Applepeels

Apple's Big Misstep In Education

I am not surprised by the recent articles about Google unseating Apple in the classroom.  Back in the spring of 2013, I wrote an article, It is not the Pixel that should worry Apple.

It could be argued that Apple's business has been built on education and education is still a key market for the company.  The iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone are the current hot products for Apple and in general are well received in the education market. However no product stays at the top in education forever and Google attacking Apple's education pond is a much bigger problem than Google coming out with an arguably over-priced Chromebook (The Pixel).

I come at this as someone who spent about half of my nearly two decades at Apple selling to the education market.  Back in the last days of the Apple II, I made one of the largest single purchase order sales of Apple IIes.  It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia.  I went on to be higher education account executive of the year in 1992 and then led Apple's most successful higher education team over the five years that Apple treated higher education as a separate market.

I got ripped out of higher education during one of Apple's many reorganizations in the mid-nineties but education stayed close to my heart.

For years Apple believed in the power of computers in education to create consumers of Apple technology.  We used to take great pride in higher education that we sent college students home every Thanksgiving with full instructions as to what their families needed in the way of computer technology.

In the dark days of Apple, when it was hard to find a decent reseller of Apple products anywhere, you could discover many wonderful places to buy Macs on campuses well before Apple Stores ever showed up at the mall.  Apple at the time was a real partner with campus resellers.

When I was director of federal sales at Apple, I can remember being flown to California twice to take part in education briefings.  Schools in the period just after 2000, were worried that using Macs to teach their students would make them ill-prepared for a career in the business world.  My job was to tell them about all the successes that the federal team was having at NASA, NIH, and the many federal labs. The not so subtle message was "Do you want your child just to learn how to use Microsoft Word or how to think like a scientist?"  It was a powerful message and well received by many schools.

Apple is changed company since those days but Apple is still about convincing you that you need the next glitzy device.  At Apple I heard Steve Jobs say many times that we were not an enterprise company but rather one that sold products that are sometimes very useful in the enterprise.  He often followed that message with a comment about the heart of Apple being education.

So what happened?  It would be easy to say that Apple became enthralled with its own gadets and maybe that is part of it. However, I think it was a much more subtle change and I have to put the blame on Steve Jobs and not Tim Cook. Tim Cook might be guiding the good ship Apple, but Steve Jobs put it on this course.

One of the biggest things that changed after Steve came back was how Apple interacted with its higher education and large business customers.  There were changes with the K-12 customers but perhaps not so dramatic.  If you were at Apple in the early nineties, you would probably agree that Apple and many of the thought leaders in higher education agreed that computing had the power to transform education.  At one time Apple invested in many higher education projects.  Apple also listened to higher education customers and worked with them to deliver exactly what their students needed for a college computing environment.  There was a tremendous synergy between Apple and its higher education customers.  We gave them special pricing, told them what we were going to do before we did it, and often protected them from their own mistakes.

Much of this changed when Steve came back.  The first to go were customer meetings with publishing professionals.  Steve did not enjoy customer meetings when he was not on a stage.  While the higher education meetings continued, it was clear that Apple was not listening seriously.

The Cupertino briefings kept going for business, higher education, and K-12 customers but the amount of useful planning information that came out of the meetings declined.  It was not unusual for Apple to pay the way of some K-12 executives to come to a Cupertino briefing but the true education partnerships were gone.  However, the briefings also brought out another change that was close to Steve's heart.  Apple sales people were excluded from customer briefings when non-disclosure information was discussed.  Apple would often tell customers something that they were unwilling to tell their own sales people.

That might seem fine on the surface since no one likes sales people, but when you are company such as Apple which in essence walls itself off from its own customers except for the tiny scripted interactions that take place in an executive briefing, you need consistent, reliable feedback from your sales people as to the directions that customers are headed or the issues they need solved.

By not trusting its own sales people and giving up on customer advisory boards that often fueled Apple's own imagination, I believe Apple has become disconnected from some core elements of its customer base. Having some arrogant, perhaps even toxic sales vps has not helped Apple with its education customers. One of the worst ones is gone, but I suspect people are still trying to repair the damage that he did.

The second thing that I believe hurt Apple is the inability of the company to get web services right.  While today's iCloud is better than it was, it is way too confusing compared to Google's Drive and Docs which just keep getting better and better.

The web has been an afterthought for Apple for as long as I can remember.  Your web data has often been tied to a particular device just like your iPod.  I remember a strong push from some of us in Apple's enterprise groups for a home directory that would work from USB thumb drives. I actually saw prototypes working but Steve shot it down because he thought people would screw it up.

Google has always abstracted the data from the hardware, Apple has always tied the data to a device in the hopes that you will buy a new one.

You can use Google Docs from just about any device including Macs of all stripes.  Just try using Apple's cloud services from an Android device. Of course I have found Apple's cloud apps are often hobbled like the inability to do notes in Pages or presenter notes in Keynote.  Actually you cannot even upload files from an old Mac to Apple's own Cloud drive.  You have to use DropBox.  How many schools have you visited where old Macs and in fact any old computers that they can find are part of their educational computing program?

While Apple was diddling around with the complexities of NetBoot, difficult to manage one to one laptop deployments and trying to convince educational customers that first the iPod, then the iPad was the greatest thing for education since chalk, Google went out and solved some real customer problems and gave educational users a way to use computers without a lot of hassle.  They also gave them a keyboard, a way to collaborate, and they made it very inexpensive.

