Sales and Retail : The Seen and the Unseen

Peter Grant makes the following point regarding "Amazon is taking away muh jobs."

Companies who are currently struggling to attract customers, such as retail stores, often have themselves to blame for their predicament.  They stock limited merchandise, employ the minimum number of store staff (many of whom have no idea what they're selling or how it works), offer minimal customer service (and that only because they can't get away with killing it completely), and focus on returns to their shareholders and bloated salaries for their executives, rather than attracting the consumer with his or her dollars.  Funny, stores back in the '60's and '70's got that right . . . I wonder what changed?

On one hand, I'm fully aware that the workers getting displaced, the store chains closing, don't have people at the lower levels who can easily transition elsewhere. Even more unfortunate, it's not entirely their fault. But Peter hits the nail on the head here.

What is one of the most successful, per square foot, in dollar revenue, retail spaces in the world?

The Apple store.

Limited merchandise? Maybe - but thanks to refocusing their product line, everything that apple made was available in every stock option, and even a couple upgraded (added memory, etc.) options, assuming it wasn't sold out because of insane levels of demand. Even in that, Apple developed a way to make appointments when stock was available for the day so you didn't have to make a trip to find out they were out.

Let me get back to that appointment thing later.

The stores themselves are beautiful, and clearly laid out. You can clearly see everything they have on display. While there aren't all available accessories and add ons, you can walk out with at least something good enough. Maybe not the case you wanted, but a decent case. Ditto USB drives, bluetooth headsets, headphones, game controllers, drives, wacom tablets, etc.. And they did this without making the store look crowded.

Minimum store staff? No one staffs more than they need, but there's far more to "need" than a Gantt chart of bottlenecks. Walk in the store, there's always someone near the front to greet you, direct you to your appointment, or to ask if you want to talk to sales staff and hook you up. The biggest limit in people was the "genius bar" staff - and they dealt with that as gracefully as possible as well. Again, more on that later.

Minimal customer service? I - and many of my clients - have rarely found people more willing to go the extra mile to find the right loophole, or push the limits, to ensure people are satisfied. Are there exceptions? Of course. I've worked customer service though, and can recognize a quality setup when I see it. 

I worked customer service at a now-defunct electronics chain for two years in college. Days alternated between boredom (and suffering far too many viewings on the store TV's of the movie of the month on laserdisc) to lines of irate customers backed up 30-45 minutes deep no matter how hard you tried to get them processed quickly, politely, and their stuff verified for issues, written up, and tweaked, swapped, or put in for repair. 

The Genius of Apple was scheduling hard appointments for repairs. Sure, there are edge cases where you would have preferred to simply walk over and wait - and often they could find a late-day opening if you could come back later - but in practical experience heading back over to a store to talk to customer service about broken equipment that needed troubleshooting or repair was something you generally knew you were doing in advance. Getting the appointments set made sure that when you walked in, there was staff ready to talk to you right then, or very soon after. For the waiting you did have to do there was someplace to put down your gear and sit. And of course the aesthetically pleasant store and people walking around.

Sadly, this again, was the Apple of Steve Jobs. Love him or hate him, his focus was an awesome computer, not corporate political posturing. It was also on awesome in the service of long-term business instead of short-term beancounting.

So, the other day, I heard that a standard part of the Apple hiring and training program for their "Geniuses" - their tech support desk techs - is no more. In the past, all of them went to either the Boston or Cupertino campus for an intensive round of training now being supplanted by self-guided training with in-house tools.

I'm a big believer in self-guided training, but as Bastiat observed, there is the seen, and the unseen. Especially for the majority that went to Cupertino, this was a formative experience shared by all of their in-store tech staff. As one podcast put it, selfies at One Infinite Loop were a milestone in their career. They all got to see the mothership, as it were (and the new office building looks an awful lot like one, truth be told). 

The seen? Saved money. The unseen? Lost morale, lost unity of purpose. It's a minor sign, but yet another one that Apple is throwing away that which made them not slip into mediocrity in favor of saving a few pennies here and there.

