Innovation is a Fight

Innovation is a Fight | Rands In Repose

Apple is eventually doomed. Yes, the most valuable company on the planet will slowly fade into stagnant mediocrity. It will be replaced by something that they will not predict and they will not see coming. This horrifically efficient culling is a fact of life in technology because it is an industry populated by a demographic intent not on building a better mousetrap, but who avidly ask, “Why the hell do we need mousetraps?”

While I’d continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that’s how business was done at Apple – it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.

Innovation Is a Fight | Daring Fireball

The best and most nuanced take on Scott Forstall’s ouster, unsurprisingly from Michael Lopp:

“I wonder if that is how it begins”… | parislemon

That’s why Lopp’s last point is so important: while the ouster of Scott Forstall makes a ton of sense from an org perspective as it seem to make Apple more stable, maybe that’s not the best thing in the world for Apple going forward. If they’re going to defeat these unknown assailants with unknown products in the future, maybe Apple (and really, any company) needs some level of instability to keep the creative juices flowing. At the very least, it makes it hard for anyone to know what and how to attack.

イノベーションは闘いだ | maclalala2