Apple makes very nice devices.  On Black Friday, my wife and I were in Best Buy.   I wanted her to have a look at a MacBook.  Since I work for a company that uses Macs, I thought it would be nice for her to get a Mac so I would have one in case I needed to edit some Pages documents when we are traveling (and yes I have used Pages on the web).   She spent some time with a MacBook Air and then went over and tried a Chromebook.  Her question to me, "Why would anyone with basic browsing and email needs spend more than three times the money on a MacBook?" I had no answer.

For education customers the question turns out to be, "Why would I spent double the money on an iPad that doesn't meet the needs of my students as well as a Chromebook which is much easier to manage?"

It is a good question and most educational institutions have figured out the answer as we can see from the education sales figures.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where being on the beach is more attractive than being in Best Buy on Black Friday or being an Apple education rep at any time.

Tim Cook's Excuses Uninspiring

I just read David Smith's ReadWrite Article, Why Apple's iPad May Have Peaked.  Many readers know that I have a long history with Apple and did work with Tim Cook when I was director of Apple federal sales team. I have also credited Tim with being one of the three people who helped to save Apple.   Almost exaclty two years ago I said that Tim Cook might be the right person for Apple.

Unfortunately in the two years since I wrote that I have seen little evidence that Tim is the guy who can take Apple to the next level.  I was very disappointed that Tim basically blamed changes in channel inventory for the iPad's disappointing results.  The arguments are weak and typically would have been dismissed not very pleasantly in a Jobs led Apple.

Most people think Apple's success hinges on making great products, but Apple's got where it is by defining new categories and changing the way we interact with devices.  Since Tim Cook has been at the helm, Apple has fallen into the game of trying to beat other devices on specifications. There have been no new categories.

Steve Jobs always said that trying to out spec another manufacturer was a losing battle.  What we have seen under Tim Cook basically proves that Steve was right.  Retina displays and the thinnest and lightest computers provide only a momentary victory because other manufacturers quickly catch up and pass you.

Tim Cook is a numbers guy.  There is nothing wrong with that, but his leadership has yet to to inspire the rest of Apple to find the next great thing which helps redefine computing.  Apple is a money machine and certainly is not going to disappear, but the disappointing iPad results are a clear warning that the mother ship definitely needs some attention.

The reality is that Amazon and others have products out there that cost less and have arguably better specs than the iPad. Others are eating the iPad's lunch and it is not a light channel inventory that is responsible for weak iPad numbers.

Unfortunately Apple's top down culture might need to be turned upside down before the next great thing can come out of Apple.

That is my nickel view on Apple from North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

 

Could Apple have been even more successful?

I was hired to go to work at Apple in October of 1984, only a few months after the Macintosh was introduced.  My first official day was November 26, 1984.  In one of the few moves in those days targeted at saving money, my partner and I did not get to start until after the sales conference that year.  We were sure they just did not want to spend the money for another two tickets to Hawaii from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

 

My days at Apple lasted until July of 2004.  This summer it will be ten years since I left Apple and a lot has changed at the company and in my life. In 1984, fresh out of two years in sales management at an Apple reseller, Macs were the only computers in my life.

 

Today I am down to two Macs and my life has more Windows and Android devices than Apple products.  At the peak of our addiction, and I include my family since they were all Mac users, we had well over a dozen Macintoshes not counting my collection of old Macs. Today the total number of Macs across the five adults in the family numbers three.  The two that I have and one iMac that my older daughter has.  No one in the family has an iPad or an iPhone. Even my wife who loved her 12” Powerbook well beyond its useful life is now using a HP laptop.  I think we might be able to find two or three old iPods in drawers.

 

With the drop in Apple products in our family, I started wondering if the technology in our lives might have been different if Apple had been even more successful particularly outside the consumer world.

 

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that arguably the world’s most successful technology company might have been more successful, but I expect if you could find other ex-Apple sales folks besides me willing to talk, you might find a number who would agree with me that Apple could have gone farther in the enterprise if they had wanted to do so.

 

Back in December on my Applepeels blog, I posted an entry, The Decision That Lost The Desktop For Apple.  In it I make the argument that the pricing decisions that Apple made at the height of the popularity for the Macintosh II had a huge impact on Apple’s desktop market share.

 

You could take my reasoning a little further and say that we were all hurt by Apple’s punting on the enterprise market.  Certainly the federal information technology world which needs all the help it can get. I have argued at ReadWrite that federal IT is a mess.

 

Then there is the rest of the enterprise and publishing market which actually kept Apple afloat until Steve Jobs discovered the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.  My career at Apple ended roughly about the time that Apple figured out that selling to consumers was a whole lot easier than meeting the demands of fussy CIOs.  As an Apple product manager famously once told me, “Customers do not tell us what to make, we tell them what to buy.”

 

But what if Apple had been successful in the enterprise market?  Many of us believed that Apple had all the elements needed to be successful there except the support of Steve.  We had a great operating system that was far more secure from viruses at a time when Windows was being swallowed alive by all sorts of threats.  In those early days of OS X even Apple laptops and professional desktops were very competitively priced.

 

We were able to get token support from Steve on some federal requirements like SmartCard support, but there was never a serious push into the enterprise after Steve came back to Apple.  There was only ever a handful of enterprise sales people at Apple and in spite of some recent rumblings reported by Business Insider I don't think that is going to really change.  My guess is that the 100 enterprise people Apple is looking for probably just cover the ones that got too expensive on the payroll and were let go. 

 

When my team took over the federal market for Apple, we started with one sales person on each coast, one system engineer, my area associate, and me.  We joked that we could hold team meetings in my Previa van.

 

Still Apple and my federal team in particular was very successful in the federal market.  Many CIOs were tired of being held over a barrel by Microsoft.  The cost for Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) was a thorn in the side of many federal CIOs.  However, no CIO federal or otherwise was stupid enough to bet their whole enterprise on Apple which refused to say in public that the enterprise was important to the success of company.

