Short term gain myopia always fails because of a failure to plan for Capital investment for future growth; if focuses on the quarterly and yearly bottom lines, but not the five and ten year goals, much less fifty year growth. Research and Development of future products are de-emphasized in preference to marketing current products and services being sold and/or ideas that can quickly be brought to the market, especially those that will redound to the credit of the MBA’s tenure, not to some future management team. One of the secrets to Apple’s repeated successes is their corporate policy of planning for at least five to ten years in the future. That keeps their profits at the highest in the industry.
As for Apple, it seems to me they are still living off the imagination of Steve Jobs. Time will tell.
People keep saying that, but Steve Jobs did not foresee the services that are growing hugely for Apple now. Nor did he have any hand in the development of the AppleWatch which is generating sales in the size of a Fortune 100 company in its own right now. So, no, that isn’t the case.
As for planning for the future, Apple maintains multiple lines of technological R&D for the future to avoid the problems you outline, some in its current product line, and others in lines we know nothing about because they don’t even mention them until the time is ripe. For example, the Apple iPhone did not start out as a phone but as a tablet in 1998. . . And a tablet was not released by Apple until 2010 with the release of the iPad. . . While the iPhone came out in 2007.