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…