 

One of my last meetings at Apple was taking Avie Tevanian in June 2004 to see Karen Evans, who at the time was the CIO for the whole federal government.  Avie got wound up trying to convince Karen to start developing applications with WebObjects.  Karen handed him his head and told him the federal government had moved to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software.  She also asked him a question that sent him into a serious enough tailspin that I had to rescue him.  She wanted to know why she should trust her important business to company that only ever talked about the consumer market and iPods?

 

The fact that Apple practically gave up on the federal market and has never taken a lot of the business world seriously left room for Microsoft to keep pounding away on their OS until they came up with Windows 7.   The lack of a viable alternative to Microsoft meant they were to maintain their stranglehold on the feds.  It also left a lot of the small business world firmly in the grip of Windows XP and its descendants.

 

My two older children are in IT and the youngest worked in a finance office.  My wife worked in an insurance office and after Apple I sampled a number of different workplaces whose only common denominator like those of the rest of the family was that usually I was the only Mac user in groups as large as seventy to one hundred.  I struggled through the pains of VISTA but was pleasantly surprised with Windows 7.  I held off in getting a smartphone for a long time.  A year after my son bought a Droid, I relented and followed his platform choice. I did not even consider an iPhone because the AT&T network was so bad here on the edges of civilization.

 

At WideOpen Networks job, I am happy to be back at a Mac centric company, but I am not going to give up my Windows gear.  I like living in a multi-platform world and I know how fickle the winds of Apple are.

 

Had Apple been more successful in the enterprise market, my family might never have wandered away from the platform.  Obviously Apple is very successful, but just imagine a world where you went to work and everyone was using Macs.  I think Apple not pursuing the enterprise world left room for Microsoft to keep plugging away.  There was a time when the argument that the Mac was a more secure platform was undeniable.

 

I stuck with Macs not because of any great love for Apple but because I like using the product. It is not inexpensive to use a Mac in spite of what some loyalists will tell you, but I find myself more productive doing certain things on a Mac so I have not given up on the platform.

 

Perhaps we have Apple to thank for the fact that we all can buy some pretty nice Windows hardware like my Lenovo Yoga at very reasonable prices and some great tablets like the inexpensive Nexus 7 that I have.  If Apple had taken the enterprise market seriously and made some aggressive moves on pricing, this world might be even more Apple centric than it already is.  Then again, all that success in the enterprise world might have distracted Apple and we would have never gotten the iPhone and iPad.  Then it might have taken a long time for Android to develop and we would have all been stuck with Blackberries.

 

We will never know for sure.

Hard to put a rosy shine on the Apple

I am sure there are diehard Apple fans who believe nothing is wrong at Apple and the company is hitting on all cyclinders.  I doubt that is the case.  Unfortunately like all large companies in a very competitive global market, Apple is finding the road to continuing success a road with some twists and turns.

In spite of the challenges, I am not going to join with Doug Ehrman, a contributor to Motley Fool, and suggest that Apple would be better off by getting rid of Tim Cook.  I actually thought Ehrman's arguments were particularly weak. The idea that consumers will give Apple a break if they are searching for a new CEO is a fantasy.

One of the biggest challenges for Apple in the nearly twenty years that I was there was the revolving door management.  The reality is that you will never replace Steve Jobs.  Tim Cook plus almost anyone is still no Steve Jobs, but I firmly believe that Tim needs to find some new leaders with a passion for technology.  He needs to stop listening to whomever is whispering in his ear currently and find some folks who can bring some excitement back to the company.  There has to be more to innovation than thin, light, high resolution screens, and prices that are higher than anyone else in the industry.

There are some serious problems with Apple.

1. Obviously Apple has not been nimble enough to respond to the Android challenge in tablets and smart phones.  Going to court also has not worked.
2. Apple's strategy of taking industry standard parts and demanding unbelievable margins in computers to add to their cash horde is unsustainable in the long run.
3. If Apple is going to be a premium product, it needs service where there are no hiccups like my iLemon. Even Tim Cook's Executive Relations team which had initially promised to solve all my iMas's problems gave up on it and gave me the remarkably sage diagnosis that it was broken.  Guess what? Computers that cost $1,900 and are less than two years old should not break.  I had five other people all with similar iMac problems contact me.  That included one Apple employee who was afraid to push the issue.
4. Apple needs a culture change.  If you can find someone who worked at Apple and is willing to talk, you will find that Steve Jobs created a company culture where risk taking was discouraged.  You will also find that aside from developers, Apple has isolated itself from customers who might at least provide some serious feedback which is not tainted by the famed reality distortion zone.  I am not talking about people talking to their local genius bar.
5. Apple still does not understand the cloud and their new beta of cloud based software is almost embarrassing.  iWork beta in the cloud cannot import RTF files. (note hyper links are now working)
6. Pre-announcing a new product like the new Mac Pro and not shipping it is even worse than the fiasco that Steve Jobs created in 2003 when he preannounced the G5s in June and was unable to ship any until the end of July.
7. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion.  I find Windows 8 more stable and more usable. I cannot stand the dumbing down of OS X and apps like iPhoto which I have stopped using.
8. If you are going to have the best products, quit doing stupid things like putting the SD slot on the back of a huge iMac screen.  Make sure your products are also the best to service.  Having to pull the huge LCD panel to get to a hard drive should not be the first choice.
9. There are companies like Lenovo who believe they can deliver high quality and reasonable prices. If Apple is going to be the Lexus of the computer world, they need to fix problems when they find them instead of creating angry customers.  Otherwise consumers will figure it out.
10. Apple has always been proud that they ignore the competition and make their own way. That may no longer be possible.  They need people who can figure out what the competition is doing right and help Apple get ahead of the curve.  I see no evidence that Apple has people like that currently.