Speaking of Losing Daring Fireball, and Apple Missteps...

To follow up on the notes in my previous post where Apple really dropped the fucking ball - and other people, even fanboys, are arguing that Apple is provably losing it on multiple fronts - John Gruber points to an article called "Capitulation."

Yes, I bought a new Mac Pro. For certain values of “new”. Hear me out, though, after the jump.

Why?

So, my last post was about my angst about replacing my 2008 Mac Pro tower, the best Mac I’ve ever owned. So what happened? Well, upon further reflection:

• The idea of a 2012 Mac Pro, even the CPU-upgraded Ramjet aftermarket ones, fell off the radar because with Apple’s definition of obsolescence, that hardware will become unmaintainable as soon as 2018.
• Similarly, someone pointed out that with the very idea of a third-party graphics card no longer in any of Apple’s shipping Macs, it could become difficult for the Hackintosh community to keep going. No idea if this is true, but it makes sense, I guess?
• If I wanted a year-old iMac, or the new MacBook Pro, I could have bought either of those ages ago and wouldn’t be in this position.
• Waiting isn’t really an option, with my 2008 machine not supported by Sierra.

I think my needs, for development and especially for video work (Motion and Wirecast, mainly) are best served by the Mac Pro. Even the pathetic, three-year-old Mac Pro, because what I want is lots of cores, silent operation, and expandability of RAM and storage, something the iMac and MacBook Pro can’t offer.

I’d been catching up financially for a while, and finally had a $4,000-5,000 budget to work with. What made finally pull the trigger, ironically, was Tim Cook’s ham-fisted, half-assed claim that desktop Macs remain strategically important to Apple. Marco Arment parsed this as suggesting the Mac Pro is likely dead within Apple, given the fact that Cook explicitly equated the concept of the desktop with the iMac and only with the iMac.

If Marco’s right, then the choice is either today’s Mac Pro, or no Mac Pro.

I know that I'm a long-term Mac user - and the OS frankly is a completely different beast under OSX than it was in the OS9 and older days, so much so that (as much as I loved some aspects of it), it would have died  a well deserved death languishing as it was before Jobs return. A lot of us would have turned to Linux or Windows, or both, without it. And yes, I know there are people who bitch about the prices - and it's mostly unfair as Apple never targeted the bargain or low-end crowd. Yes, in the last few years the desktop and laptop hardware has languished, and it took a few years after Jobs came back to really get the combination of hardware and software fully up to par (~ 2003), but the time period in the middle, after Apple perfected their logistics chain, until Steve died, was some of the best bang for the buck you could get if you needed those features.

Yes, there were cheaper computers, especially, though less so over time, if you were willing to assemble them yourself. Yes, you could get more RAM, faster processors, bigger screens, etc. for the price, but if you needed the array of connectors Apple provided, with a good screen, a good keyboard, a trackpad (on the laptops) that is still, frankly, generally unmatched even on "high end" windows laptops, in a solidly built enclosure that could take a beating, it was hard to beat apple kit at any price.

I know one exec who still insists on Macbook airs to run Windows for his personal use even though I've recommended Dell and similar options because - especially with a back injury he had at one point - he utterly values the size and slimness of them, and the reliability compared to the returns for some of the other office computers.

The laptop I'm typing this on, I purchased because out of the four options I looked at for Wintel-based machines with similar RAM, CPU, screen resolution, weight specs three years ago only one was marginally cheaper, the rest were more expensive than this Mac. And no, I'm getting around too much for a "portable desktop" brick.

This year, seeing the new Macbook Pro with the "active" function bar zone? I'm glad that I'm not buying a laptop this year, and either the prices will come back down over the next twelve months - I don't need the price hike to effectively embed an apple watch in my keyboard - or I'm likely jumping ship when it comes time to get my regularly scheduled replacement.

