Really great overview of Apple’s organizational structure from Ben Thompson at Stratechery covering how Apple has managed to become one of the largest companies in the world and uniquely maintain its functional organizational structure. More importantly, however, is that if Apple plans to take its services business seriously and use services as a way to generate significant revenue from existing customers; they will almost certainly have to make changes to the organization and stop tying to run services in the same way they manage hardware and software products.
Apple will not fix the services it already has, or deliver on the promise of the services its hardware might yet enable, unless a new kind of organization is built around these services that has a fundamentally different structure, different incentives, and different rhythms from Apple’s device teams. You don’t make great products because you want to make great products; you make great products by creating the conditions where great products can be produced.
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