What's is still right with Apple

1. They have some very passionate customers, but even there their patience is limited.  We had an Apple user visiting with us recenlty  He was very ticked off that his photos which should have been in the iCloud and on his iPad were missing in action.  His comment to me was that it was becoming too complex to be an Apple customer. I promise that I did not coach him.  As far as I could tell he had everything set correctly and the photos were just not there.
2. Apple has a core of great products.  They need to get better not just thinner, lighter or weirder.
3. They have a strong developer community.
4. There are some very hard working and bright Apple employees.

What does Tim Cook need to do?

1. He has to decide what the new Apple is going to be. It will not be Steve Jobs' Apple.
2. Innovation has to once again become a core value at Apple.
3. Apple can no longer afford to screw up the cloud.  Go buy Dropbox or someone else who has a good cross-platform cloud model and then add some Apple value to it.
4. Get OS X back to being the best OS out there.  That I prefer Windows 8 and Xubuntu Linux to Mac OS X Mountain Lion should be an embarrassment to Apple.
5. People still use devices for the software.  If you cannot figure out how to create great software, you better start throwing some more support towards open source.  While Picasa might not be as pretty as iPhoto, try editing a few dozen photos with each and tell me which one does it easier and better.  I already know the answer.

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

1. I love nicely designed hardware and I still think Apple can be the best source of this.
2. I want competition. It is the way we get better products.
3. Twenty years at a company even if the last two were the pits still makes you root for them a little.

For those who have just found my Applepeels blog, it, like me, has been around for a long time. There is more about me at this link or it you want to explore my non-Apple writing a little more try this link but it comes with some upfront apologies if my page does not resize properly in your browser. 

At one time I had over a thousand pages of posts on Applepeels. Apple never challenged the accuracy of a single one of my posts.  However,  much of the older Applepeels content is now found in our book, The Pomme Company.

And for those who might care, the book is now available in paperback. It is expensive because of the large number of color pictures, but on the other hand, the Kindle version is very inexpensive.  Print production costs are what they are.

Just to be clear so potential readers understand the book's content, there are no Apple secrets in the book.  It is about working at Apple.   However, no other person that I am aware of who was at Apple for nearly twenty years has written an unchallenged book.  Every Apple employee who was part of the history and who has read the book and communicated back to me has commented that if anything I was too kind to Apple.

Little of what I saw has changed according to reports from people still at Apple. I did work with Tim Cook so my comments are not idle speculation.   If you want to see what it is like to be in Apple sales, the book will meet your needs. The book will most definitely show you a side of Apple that few people aside from Apple employees have ever seen.

 

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

Do Apple Employees Need A Witness Protection Program?

I am rarely surprised about what comes out of Apple, but this caught even me a little off guard.   Some of you know that I have a long history with Apple .  I have seen things that I still have a hard time believing.  However, my recent experience with Apple's unreal world is a reminder of just how weird things can get for you if your paycheck comes from the folks in Cupertino.

In October of 2001, I was named manager of the year for my team's outstanding performance in the federal market.  A friend took a picture of my team at the awards banquet.  I have always treasured the picture and been very proud of our accomplishment since we were covering the worlds largest IT market with a handful of people. 

I wanted to include the picture in my book and took the time to ask each person in the picture for their permission to be in the book.  It wasn't a controversial photo.  No one was nude or holding a Windows PC.  Much to my surprise three of the five current Apple employees declined to be in the photo.  I edited the image so they are unrecognizable.

One person admitted to being afraid of the consequences of being in the photo, and I respect that.  Two came up with excuses that were plain laughable.  

You can try to appreciate the situation by working through this.  For a moment imagine worrying about being in a photo taken eleven years ago when your team was the tops at Apple.  Then think about worrying about the photo being in a book that you didn't write and which you haven't even seen but which is basically a historical account of someone else's career in the fictional Pomme Company.  Then remember that none of these employees are even named in the book.

If you have that scenario in your mind, you now know just how much control Apple exercises over its people.  The whole episode reminds me a little of the "Minority Report."

When a former manager of mine who is in the picture heard about the incident he asked, "What is the story with these people? Are they in a witness protection program?"

He has been gone from Apple for almost ten years, and I exited a little over eight years ago.  We have both returned to a normal world where you aren't afraid to open a box of literature before a keynote speech.  I don't miss folks worrying about someone from the press tricking them into answering a question.

The culture of fear runs deep in Apple sale's division.  If you want to know about life at Apple in sales, you can now read my newly published book, "The Pomme Company."

Some friends have said my book should be required reading for people wanting to join Apple's sales force.

The book has taken a little over a year and was interrupted by a note from Apple's legal folks warning me to adhere to my non-disclosures.    That is actually easy to do since most of us at Apple heard no secrets.  The joke used to be that when we wanted to find out what Apple was about to announce we would check out MacSurfer.

My book is about my somewhat amazing journey.   I went from running a cattle operation in eastern Canada to being the director of federal sales for Apple.  The journey actually started just after we dispersed our cattle and I started selling Apple II+s for a small company in Fredericton, New Brunswick.  It ended with me as director of federal sales sitting on Capitol Hill with Avie Tevanian in a cyber security hearing.

My career at Apple transformed my life and that of my family.  I'll be interested to hear what people think of the book which is priced at $5.99.  It has lots of pictures of historical interest to people interested in Apple.

Most of all if you want a peak at the Apple culture that I saw, my book will be a cure for your curiousity.

Has Apple lost its soul?

My up and down relationship with Apple still hasn't reached a turning point. I remain hopeful that Cupertino will announce a product that will catch my fancy. I have a long history with the company.

