Ben Thompson of Stratechery has a good article about why microsoft failed in smartphones, and why Apple may have some problems in the future. It is due to culture, but what you think of culture is not how many people understand it, but it is actually from a scientific perspective the more likely way human behavior organizes. I am going to link the article now but read my comments first please.
https://stratechery.com/2016/the-curse-of-culture/
Ben Thompson is using the ideas of Edgar Scheins bookOrganizational Culture and Leadership. This book first published in the 1980s has had 4 editions and has greatly influenced business schools (Edgar Schien until he retired was a professor at MIT's school of business)
Human beings have 3 ways of organizing yourself with others.
1) Visually as well as things you can touch which Schein calls artifacts
And in business stuff like logos, t-shirts, flag-pins, other ways to identify you are part of the group
2) Words which Schein calls espoused values, how you talk about yourself and others, how do you compare yourself to others. Say things like I am pro consumer, or pro privacy, or I am for freedom, etc.
3) Unconscious assumptions and beliefs which are both A) individual which we learn from our own personal experience, B) some of our inherent personality, C) Push back from other people in society and this is self reinforcing. this is culture. Do understand that the push back from society is their own unconscious assumptions and beliefs.
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Well whenever you do your thinking you do not always respond rationally, you find the argument that suits your core unconscious beliefs and you advance that argument and discount other arguments that are contrary to those beliefs. Some tech nerds in jest call this reality distortion field and the reality distortion field can be both individual unconscious assumptions but also cultural of the group and the groups unconscious biases based off past success.
Well one thing about these unconscious assumptions and beliefs is that when you are founding a company it is one of the key figures on whether a company thrives or it fails or becomes a small niche company. Culture is advanced and enhanced by the contribution of others creating a form of group thinking when individuals make a lot of early success and these success are largely due to talent and unconscious assumptions of that person on how they view the world and the economy and so on. And this is how you get Corporate Culture (but also social culture), this is how you get mission statements, this is how you get pieces of flair.
And when the initial assumptions of the market are right for this time in history and this current facts on the ground, than the power of culture is amazing for its self reinforcing. But when the facts change, when technology changes, the curse of culture can actually seal a companies destruction for they do not adapt, they do not see the grim reaper coming, they rationalize it away. Both the individual leader whose beliefs are not up to date but also the initial corporate culture which promotes "yes men" without even realizing it, are also the same people who doomed the company.
Unless the leader has enough leadership to realize he is wrong and to try to change the culture before this effect. Now sometimes it is not just one leader and you need a group of leaders to cause this change. And creating a 2nd generation culture and how it unites to the first one but then abandons the first one helps creating companies that can adapt to the changing circumstances.
I am done explaining all of this, now what does that have to do with windows, ibm, apple, nokia, etc
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Ben Thompson of Stratechery identifies examples in various tech companies with their leaders and how culture helped them, and how it also hurt them. One of the best examples illustrates how Jobs and the Apple culture help lead to the success of the 1980s apple, yet in 1993 Apple was still doing mostly fine, but in 1997 Apple was 3 months away from bankruptcy when Jobs took over again as CEO. 1 month in his tenure he gets booed for he is allowing Microsoft to make word for the mac, and that Microsoft bought 150 million dollars of stock and arguably that kept the lights on until Jobs returned Apple to profitability. Yet the corporate culture was against him in 1997, everything Jobs was saying in 1997 was against the culture of the 1980s Apple that Jobs helped founded, make peace with microsoft, blasphemous.
Thompson then goes into the failings of windows in the year 2007 when the iphone came out and how they did not take the iphone seriously until years later and they started windows 7 phone but by then it was already over. It was the own internal biases of the company where they judge future performance based off past performance but they did not notice how technology has fundamentally change the game for technology now allows a computer in your pocket, and some of the business decisions they made prevented them from building on this key insights.
Thompson then identifies various blind spots of Apple and how possibly in the future things can change and unless apple heads these changes off years in advance than Apple will lose its authority as being the industry leader and profitability leader, and that is just because their culture, or put another way reality distortion field is too strong they did not see the change coming.
