Apple may have finally gotten too big for its unusual corporate structure
No management is happening in Omaha. Instead, the company’s various divisions — whether it’s a freight railroad or a mobile home manufacturer — have their own corporate functions, including things like HR and legal.
.. there’s no senior vice president for iPhone who works alongside a senior vice president for Mac. Nobody is in charge of Macs or iPhones or iPads or really anything else, because Apple is almost entirely functional.
.. In that divisional context, Ahrendts’s job would be to optimize for the profitability of Apple’s retail stores. But Apple doesn’t want its retail stores to be optimized for profitability. The stores do bring in money, but they are also important marketing statements whose existence, design, and operation is supposed to project the Apple brand in specific ways.
.. top executives are responsible for things like “software engineering” and “hardware technologies” (i.e., chip development) rather than for specific products.
.. But most CEOs do not attempt to manage enormous global companies with purely functional structures, because even though it sounds good, it’s extraordinarily difficult to make it work in practice.
.. Of course, it might be hard to bring radical redesigns and breakthrough innovations to the Mac. But what existing Mac customers really want is something more basic: confidence that Apple will regularly update the Mac to incorporate new chips as they become standard in the rest of the computer industry.
.. even though regularly updating desktop Macs should not be that difficult, objectively speaking, it tends not to happen in part because it’s not anyone’s job to make it happen.