My phone is free and clear, over two years old, and I'm not buying the latest iPhone because the issues with the lack of headphone jack and the non-mechanical home button, though not showstoppers, combined with the fact that my "6plus" is "fast enough", mean I have no problem waiting to see what comes around the corner. Also, the current android offerings, though far better than they used to be overall, don't impress me either. So I'm sticking with what I have.

In short, until I absolutely have to on both the phone and laptop fronts, I'm waiting to see if anything comes out that impresses me enough to either stay with Apple, or shift to MS/Linux. I already use Mint in VMWare roughly 20% of the time. And If I have to because something breaks?

I fully agree with the sentiment of that article's title. Capitulation is exactly the right word.

When You've Lost Daring Fireball...

John Gruber's site is one I have a love-hate relationship with. The man "gets" why Apple has worked - whether you like Apple kit or not - and what made apple successful as a business up to this time. He also created the very useful markdown tagging/formatting system for plain text. If he could lay off the non-computer political posts where he proves that the very principles he applies to explaining Apple's success he cannot generalize to the rest of the world...

But I digress.

He has, with some justice, been accused of being a total, unquestioning, Apple fanboy. I'd argue the unquestioning. So it comes as a surprise, not that there's something to be said about Apple missing the boat, but that John Gruber fundamentally agrees with an article eviscerating Apple and their performance the last few years. Two points he highlights as explicitly relevant, and doesn't note a point of disagreement.

Chuq Von Raspach notes multiple slipping ship dates, lack of product updates, sloppiness, and tying it all together as Apple being out of touch with their users. First, the Airport:

Apple has products it’s let languish without any significant update for long periods of time. If you look at how Apple’s treated their Airport line, you’d think WIFI was a mature technology where nothing was really changing. In fact, a lot is happening including a big shift to mesh networks, and Apple has seemingly ignored all of that. It used to be you bought Airports because they were some of the best WIFI devices out there. Today, the only reason to buy them is you want easy, and because it has the Apple brand. They’re woefully out of date (and in fact, I just replaced mine with a set of EERO devices, which are Apple easy to use, and blow Apple’s products away in terms of performance). Rumors have come out that Apple has cancelled future development of these, but they’re still for sale. Why?

Regarding the Mac Pro:

But here’s the problem: in retrospect, what they built was a device based around their own ego needs of proving their critics wrong, not a device that served the purposes of their power users. It’s not configurable, it’s not upgradeable, it’s not expandable: It’s pretty, and full of (for 2013) innovative hardware design, but is that really what Apple’s power users needed?

I don’t believe so. I think they were much better served by the “cheese grater” Macs of the previous generation, and I think Apple needs to rethink this, and for the high end, go back to more of a developer machine which gives users flexibility to expand it and customize it to their needs. Just like the old Mac IIci, one of the best computers Apple ever built. I propose just this in a piece I wrote about this.

Gruber adds this:

“What the hell happened with the Mac Pro?” is the most interesting question about Apple today. Because something clearly went way wrong with this product. I’m not convinced the basic idea for the design is unsound — the idea is that expansion would come in the form of external peripherals, rather than things you install inside the box. I still think that’s probably the future of “expandable” computing.

If Apple had updated the Mac Pro on a roughly annual basis, we wouldn’t be calling this a disaster. I’m sure there would still be people who would wish that Apple had stuck with the traditional tower form factor, but we wouldn’t all be saying “What the fuck?”

Case after case is laid out. Apple's sloppy or clumsy transitions, bungling the consolidation of iWork, languishing product lines, and so forth. I personally find it particularly interesting given something @XDPaul pointed out on Gab.ai that Chuq specifically addresses the "bean counter" move of sluffing off one's most demanding customers and power users at in the niches and the thin end of the bell curve - something that perfectly fits Tim Cook as operations/logistics focused - and cutting off the very people, a large percentage of whom are developers, who evangelize your product, and create for it.

