The opening of this article makes no sense. It implies Intel and Boeing made bad decisions compared to Apple because the CEOs were MBAs, not engineers. Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer either. Tim Cook is also an MBA. What a dumb premise.
hibikir_40k on
It’s really funny. The article talks about the value of industrialists lasered focus on a product, and then sets Elon Musk as an example, with no irony? Is the author a time traveler from 2010 who didn’t know about what happened in PayPal or something? Did they read Atlas Shrugged one too many times.
It doesn’t take much effort to figure out that yes, companies can rot. Silicon Valley alone is full of campuses built by companies that were giants once, and then disappeared. SGI was a monster once, and everyone wanted their workstations. We all blinked, and they were dead. We could list dozens of others.
Since the companies that we have today are more likely to become holding companies doing financial magic along with their core work, it’s easy to point there to the issue, and consider oneself wise and thoughtful. the companies were made by founders, and sunk by MBAs! Except many founders also end up sinking their own companies. New CEOs sometimes reinvigorate declining companies. Companies that are still laser focused on one thing end up releasing the Cybetruck, and not providing any serious updates to the most important part of their business for years. Other times the industrialist buys something and then mismanages it into a right wing cesspool. Other times, a company that supposedly sells bysical books, and then basically anything else, also revolutionizes digital publishing, or makes more money renting datacenters to the rest of the corporate world than they ever did on retail: They even make more money from letting companies put ads on their retail page than from the actual sale of items.
The problems are trivial to find, the solutions are separated from the problem by a line full of question marks: Underpant gnomes levels of argument building.
2 Comments
The opening of this article makes no sense. It implies Intel and Boeing made bad decisions compared to Apple because the CEOs were MBAs, not engineers. Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer either. Tim Cook is also an MBA. What a dumb premise.
It’s really funny. The article talks about the value of industrialists lasered focus on a product, and then sets Elon Musk as an example, with no irony? Is the author a time traveler from 2010 who didn’t know about what happened in PayPal or something? Did they read Atlas Shrugged one too many times.
It doesn’t take much effort to figure out that yes, companies can rot. Silicon Valley alone is full of campuses built by companies that were giants once, and then disappeared. SGI was a monster once, and everyone wanted their workstations. We all blinked, and they were dead. We could list dozens of others.
Since the companies that we have today are more likely to become holding companies doing financial magic along with their core work, it’s easy to point there to the issue, and consider oneself wise and thoughtful. the companies were made by founders, and sunk by MBAs! Except many founders also end up sinking their own companies. New CEOs sometimes reinvigorate declining companies. Companies that are still laser focused on one thing end up releasing the Cybetruck, and not providing any serious updates to the most important part of their business for years. Other times the industrialist buys something and then mismanages it into a right wing cesspool. Other times, a company that supposedly sells bysical books, and then basically anything else, also revolutionizes digital publishing, or makes more money renting datacenters to the rest of the corporate world than they ever did on retail: They even make more money from letting companies put ads on their retail page than from the actual sale of items.
The problems are trivial to find, the solutions are separated from the problem by a line full of question marks: Underpant gnomes levels of argument building.