Steve jobs on why xerox failed

Steve Jobs articulated xerox's failure well, which I think applies mostly to kodak, some to intel, and I've no clue about VW. tldr: Sales and marketing were the main groups who could impact the company's bottom line. So those were the folks that got promoted and pushed to the top. When they lead the company, they don't focus on products+innovation. Because they failed to innovate (or capitalize on their innovation - e.g. their gui) competitors did (e.g. apple). They fail to make great products. See [VIDEO] (I recommend watching this, its short!)

They're a victim of their own success. They became a monopoly and the quality of their product stopped mattering. They're an example of Steve Job's comments on Xerox's failure[0]. It happened at Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. It's happening now at Apple, Intel and Google. [0]: [VIDEO]

Obligatory (Steve Jobs on why Xerox failed): [VIDEO] He summarises the whole process, Intel is now at the sales and marketing people running it.

The Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] strikes again. The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years. This effort seems like it's part of the ruthless approach to controlling costs that slowly strangle a company from within. I believe WoW is the #2 property (after CoD) at Acti-Blizzard and it's clearly changed from one of delivering a game to simply extracting as much money as possible from each customer much like how almost all mobile games do. The state of California's complaint is bad. I mean really bad. The fact that 3-4 different people from AB all released different statements in the last week should tell you exactly how bad it is. That's classic panic mode. There should only be one. This latest move tells you the company believes it will blow over and they're looking to do the minimal required to appease the detractors and get back to business as usual without having to pay people more or pay out a bunch of lawsuits. Honestly, the heads of J Allen Brack and Bobby Kotick in particular should roll over this lawsuit. [1]: [VIDEO] EDIT: commenters have noted (correctly) that I overlooked Overwatch. This was a significant release but it seems to also have waned in popularity and Overwatch 2 is inextricably going in some weird PVE direction. Other tha

> Does anyone know why this happens? Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. They want a formula to produce content that can be predicted, projected and tracked. Here's another key point: everything you do as a company either adds to or subtracts from your brand value. For example: Square Enix giving discounted subscriptions and a general mea culpa around the original FF14 release, brand value add. Blizzard adding micro-transactions to classic TBC? That's nothing more than the short-term extraction of brand value into money. It's a bit like delivering pizza. You're trading long term car depreciation and maintenance for short-term cash. [1]: [VIDEO]

Here's the framework I use: "tech companies" are those where tech still plays a significant factor in the growth of the company such that it's important to an executive level. Example: Google is still a tech company. As much as some might view search as "solved" (just like it was when Google was founded I might add), search continues to get better. Tech still plays a significant role in the actual core business (ie advertising) too. I once again return to the Steve Jobs take on why Xerox failed [1]. An effective monopoly devalued the tech such that Xerox became a sales and finance company. So, returning to Netflix. I agree Netflix isn't a tech company anymore because Netflix ultimately is about serving several thousand VODs and that problem is solved. Now Netflix's core business is about making content, licensing content and acquiring and retaining customers. Obviously doing this (or anything) at scale is a lot harder than it sounds but at the end of the day Youtube is monumentally more technically challenging than Netflix due to the number of videos, the number of viewers, the advertising and live streaming. "Tech company" is still a useful classifier IMHO. [1]: [VIDEO]

I'm reasonably bullish on intel, but Jobs explained the problem well [VIDEO] When tech companies become a dominant force in their market they lose their ability to innovate, and it's very hard to change culture once that's happened.

> focus on the basics instead of marketing gimmicks This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about Xerox[0]. After achieving market leadership in their industry, engineering at iRobot seems to have been pushed aside in the company's decision making process. Is this a consequence of being a publicly traded company? After all, pushing consumables and subscription services requires less capital and makes more money compared to developing a better robot. The $1.7B exit seems like a good outcome for a stagnant (relative to its peers) company. [0] [VIDEO]