I have enjoyed watching the launch of the new iPhone 5, but I am still happy with my Android powered LG Spectrum and the Kindle Fire my children gave me last fall.  I am waiting for some Apple products to excite all of us who built our digital lives around Apple solutions.

With all the media coverage around the iPhone 5 announcement, I especially enjoyed the Jimmy Kimmel segment where some supposed iPhone users couldn't tell the difference between the iPhone 4S they were being shown and the new iPhone 5.  However, perhaps that is a cheap shot.  I'm not sure I could tell you the difference between my latest LG Smartphone and whatever new product LG has announced.

Beyond being the butt of  a few jokes on late night comedy shows, there are some serious problems with Apple.

It is easy to ignore the issues if you just measure the company by their unbelievable stock price.  Before I go further let me say that I still believe that Apple makes great hardware products, and perhaps the latest iPhone and iPad are among the best they have ever made.

The question for me comes down to this, can the Apple of today follow through with its direction without paying better attention to its computer and software roots?

If you are new to Applepeels and want some perspective on me before reading more, try this link to my Apple history.

Perhaps the most worrisome issue for me, is the health of Mac OSX.  Having only recently taken the step to go to Lion, I still haven't upgraded to Mountain Lion.  I normally don't jump on an Apple first release, and I was actually hoping that Apple would announce a new Mac Mini by this time.  If that had happened I could take the step to Mountain Lion with new hardware.

Lion has been a mixed experience for me.  Perhaps you need an iOS device to really see its benefits, but I get the distinct feeling that there are now far too many ways to do the same thing on OS X.  I believe that some of the simplistic beauty of OSX has been lost as a layer of complexity has been added. 

While I am worried about OSX, I am downright depressed about iPhoto. I was at Apple when Steve was focused on the release of iPhoto. It was a revolutionary program at the time, and it had the full attention of Steve.

I'm pretty sure that Steve would not be happy with the current user interface on iPhoto.  One of the great things about the original version of iPhoto was the ease with which you could create a web album for your friends to see.  In the latest version of iPhoto on the Mac we are stuck with photostream which seems to be an all or nothing solution unless you want to use Flickr or Facebook.

As a photographer who sometimes takes a thousand pictures in a day.  I want to be able to quickly sort through the pictures, select the good ones, make some adjustments, put copies of the ones I like in cloud storage, and then create web albums of ones that I plan to show to more than a few people.  That process used to be very simple with a Mac.  That is no longer the case.

I now do my initial photo sorting and tune-ups on a Windows 7 laptop because it is easier with Picasa than it is with iPhoto. In a number of areas where iPhoto was ahead of Picasa, Apple has managed to dumb down recent versions of iPhoto.  While this was happening Google actually made Picasa better and more efficient.  While I have Picasa on the Mac, I have hung with iPhoto hoping it would get better.

While Picasa might not look as glitzy as iPhoto, you will get more work done with Picasa.  On top of that Picasa easily puts one or dozens of photos on the web with easily controllable access.  I haven't tried to find the extra cost plug-in that I purchased for my previous versions of iPhoto so I could directly load photos into Picasa web albums from iPhoto.  Likely the reason is that I resent paying for something that should be there.

It really is a final straw for me that in iPhoto Apple has built-in Flickr and Facebook support but has ignored Picasa web albums. I know they are doing this to spite Google, but users are the ones who suffer and Apple offers no solution of its own comparable to Picasa web albums.

If you want to delve into this deeper, read a post or two of mine which compares iPhoto and Picasa.

An even bigger problem is that Apple seems to have fallen into the old trap of if it wasn't invented at Apple, it can't be good.  The recent ditching of Google maps is just not something that will work out well for Apple over the long term.

I have no question that Apple has the money to create a great map solution, but I seriously doubt Apple has the management culture and the persistence to stick with their own mapping solution until it is a great product.  It is not in Apple's DNA to incrementally upgrade software or a backend solution until it is a really solid product.

If you don't believe me, just think back to the original .Mac product and all its many iterations including iCloud which was going to change everything.

Actually it has changed everything, just not for the better.

Compare Apple's cloud solution with GoogleDrive, SkyDrive, or DropBox, and it looks like making a home grown solution isn't necessarily the best path for Apple.

Apple has a history of alienating partners and having to go it on their own. Maps is just a symptom of that problem. As an Apple employee once told me, you can't say the word "partner" and Apple in the same sentence.  Let's hope that Apple makes nice with Microsoft so they don't pull the plug on Office for the Mac.

Even if Maps is a good idea, many good Apple ideas have withered on the vine for lack of attention.  Does anyone remember eWorld, Apple's online world that was going to be better than AOL?

And if that comparison doesn't ring true, just look at the history of Apple branded or backed word processors for the Mac and compare that to Microsoft which does have a history of banging its head against the wall and showering money on a project until they either succeed (Word & XBox) or fail (Zune).

Remember back to the introduction of the original Mac. It came with MacWrite.  It wasn't long after the introduction of the Mac that Microsoft came out with Word.  MacWrite after the Claris spinoff eventually became MacWrite Pro.

Then came ClarisWorks which eventually became AppleWorks before disappearing completely.  Now we have Pages which will eventually languish like the rest of Apple's word processors. Word is still around.

The lack of a culture built around incrementally improving products as opposed to ditching them is a huge challenge in the technology world.  While Apple might have mastered it with the iPhone, they have a number of other products begging for updates.

Beyond  this I believe the biggest problem that Apple has is the wall that the company throws up between the company and its customers.