The article is very thorough and nails a lot of the issues in losing touch with what their users need, but they miss one other aspect. While it's true they don't have someone with the kind of dedication, taste, and insight Jobs had, they also aren't dedicating all of their efforts to the products they create. Actually, given the examples of the Mac mini, the Mac Pro, the Airport, and the only very recently updated laptops, you can argue they're not only slipping on paying attention to the details on what they are developing, but unable to even maintain what they had (which was never a terribly broad product line). I am, of course, referring to their public displays of convergence - taking the time to signal their virtue to make sure they have more women programmers, etc., rather than the best, regardless of how biologically equipped.

Searching For Alternatives

Yeah, I'm a Mac user - and no, not out of lack of familiarity with Windows. Due to various bugs and other issues the last few years - more will be posted in the next couple days - I've been searching for viable replacements to using a Mac as my next computer, looking at both Windows and a number of Linux distros, and a close look at what pieces of software I'd have to find effective replacements for. Given that, it was interesting to find an article on another developer's quest for the same.

He leans toward the Ubuntu - based "Elementary" (I'll have to give it a look), and I'm not sure why he didn't give Mint a stab, but read the article.

More Apple Issues

PDF and preview issues in Sierra are affecting what used to be long-standing features of the app and the API. The kicker is this:

Apple wants to use a common foundation for both iOS and macOS. However, it was released way too early, and for the first time (at least in my experience) Apple deprecated several features without caring about compatibility. And to make things worse, lots of former features are now broken or not implemented at all, meaning that we had to add lots of workarounds or implement stuff on our own. And there’s still work left to be done.

OK, I get it, it's a nice thing to have to simply things. Here's the issue.

One, it gives more and more credence to the feeling of many that Apple simply as stopped caring about computer users vice iOS.

Two, when they did something similar to the iWork suite, they brought most of the features back fairly quickly, and it affected a side application, albeit a frequently used one, and not core functionality of the OS.

SJW Convergence and Apple, Redux

I recently wrote about how Apple, despite the technical momentum and inertia it still has, is already being affected by loss of both product and technical focus as it spends more and more time virtue signalling by working to have "diverse" presenters, a "diverse" programming staff, and expanding their product line.

And sure enough, the iPhone release and iOS 10 update proved my point.

First - we had a few update issues in the early hours of the iOS10 availability that caused a small percentage of phones to brick. I say small in the overall scheme of things, but large enough that it was reported, and caused people problems. As things go, it was actually not a problem with iOS10 itself, but an issue with the update servers that was quickly resolved.

Should it have happened? No, but it's not unheard of, and frankly, pushing out major updates like this is what we call "non-trivial" - note that most android manufacturers, never mind the carriers, effectively don't do the update thing. In isolation, it would be annoying, but...

The new iOS was released. It was presumably beta-tested. Yet T-Mobile is now recommending their customers do not update to iOS10 if they own an iPhone 6, 6plus, or SE. "iOS 10 is causing those three iPhone models to lose connection to the T-Mobile network."

While there is a temporary workaround (reboot the phone) and Apple and T-Mobile are working together to get it resolved via software or carrier-side fixes, and again, it's not unheard of in isolation....

Let's talk the iPhone. I'm not even going to argue the whole "no headphone jack" decision - I'm personally neutral. I get some stuff needs to be deprecated but that throws out interactivity with a lot of stuff out there. Sure, they provide one free adapter and lightning earbuds, but people need to charge the damn thing while listening to it sometimes...

No, this is even more subtle.

So one of the new features of the iPhone 7 is the "taptic" home button. Basically, the home button no longer is a mechanical button, but "clicks" by kicking off a little tactile feedback device. This was apparently to deal with a huge chunk of the non-American market that, due to a few failures of the home button, actually use an accessibility feature to enable an on-screen home button.

Well... we can deal with not having the fingerprint sensor work when sweaty, or wearing gloves, but keep in mind, these trackpad-style surfaces need skin contact.

