reading “An Interview by Eric Jackson: On Blogging, Apple And What's Next”

I recently tweeted that any discussion related to wearable technology needs to begin with a description of the job it would be hired to do. Without a reason for building a product, you are building it simply because you can.

The reason a product deserves to exist is that it can do a job that needs doing and that few, if any others can also do it. This happens when the job is unstated and difficult to perceive. Put another way, the difficulty behind jobs-to-be-done based design is that jobs are never plainly evident. In contradiction to invention, where the problem being solved must be as clearly stated as its solution, value-creating innovation meets new and unarticulated needs. Even when created, the value is more subtly perceived, often only after prolonged use.

Which brings me to the M7. Apple chose to highlight a component (curious in itself) which it bills as a “motion coprocessor”. It claims to be measuring motion data via accelerometer, compass and gyroscope and processing the information in some way. By bundling the sensors and their management into one integrated chip battery consumption is reduced and these motion monitoring functions are performed more efficiently.

But what for? The examples given during the presentation for an iPhone with M7 don’t add up to a lot of benefit. An iPhone could be used as a fitness companion but it would not a very good one. Compared with, for example, a Nike FuelBand, an iPhone could not track your activity well. It’s often not moving, sitting on a desk or in a purse or pocket while you are doing exercise. It’s too big to take into a basketball game. It can’t “observe” your activity because it’s not worn during many activities and if it is worn it is in a position which does not inform much about what you’re doing. Phones are too big to be used as physical activity monitors.

Hence the question of what is the M7’s job to be done. As part of an iPhone, it does not seem to have one. Saving a bit of battery life is not a job, and certainly not one that needs to have billing in a media special event. The answer must be that the M7 was developed for some other, as yet unstated reason.

When the A series chips were created Apple leveraged the in-house design and cost reduction to make a wide range of products with more than 700 million examples built. Designing a chip needs a broad application domain.

Perhaps this is why Apple chose to describe the iPhone 5s as “forward-thinking”. The M7 and the Touch ID are like research projects whose actual value will be realized at some future time, in probably different contexts. The M series of chips may become Apple’s “low end” microprocessor as the A series climbs the trajectory into core computing tasks (read: phone, tablets, TV, laptops).

M might be the chip for the wearable segment, woven into a whole new fabric of uses and jobs to be done.

When looking at the Race to a Billion data I noticed that some platform adoption ramps look quite different from others. It’s not just a matter of “slope” or rate of growth but a distinctly different shape.

If you look at the graph below you might see the difference yourself.

First, note that the graph is logarithmic. A straight line on a log chart implies exponential growth (the y values are a constant to the power of the x value). However, none of the graphs show straight lines. None of the platforms follow exponential growth1.

Second, we can eliminate linear or logarithmic functions. They simply do not fit.

That leaves: polynomial or power. It’s easy to test these alternatives for all the functions and it becomes clear that most of the platforms split into one of these two classes.

Continue reading “A new platform classification”

1. Except perhaps in the very early periods [↩]