While Microsoft and other companies are working hard to listen to customers, Apple is busy listening to itself.  If you are going to incrementally improve something like a map solution, you need a close working relationship with your users.  I have sent Google a few notes over the years about problems that I have found on their maps.  While I have never heard back from them, every problem that I found has been resolved.

I'm not sure Apple knows how to act similarly. Perhaps if Apple could develop a strategy to start reaching out to customers in a company supported blog, it might be a first step, but unfortunately the company's DNA would have to change before they started blogging.

As long as Apple can keep iPhones and iPads flying out the door, perhaps all these issues are irrelevant. But I do believe that Apple's OSX software is a strategic product and deserves serious attention that it is not getting.

If Apple does hit a blip, and it likely will, I suspect many of the customers who came to Apple's rescue in the past will be gone.  It remains to be seen whether current iPhone and iPad customers will be as loyal or just jump ship for the next shiny trinket.

Just a few updates and I'm off to bed.

We spent a good part of the summer doing our final move from our house in Roanoke, Virginia.  We have bid Roanoke adieu, and we will no longer be making our once a month trip from the coast to the mountain. 

We are very happy to be living here by our inlet.  The peace that I find in the wildness along the Southern Outer Banks has pretty well mended the nerve ends that were seared by Apple's winner take all culture.

If the fishing doesn't require my full attention this fall and if I don't fall under the spell of the area's blue skies, I hope to finally get the book about my Apple career published.  It has been a bigger challenge than I thought it would be.

 

 

 

With MobileMe Gone, Solutions for Photos?

Whatever you thought of MobileMe, it did offer one solution for sharing photos on the web.  With iCloud Apple has effectively gotten out of the photo sharing business.

The one good thing about iCloud is that you won't have to worry about losing your albums because there are none. I guess it is also a little harder to think of Apple as "the hub of your digital life."

Fortunately there are many other solutions besides Apple. I don't pretend to know them all.  However, I do come at this from the perspective of someone who started using the original .Mac service from the beginning so I feel the pain of those who have lost MobileMe albums or web sites.

I had my own interesting experiences in migrating to iCloud.

That said, years ago after the first change of architecture in Apple's online storage which resulted in many of my albums being forcibly retired, I became worried.  I started actively investigating alternatives.  Early on my good friend Stephen @batess turned me on to Picasa Web Albums while I was experimenting with Flickr.

Picasa Web Albums has over time become my default option for storing my photos on the web. I have never regretted the trust that I put in the platform.

There are plenty of "Cloud" storage options out there, and I use several of them.  Many are free and most have storage upgrades that are much cheaper than Apple was after the heyday of free .Mac accounts ended.

I hope to discuss a few of these alternatives and make it clear that even if Apple decides to have a way to store photos in their "Cloud,"  I would likely not bite on the offer a third time.

Just to be completely clear, Photostream is only a solution for sharing a small number of photos between compatible devices.  A compatible devices rules out an older Mac but does include a Windows 7 device.

For several years, in addition to hanging onto to my MobileMe Galleries, I have extensively used slide shows on my various websites.  Flickr, and Picasa Web Albums have also been in the mix. There is no perfect solution, and the simple thing is to try a few things and see what works best for you.  Of course that depends somewhat on your computing environment.

My computing world includes an I5 iMac, an I7 Lenovo laptop running Windows 7, an old Dell Pentium 3 running Ubuntu, and a couple of older Macs including my trusted Dual G5 system which I purchased almost eight years ago.  I am running the I5 Mac in a dual boot situation.  I have Lion running on an external hard drive and Snow Leopard running on the internal drive.  For my reasons behind that, you can see my post, The Mysteries of Apple, MobileMe, & iCloud.

I have both iPhoto and Picasa running on my I5 iMac.  For more information on my reasons for that check my post, The saga of Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa with some tests. 

However, in my workflow, usually the first place that a photo meets a computer is my Windows laptop since I no longer have a functioning Mac laptop.  The windows laptop stays on our kitchen table, and when I come in from my early morning walk and finish my coffee, I often upload my photos to Picasa on the Lenovo.  By the same token when I come in after a five mile beach walk, the photos usually go first into Picasa.

Picasa, while it is not as pretty as iPhoto, does a lot of things and does them quickly.  While the iPhoto user interface has become slower to use, Picasa's has become faster and more versatile.

It is not unusual for me to run through three or four hundred photos and pick out the best ones in Picasa and do some basic adjustments for light and post them in an album on the web like this Hammock's Beach Album on Picasa Web Albums.

I sometimes will export individual photos or several photos to either DropBox or GoogleDrive.  It is easy then for me to find the best photos when I go up to my office and sit down at my Mac.  I also usually upload all my photos to iPhoto and run Picasa on the I5 iMac often enough to let it include all the photos that I have uploaded to iPhoto.

The other day when I was talking to another photographer who had lost his MobileMe albums, I created similar examples of the same Hammocks Beach photos on Microsoft's SkyDrive and on flickr.  Clicking on the links will take you to the albums.

When I export individual photos, I usually want to use them somewhere besides an album.  An example would be the photo in the post, Life without Walls, on my Crystal Coast Life website.  The photo came from that same set taken at Hammocks Beach.  I currently use Pixelmator for anything that I can't do in Picasa or iPhoto.  Of course I also post photos to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

Sometimes, I want to make a self contained photo album and post it on my own website.  I have traditionally used ShutterBug, a Mac based piece of software to do that.  An example of a Shutterbug site would be this one that I created to sell stuff from our Roanoke, VA house which has just gone under contract. 

I attempted to create a Shutterbug site for the Hammocks Beach photos, but I ran into an incompatibility between my old dual G5, iPhoto, and Shutterbug.  Shutterbug could not see the iPhoto albums so it had nothing to work with in creating a slide show.  Shutterbug is a good product and certainly should not be judged on how it works on an eight year old Mac. I'm certain that I would have had no troubles on my iMac with more recent software.