Where the screen is sensitive enough to register a touch through thin cloth, screen protectors, etc., the new home button either uses the fingerprint sensors, or is much less sensitive due to said fingerprint sensors, and will not work through thin cloth, plastic excercise pocket covers, and even many "touch" capable gloves.

Seriously - I know Jobs is famous for some really weird fucking design decisions. Some, like killing ADB ports and the floppy drive were needed, and worked out in the end. Others, well, you either wanted to use a device that way, or you didn't. Some post-Jobs even made a half-assed sense, charging the new generation mice and the pencil is annoying, but at least it's quick. To me, the headphone decision, even if it's "wrong" falls into this "we made a deliberate choice" category.

But the home button? What fucking moron didn't think to ask about how people working out, or in winter north of the Mason fucking Dixon line were going to open up their phones?

Not a single one of these in isolation is more than an embarrassing blip. Taken together in close conjunction, and the pattern emerges that Apple is no longer as focused on quality of product, whether or not you agree with their vision of said product.

Hmm - Tim Cook is a great material and logistics guy, but what have he and the company been focusing on other than just "awesome product!"? (SJW Convergence and virtue signalling ruin everything....)

And while I've been a mostly-Apple guy since my first highly modded II+, I've got a lot of time in Windows and Linux as well - and so I'm not above laughing at Apple, or myself.  If you don't mid a little simply wrong humor.... (don't say I didn't warn you)

Still not sure if and how I'll jump ship. For mobile, Android is the only other viable option for my requirements, and hardly a privacy/etc. improvement, though outside of that Linux could handle most everything else (I usually keep one up in VMWare and do roughly a quarter of my work there), with a VM for MacOS or Windows as needed. Also, it's not like the other hardware manufacturers are becoming less mediocre...

Apple and SJW Convergence

Recently at VoxDay's, a commenter had asked why Apple, despite obviously focusing on SJW-centric issues, had not imploded severely.

My take on it.

Steve Jobs was a hard-core liberal. Maybe, several years after his death, he would have become an SJW as well, but one can only take him at what he chose to do before his death. Like his choices or not, Apple kit wasn't simply flashy looks for a lot of money - despite several missteps pushing technology beyond practical limits, he methodically laid the groundwork to build hardware at a quality level and price point that no - one could achieve. Yes - there were cheaper laptops - Apple didn't sell cheap ones. There were faster ones, there were more expandable ones, but you wouldn't get much that was as solidly built, with similar performance specs, at a significantly cheaper price point elsewhere.

He was obsessively fixated on creating his vision of a fantastic product, with the attendant tradeoffs.

Corporate welfare or virtue signaling? He wanted to change the world by making a great desktop, a great laptop, a great pocket computer. He considered charity and causes to be something individuals at the company could do - or not - and not something for the company to advertise.

Cue Tim Cook. Apple now makes a big deal out of how inclusive their presentations are, and other social issues they support. From here and there I've heard how hard this focus on inclusiveness, etc. has been pushed internally. If you focus on something other than the best code, the best product, the most effective and consistent manufacturing, well, you get more of that, and not the outstanding product.

Here's the thing - Apple has a lot of technical inertia. They have room to fall to mediocre as the mediocre companies fall to even worse, and can still relatively shine. It takes time for sloppy programming and focus to screw up existing, refined products and code. Unlike their competitors they have not become mere value-added, but intimately build and design and design the manufacturing of their products from the ground up. They still have a lot of low-level "tribal knowledge".

But they are screwing up. Nothing major - yet. A few more design issues that make you scratch your head and wonder "why did they make it charge like that" - but the pencil, or mouse, otherwise works great. A few more bugs creep into DNS handling. The product line starts to lose focus as more product types are added.

Given our choices are Google and Apple for mobile, even moving to Linux only helps a little bit - and the open source world is not entirely immune either. Leaving aside the various projects pushing codes of conduct, and pushing out founders, the lead developer of linux Mint doesn't want you using Mint if you support the Israeli government over Palestine (he has since removed the post).