Steve Jobs: Sale/Marketing People vs. Product People

I think this Steve Jobs clip explains it pretty well. link to this video Basically Intel didn’t need to innovate to make money the last decade. Now it’s come to back bite them on the ass.

This is basically what Steve Jobs was talking about, with sales/marketing gaining traction in an established company and driving it into the ground: link to this video

…no work to do, after all, so why should the company keep them around? But then if the market ecosystem shifts, and a new product is necessary, they no longer have the capacity to build ground-up new products. All those people have left, and won't come anywhere near the company. Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about this phenomena in an old interview: link to this video…

> without a dictator I don't know what kind of pro-authoritarian sane-washing statement you're trying to make with this line. Jobs himself would tell you that it's a consequence of letting a salesperson run the company rather than a product person. link to this video

It's interesting to watch industry after industry hollow itself out from the inside then inevitably die long after all the financial people, investment bankers and management consultants have all cashed their checks. Steve Jobs famously accurately called this out years ago 1. Xerox, Boeing, PC manufacturers (who basically created the Taiwanese makers through a series of short-term outsourcing steps), etc. But there are two examples I want to talk about specifically. First, one lasting impact of the 2008 GFC was that entry-level jobs disappeared. This devastated a generation of millenial college graduates who suddenly had a mountain of student loan debt (thanks to education costs outpacing…