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Another good book on this subject is Thinking, Fast and Slow:written by Daniel Kahneman, a PhD who due to his research in unconscious priming influencing economic decisions got him the Noble Memorial Prize in Economics.
https://stratechery.com/2016/the-curse-of-culture/
Ben Thompson is using the ideas of Edgar Scheins bookOrganizational Culture and Leadership. This book first published in the 1980s has had 4 editions and has greatly influenced business schools (Edgar Schien until he retired was a professor at MIT's school of business)
Human beings have 3 ways of organizing yourself with others.
1) Visually as well as things you can touch which Schein calls artifacts
And in business stuff like logos, t-shirts, flag-pins, other ways to identify you are part of the group
2) Words which Schein calls espoused values, how you talk about yourself and others, how do you compare yourself to others. Say things like I am pro consumer, or pro privacy, or I am for freedom, etc.
3) Unconscious assumptions and beliefs which are both A) individual which we learn from our own personal experience, B) some of our inherent personality, C) Push back from other people in society and this is self reinforcing. this is culture. Do understand that the push back from society is their own unconscious assumptions and beliefs.
----
Well whenever you do your thinking you do not always respond rationally, you find the argument that suits your core unconscious beliefs and you advance that argument and discount other arguments that are contrary to those beliefs. Some tech nerds in jest call this reality distortion field and the reality distortion field can be both individual unconscious assumptions but also cultural of the group and the groups unconscious biases based off past success.
Well one thing about these unconscious assumptions and beliefs is that when you are founding a company it is one of the key figures on whether a company thrives or it fails or becomes a small niche company. Culture is advanced and enhanced by the contribution of others creating a form of group thinking when individuals make a lot of early success and these success are largely due to talent and unconscious assumptions of that person on how they view the world and the economy and so on. And this is how you get Corporate Culture (but also social culture), this is how you get mission statements, this is how you get pieces of flair.
And when the initial assumptions of the market are right for this time in history and this current facts on the ground, than the power of culture is amazing for its self reinforcing. But when the facts change, when technology changes, the curse of culture can actually seal a companies destruction for they do not adapt, they do not see the grim reaper coming, they rationalize it away. Both the individual leader whose beliefs are not up to date but also the initial corporate culture which promotes "yes men" without even realizing it, are also the same people who doomed the company.
Unless the leader has enough leadership to realize he is wrong and to try to change the culture before this effect. Now sometimes it is not just one leader and you need a group of leaders to cause this change. And creating a 2nd generation culture and how it unites to the first one but then abandons the first one helps creating companies that can adapt to the changing circumstances.
I am done explaining all of this, now what does that have to do with windows, ibm, apple, nokia, etc
-----
Ben Thompson of Stratechery identifies examples in various tech companies with their leaders and how culture helped them, and how it also hurt them. One of the best examples illustrates how Jobs and the Apple culture help lead to the success of the 1980s apple, yet in 1993 Apple was still doing mostly fine, but in 1997 Apple was 3 months away from bankruptcy when Jobs took over again as CEO. 1 month in his tenure he gets booed for he is allowing Microsoft to make word for the mac, and that Microsoft bought 150 million dollars of stock and arguably that kept the lights on until Jobs returned Apple to profitability. Yet the corporate culture was against him in 1997, everything Jobs was saying in 1997 was against the culture of the 1980s Apple that Jobs helped founded, make peace with microsoft, blasphemous.
Thompson then goes into the failings of windows in the year 2007 when the iphone came out and how they did not take the iphone seriously until years later and they started windows 7 phone but by then it was already over. It was the own internal biases of the company where they judge future performance based off past performance but they did not notice how technology has fundamentally change the game for technology now allows a computer in your pocket, and some of the business decisions they made prevented them from building on this key insights.
Thompson then identifies various blind spots of Apple and how possibly in the future things can change and unless apple heads these changes off years in advance than Apple will lose its authority as being the industry leader and profitability leader, and that is just because their culture, or put another way reality distortion field is too strong they did not see the change coming.
-----
Another good book on this subject is Thinking, Fast and Slow:written by Daniel Kahneman, a PhD who due to his research in unconscious priming influencing economic decisions got him the Noble Memorial Prize in Economics.