Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by MacObserver's John Martellaro for his Background Mode series. The podcast is available at this link. John worked on one of the teams that reported to me when I was Apple's director of federal sales. While that was well over fifteen years ago, I tend to believe that Apple has changed little since I left. The exception is that they have lost the education market to Google's Chromebook.
The loss of the education market was not easy because Apple's education customers were a dedicated group. We had a terrible time weaning them from the Apple II to the Macintosh because software, solutions, and outcomes were most important to them. Many preferred the extra computers and color their money would buy to the small black and white screen of the original Mac which had almost no educational software for years. Buying the product with the most profit margin for Apple was not a part of their buying decision.
As Bob Jennings, a thirty-year Apple veteran, who worked a few years for me when I managed higher education from Pennsylvania through North Carolina, had this to say in a comment to my recent post, No Way to Win Back a Market.
The long list of arrogant education executives who only cared about selling more products to schools, regardless of the outcome, was astonishing and yet they have come and gone for years.
Bob hit the nail on the head and if you read his whole comment, you will see he has experience as a teacher to back up his words. Bad leadership in education and higher up executives that lost touch with the market meant Apple was destined to lose the education market. I predicted it over six years ago.
At one time Apple was headed in the right direction with its value-priced MacBook. Today there is nothing value-priced at Apple. I would love to buy a new Apple laptop but I would like a decent and reliable keyboard. It is only available on their new premium-priced sixteen-inch laptop. My 2010 iMac is a 26-inch one for a similar reason. You could only get an I5 processor on the 26-inch not the 21-inch system back in 2010. Apple was company that once believed bucking industry trends for customer needs was a good thing. How about letting us upgrade the memory in our iMacs and MacBooks once again?
While Apple has been able to stay at the top of the pack for smartphones which are consumer products, keeping publishing and education markets has been far more difficult because those markets require that you listen to customers to make certain that their feedback gets into the product development loop very early.
If you take the time to read the Pomme Company, the signs of an executive culture divorced from its customers are abundant. While executives from other technology companies were often eager to visit with customers, Apple executives were reluctant to travel from Cupertino. The ones that did travel often came with the idea that the problem with customers was that they hadn't bought into enough Apple technology not that Apple wasn't listening to their technology needs. I had some unforgettable meetings where an executive or two were handed their heads on a platter.
You can read about those meetings in my book. Apple went from a technology-focused company to a money-making machine that is probably unrivaled in the history of the world. The question as yet unanswered is did they build a company culture that will allow Apple to thrive beyond its dominance of the smartphone market?
The paperback Pomme Company will not answer all the questions about Apple but it certainly has some information that investors should take to heart as they wonder about the future of Apple. The Pomme Company which is 509 pages of easy to read print is available from Amazon with free shipping for Prime members for $14.99. It is also a good guide for those considering corporate sales which is never as simple as it seems.
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