Reading the Room

Many of Apple’s recent stumbles strike me as decidedly simple

Several years ago, I wrote a post outlining a need I saw for big companies: a VP of Devil’s Advocacy. That is, someone who could serve as a gut-check ahead of product launches, to make sure they should really go forward.¹

This was in the wake of Amazon’s Fire Phone fiasco, which was so obviously going to be a fail from the get-go that I was surprised that Amazon actually launched it. Of course, they would argue — and no less than Jeff Bezos has — that without such failures, or really, the willingness to take risks, progress wouldn’t happen. Or at least, progress would be much slower. And the learnings from such attempts and failures leads to other things, like the Echo and Alexa, in Amazon’s case.

And, sure. Still, it feels like if you can get away without spending millions of dollars pushing something that is never going to work, that would be a useful thing for a company to know. And yet it seems to happen time and time again. Apple’s HomePod and Samsung’s Galaxy Fold are just two recent examples that spring to mind.

Also, in our current environment, these types of product and/or initiative mishaps also just serve to exacerbate the broader problems that many of these companies have — or are perceived to have. Facebook’s Portal jumps to mind here. The company launched a camera for your home just as they found themselves in perhaps the worst customer data/privacy scandal that tech has ever seen. We’re far beyond devil’s advocacy here. Sheesh.

I’m not sure you can’t abstract this idea one level further. What if rather than having someone with veto powers over individual products, you just need someone taking the high level temperature of their industry. That is, someone who could “read the room” and could make sure that many initiatives at a company aren’t directionally incorrect, or worse: dangerously amiss.

This idea came up in a podcast I recorded recently with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. Naturally, we were talking about Apple. As we went down the rabbit hole of discussing if the company has or has not lost its way, even if just a bit, this was the idea I kept coming back to.