Thanks for an excellent post.
I think your scenario shows pretty clearly that tech companies more or less by definition have a limited lifespan, at least in the lead. It is not possible to grow exponentially indefinitely.
Apple has so far managed to do so, but they’re the exception that proves the rule. And it is likely their doing so was based pretty much on Jobs. It will be very interesting if they can keep up the same pace over the next few years, but I doubt it.
Well, understand that Apple nearly died.
It isn’t common knowledge, but when Jobs was brought back... Apple was really in a for-real death spiral. The board was at a point where they thought “What’s the worst that could happen? Jobs re-boots the company and it comes back... “
because if Jobs cratered the company, that wasn’t any different than where it was going the day before they brought him back. Bringing Jobs back was a Hail-Mary long shot, and they pulled it off. And Apple’s death was literally only a couple months out at that point. They were bleeding cash, sales were crashing, there was no confidence inside the company that management knew their ass from a hot rock.
I sincerely doubt that Apple will be able to continue on their trajectory without Jobs. Some people like to pooh-pooh Jobs’ contribution, but the guy had a knack for seeing the future, then telling Apple’s engineers “invent this or else.” Sometimes, he was a royal jerk, but the results show that he wasn’t stupid. His time at NeXT was a very useful education for him, and (in hindsight) what Apple needed when they failed two or three times at a “next generation” MacOS. Apple has adopted large chunks of NeXT’s software architecture and the rest, as they say, is history.
One of these days, I’d like to find a NeXT cube in good shape. In their day, they were a super-sexy workstation, albeit a tad slow due to the DPS stuff.
The other problem for the US tech industry is that management thinks that Indian and Chinese engineers are interchangeable with US-bred engineers. Having been in many meetings with engineers from all over the world, I can tell you that what Dick Feynman observed in Brazil in physics education (rote learning with no understanding of the practical implementation or consequences) is true in Indian and Chinese engineering staff. They have no cultural gestalt to “break the rules.” They’re the perfect bureaucrats who, if you give them a perfect specification, will crank out lots of code that might do what you want... if you perfectly specified your problem.
If you didn’t... good luck with that.
If you were trying to invent the future... you’re going to be waiting a long, long, long time for these guys who think “outside the box” and create it.