With my inability to create the Shutterbug beach site, I decided to look for a free solution that would work on Windows and Macs.  I found VisualLightBox.  I downloaded the Windows version, and in two or three minutes created and uploaded this online album of the Hammocks Beach photos.  It was extremely straight forward, but to use VisualLightBox you have to manage your own website and understand a little about folders on websites.

As I get ready to make recommendations, two other factors are important in my digital life.  I have an Android phone, the LG Spectrum, and I have one of the original Kindle Fires.  I am no expert in iPhones or iPads, so make sure you run some tests of your own if those products are important to you.

First off the best and most complete solution is the one from Google. Picasa Web Albums has been a reliable photo partner for years.  It has never let me down like .Mac and MobileMe.  The photos that I put there years ago are still there.  It is easy to share individual photos or whole albums.  Picasa web albums are well integrated into Picasa and with a third party plug-in it is also easy to upload from iPhoto.

Google has over the last year made some changes in their effort to promote Google+.  If you have a Google+ profile attached to your Picasa Web Albums identity, Google pushes you to create the Google+ album first, and then an automatic duplicate one is created in Picasa web albums.

I actually find that a little inconvenient so I have two Google identities, one with a Google+ profile and the other without one.  When I upload photos using my identity without the Google+ profile, they go directly to my Picasa web albums account tied to that identity.  I like it better that way though I am warming to the way things are shared in Google+.

With an Android phone, both of my Picasa web albums accounts sync to my phone.  Of course I can log into either of the accounts using the browser on my Kindle Fire.

However that seems a little inelegant to me so I have recently discovered a new piece of software called Portfolio for Windows Skydrive.  The company, Snapwood Apps, makes a number of photo apps for different sharing services.

What Portfolio for Skydrive does is turn a folder of photos in a slide show when I run the app on my Android device.  It works great and I love it.  I wish they would do one for Google Drive.  The limitation is that the slide show is driven by the app on your device so you can't share it.

However, having said that I think Windows Sky Drive has some of the best sharing controls that I have seen.

So if you don't have a home for your photos on the web, there are plenty of options and several more that I haven't discussed.  The one option not there is a solution from Apple. 

In this world of everything being online, Apple's absence is a major mistake in my opinion, but I suspect it all goes back to Apple not understanding what a "Cloud" really does.

I actually think Apple would have a far better understanding of what is needed if the company got a little more involved in social media, but that is a post for another day.

If you get a chance, stop by my View from the Mountain blog, and check on my latest post, The Three Kinds of People in the World.  There is not much doubt where Steve would have fit in my categories.

Take-out Tomato Soup and Apple's view of the future

I actually don't see very many television commercials because I watch very little television.  While I know that television commercials are not a locked-in-stone view of the future, they do give us some insight into the companies who put them on the air.  Commercials especially help us identify the products that business like Apple love the most.

While it might not go into the annals of silliest commercials, Apple's last "Siri" commercial which features someone ordering take-out tomato soup deserves some consideration.

Long ago, Apple had a marketing campaign based on a flying car. It didn't last long. Perhaps it was just before its time since flying cars seem to be coming back for real.  

However, some of Apple's campaign's have really resonated with computer users.

Perhaps my favorite was the one with the dog and the young boy who unpacked his iMac and got on the Internet faster than an adult male who had purchased a Windows computer.

I think the commercial was a homerun because at the time, getting a computer other than a Mac functioning was a really time-consuming and frustrating experience.  Getting an iMac going was pretty easy.  Of course life even with an iMac was a whole lot better when it got a Firewire port and could write CD-ROMs.

We have come a long way since the iMac was first introduced. Other manufacturers have learned a lot from Apple.  I would argue that setting up a new Windows PC is not very different from a new Mac today.  I have done both in the last couple of years.

I don't think it is difficult to argue that Apple isn't nearly as interested in desktop and laptop computers today as they are in iPads and iPhones.  Long ago I predicted that Apple desktop and laptop market share would peak at around ten percent.  I think that is pretty close to their current US market share.  I don't see it growing.

However, I never guessed that peaking at ten percent would be because Apple has lost interest in computers. I know that iPhones and iPads are selling like hot cakes but isn't a Mac still at the heart of it? You certainly can't run iCloud without a Mac to create your identity.

Maybe Apple's focus on small gadgets is finally reaching Mac lovers as it appears that users might not be jumping on Apple's iCloud bandwagon.  Apple is now giving away Snow Leopard to make it easier for users to buy Lion.

Maybe Apple's marketing has become silly enough that it is no longer a company strength. Or perhaps potential computer purcahsers aren't interested in searching for take-out tomato soup with their phone assistant?

If you ask me to define Apple's current marketing message, I would say it is all about very fancy screens for tablets and a future where we are reduced to ordering take-out tomato soup.

Maybe I grew up in a different world, but the thought of being lazy enough to order take-out tomato soup is beyond what I can imagine.  And in this world where people are struggling to find jobs, does Apple really believe that there are people out there who can afford to order take-out tomato soup or who even would want to?

If the computer future that Apple envisions for us is asking my phone silly questions and following the responses, it might be time to say out loud that Steve's absence is being felt.

Those of you who still know how to cook might want to try my grilled salmon recipe which is at the end of this post.

Lessons that Apple might learn from its past

If you are a long-time reader of Applepeels, you might know that I have said many times over the years the experience of being an Apple employee depends a lot on what you are doing and the management team in charge of your division.

Today I came across a presentation from RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) that talks about what really motivates people. 

