When Yellow Lights Look Red
Was the HomePod hampered by the Jobs-to-Cook transition?
A lot of good parts in this interesting, yet weird, profile of Tim Cook by Tripp Mickle for The Wall Street Journal. One part that stood out to me:
When hardware chief Dan Riccio was exploring the idea of a smart speaker around 2015, Mr. Cook peppered him with questions about the product and asked for more information, said Mr. Deaver, the former human-resources executive, who said he was briefed on the exchange.
Mr. Riccio’s team scaled back working on it, Mr. Deaver said. Later, Mr. Cook emailed Mr. Riccio about Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo speaker and asked where Apple stood on its speaker effort.
Mr. Riccio’s team ramped up work. Apple’s resulting HomePod speaker trailed rivals to market by about two years and has struggled to catch up, accounting for five million of the 76 million active smart speakers in the U.S. as of last year, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.
“Here’s Dan, who was used to getting firm direction, so if it feels like a yellow light, then it looks like a red light,” said Mr. Deaver, who said he spearheaded a project to improve internal collaboration. “Then you have Tim, who is a processor. He likes to listen a lot. Time and patience are his favorite warriors.”
This all, of course, implies that there was a pretty vital miscommunication when it came to the product that would become the HomePod. Riccio thought Cook was skeptical of the product, which in the Jobs era may have meant it was a no-go. But in the Cook era, such skepticism was just meant as a gut-check for executives running more autonomously.
Whether that’s an entirely fair categorization or not, you could see it playing out this way, at least directionally. You could see a world in which a company which had a product guy at the head struggles a bit in the move to a company with an operations guy at the head.
Now, I still highly doubt Apple would have created their own Alexa/Echo devices even if the yellow light above was interpreted as a green light — the cheap/ubiquitous device strategy isn’t in Apple’s DNA.¹ But it is interesting to think about if the HomePod would have been more successful for what it is — a great music-listening device — if it had launched in 2015 or 2016 instead of 2018. Alexa launched in late 2014, so it would have only had a head start of months or a year instead of almost four years.
In 2018, Amazon (and to a lesser extent Google) had already laid the groundwork for a market of the aforementioned cheap, ubiquitous devices where the smart assistant and voice interface was the key, not the sound quality. At that point, Apple’s strategy of a high-priced, great sounding machine with a poor voice assistant looked and sounded, well, dated.²
It may as well have been an iPod Hi-Fi.
¹ We’ll see what they end up doing with the newer, apparently smaller HomePod devices coming soon. My guess is that they’ll be sticking largely to the Apple strategy: they’ll still be relatively expensive (though slightly less so) and will still sound great. I do expect Apple will try to push them to become more ubiquitous around a home.
² I do think they could have done someting interesting with a ‘FacePod’ though — a HomePod with a camera for FaceTime that connected to the TV…