Paying attention to some of the thoughts in the presentation would really help Apple fix a hidden weak spot in their culture and management philosophy. 

You might argue that Apple doesn't need any help with anything, but I actually know some very good people who have left Apple.   In the long run even for a great product company, losing very good people could lead to problems down the road.

Apple actually had some great results in the past from the techniques discussed by RSA, but I suspect that years of wet-behind-the-ear MBAs have erased the memories.

It is likely not a surprise to some readers that Steve Jobs was not a fan of the Apple sales force.  At best he believed them to be a necessary evil.  I did get to hear him in essence say that.  Unfortunately, I never got to have a personal talk to Steve about his views on sales. 

However, I did work for some of his Apple managers who really did not understand sales.

Understanding the potential for success by having good sales leadership as opposed to having nit-picking sales management might not matter today in this world where Apple has become the darling of just about everyone.  However, it did once and might again some day.

In the mid-nineties until early in the next decade when customers, especially enterprise ones, were fleeing Apple, it was important to have a sales force which kept customers in the fold so Apple could survive.  I suspect it will be important in the future even if Apple doesn't slip.

There was a time when it was hard to get good people to work at Apple.  There were a lot of reasons for that, but one of the most interesting ones was that Apple sales people didn't make as much money as other technology sales people.  On top of that selling Apple was much more difficult than selling a generic computer box based on price.

That was especially true when you were selling to the enterprise. You had to convince your enterprise customer who was sometimes betting his job on making a large Apple purchase that Apple actually cared about his business.  That was tough to do when Steve spent most of his stage time telling people that Apple was a consumer company that didn't care about large businesses.

Fortunately Apple had people like Fred Anderson and Tim Cook around who were good at talking to enterprise customers.  However, Apple was like many technology companies in one respect.  It believed in a highly leveraged compensation plan that in theory rewarded the top performers the most.

Most of you have likely never been in sales, but those of you who have had some experience in sales would not be surprised if I told you that there is a lot of room for error in setting quotas and measuring performance against them.  All of this boils down to how much money sales people make.

Much of my first experience with Apple was in higher education sales where in the early days it was pretty easy to measure what customers were buying.  Higher education customers bought everything directly from Apple.  You had years of data to help structure quota.  If you had a decent manager and a reasonable divisional goal, you could feel pretty good about having a chance at making money.

In the mid-nineties during one of Apple's countless reorganizations, I got moved over to the business division.  The team I headed was responsible for resellers and large accounts.  It didn't take me long to be appalled at how bad the historical data was and how flawed the quota setting process was in the business division. 

The first year I was there, my team was given quota for a couple of "reseller locations" that turned out to be bank accounts in Delaware.  They ended up being not used the year after we picked up the quota for them.  It was literally millions of revenue which was in our goal and which turned to vapor the year when we were supposed to grow their business.

Still I had a great manager at Apple, and once we got control of the numbers, the next year my team went on to be very successful.  In the fall of 2001, my very good manager fell victim to being blamed for the failure of a hair-brained scheme from upper management to win the enterprise by selling interactive iMac kiosks.

New management was brought in, and my manager who had been in charge of business sales for the US ended up with only one person directly reporting to him.  That person was me, and I had been given the unenviable challenge of turning Apple's tanking federal business around. 

While competitors often had hundreds of reps covering the federal government.  I was given two reps, one on the east coast and one on the west coast.  My area associate came with me and one system engineer along with a person to work with resellers.

It was a daunting challenge, but one thing I did negotiate was a team goal.  In other words I convinced management and the finance people that it was more work to figure out individual numbers for customers than it was just paying everyone on one number. Our small team worked towards one quota number.  If we hit it, we would all be successful.

Doing that made all of our lives much simpler, we focused on the customer and didn't really worry about who was getting paid for what business or even through which channel.  We were wildly successful.  We grew our business a phenomenal amount, and I ended up being manager of the year.

Now the compensation plan obviously was not the only reason for our being successful.  I had run a stealth federal sales organization for over three years.  With help from a number of operating system folks in Cupertino and support from upper management, we removed a lot of barriers facing our customers.  We made Macs attractive as an alternative in the federal market to virus plagued Windows machines.

Still I firmly believe that it you look at the historical records, the team goal was a big part of the reason that a relatively small team of committed individuals were able to turn around Apple's federal business.

We managed to keep our team goal for three years even as the number of people working for me grew to over twenty.  Though we didn't make a lot of money after the first year, we more than tripled Apple's federal revenue in less than four years at time when no other enterprise team was nearly as successful.  The reason we didn't make much money was that each year after the first our goal was set so high that it was almost impossible to make.  That a whole different story.

Still I had a very motivated team that was growing Apple's federal business by leaps and bounds while making less and less money each year.  In the final year that I was at Apple, the team goal was abandoned until six months into the year when Apple had to admit they couldn't figure out individual revenue performance.

It is interesting that most executives get paid on the total performance of the company, yet they almost all believe that paying sales people on just the business they "personally touch" is the only way to effectively compensate them.  I would argue that what is good for motivating executives might work even better for sales people.  It certainly did for the ones who worked for me.

My experience at Apple and the research presented by RSA seems to indicate that a leveraged monetary reward for the top performers isn't necessarily to way to get the best performance out of anyone.  Fixing that might make a huge difference in the Apple sales force over time.

At least that is the view from NC's Crystal Coast where the winds are still blowing this spring, but the ocean water has warmed enough for wading and the air temperature is to the point that a quick dip in the pool is possible.  We still haven't found a new owner for our home in Roanoke, but I have started a new career selling cloud-based network asset management tools.

I will be focusing on that new opportunity in spite of living in a spot where there is a special place around every corner and the beach is always calling me.