Re: Sal
Re: Sal
- Subject: Re: Sal
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2016 22:12:41 +0000
Deivy Petrescu wrote:
>On Nov 17, 2016, at 09:38 , RJay Hansen <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>I suspect there’s a lot of overreaction in this thread and that Hamish’s take is pretty accurate.
>
>RJay
That is correct! You suspect!
We have no idea of what were the reasons for Sal Soghoian abrupt departure from Apple.
Yes we do! Apple's revenue and forecasts are falling, and they are
slashing job all across the company as an immediate cost-cutting
measure! Jeez, does NOBODY pay attention!?!
Humans greatly over-estimate impact of changes over the short-term, and
greatly under-estimate them in the long. Yesterday, for most of you,
AppleScript was in the very peak of health, yet today it is gutted and
bleeding out on the pavement, mere moments from permanent death.
Meanwhile, I've been studying AppleScript's progress for 16 years, and
it has been on a clear decline for the last 8 of those, at least. That's
actually perfectly normal: the standard product life cycle is rapid
growth to a maximum plateau, then a slower decline that tapers into a
long tail. Look it up: "long tail". The AppleScript language been in the
long-tail stage of its lifecycle for _years_. Again, this absolutely
normal and to be expected.
The problem—and this is why Sal's sacking is *way overdue*—is that Apple
(by which I mean the Automation team, cos who else is going to do the
job?) have *repeatedly* and *willfully* failed to bring up NEW PRODUCTS
which create and grow NEW MARKETS for Apple Automation technologies.
-------
So here's how ongoing product management works. You have an existing
product and its customer base, so you take them while they are both
active and healthy, and you exploit them in order to fund your New
Product development and bootstrap its customer base the moment you ship.
This way, by the time your existing product has ended through its growth
stage and is on the plateau, your next product is completely ready and
rearing to go. And then you ship it—and even when it cannibalizes your
old product to death, you go with it. Because what better testament to
the phenomenal power and appeal of this amazing new product that it ate
its predecessors for breakfast?
Steve Jobs 2.0 did precisely this when he rebooted the moribund Mac
market. He didn't do this to save the Mac, he did it to fund and
bootstrap his NEXT market into existence: iPhone mobile. And when a
product—ANY product—failed to pull its weight, he brought the ax down on
it with zero delay; zero remorse. Simple strategy; took the world's #1
Joke to World #1 in under a decade. THREE out of THREE; gold star.
Amazing sales man, one of the very best ever.
Me, I once built an excellent product; utterly failed to sell it. Once a
product's over the plateau and on the down, that's it. Had a chance,
blew it. Killed it, moved on; next project. TWO out of THREE; could've
been worse.
Sal shipped *useless* new product. Worse than useless, actually, because
having welded it into the OS and failed to create even a nascent
audience for it, he immediately wandered off, leaving his shit in there
just to sit and to rot. ZERO out of THREE…No, wait, actually Sal scores
MINUS-ONE out of THREE! Because ScriptingBridge DID achieve one genuine
success: it *killed* the small but solid Automation base that was, up
till then, being slowly built up by third-party rival, appscript. Ouch.†
...
Had Sal done his job RIGHT, he'd have shipped a world-class,
production-ready ScriptingBridge that worked, immediately stolen all of
appscript's 1000 users to bootstrap his own product, then built that
free lead into 10,000 new Automation users within the year, and 100,000
not long after. I know this, cos it's precisely what I'd have done in
his shoes. Had Sal done that, he'd have instantly secured my total
respect and absolute support, and I'd have personally bust my guts to
make ScriptingBridge a massive worldwide success. Not for Sal, not for
me, not for Apple. FOR THE USERS. You, Me, Everyone.
Cratering ScriptingBridge was a mistake. Taking my free support and
goodwill and Matt Neuburg's free support and goodwill and pissing it
down the hole; that was the mistake TIMES TEN. Software is cheap;
manpower is bloody expensive, and the best of it only slightly less rare
than hen's teeth to boot. Me and Matt were the two User-Evangelists on
the planet who knew this tech and able and willing sell it into its
target markets too. We could've been ScriptingBridge's personal fucking
vanguard as it ploughed its way through the millions of Great
Programming Unwashed, spreading Its True Enlightenment and Automation
Love to them all. All done for no cost to Apple or the Automation team too.
Millions of Programmers, learning, loving, using, and building
Automation. Maybe even learning how to communicate with us Users too, at
long fucking last! You tell me what even a mere ten thousand
Mac-Automation-Adoring programmers could have done for this platform.
Because I know—and even tried for a while to help make this happen. And
Sal sure as shit did not—and didn't even care to.
...
Sal did not pull a Steve Jobs; he pulled an Stephen Elop. Poor,
well-meaning Elop in a single, almost trivial mistake personally
destroyed Nokia's mobile business, also obliterating Microsoft's one and
only opportunity to turn itself into anything more than the next IBM.
Nokia survives on its other, non-mobile, businesses. IBM survives in its
high-end vertical niches. Still respectable livings, both. But neither
will be ever the _next_ Google or Facebook, cos they already had their
chance… and they blew it.
Apple should have hauled up Sal on that first failure for a full
explanation and plan for correction. And when he did it all again a
second time with JavaScript for Automation, he should've been straight
out the door on his ass; no third chances. Booting him now as once small
part of much larger budget cuts is better than nothing, I suppose—his
card was stamped "consistently underperforms" long ago, and in a
reasonably well-run business those are always the first to go when
accounting asks what they're spending all that money for.
But it also means we are ALL two years further on and two years weaker
than we might've been been had they removed him and replaced him with a
new, seriously competent Automation Product Manager with fresh ideas and
clear direction and the urgent need to prove herself and justify her new
salary and position to the High Heid Yins above.
-------
Okay, more than enough Sal Talk for me. It's already history. What
matters, to all us users at least—and hopefully still Apple too!—is what
tomorrow brings.
If we users want to do our bit to try to secure Automation a future, we
will NOT achieve anything by wailing and gnashing of teeth. So grow up.
The ONLY way is by MOVING FORWARD, boldly, building NEW AUDIENCES for
it… even if this means killing AppleScript itself. Because that is going
to happen anyway, eventually; in which case the real trick is to do it
now, not later, and in a way that puts something new, exciting, and much
more successful in its place. Call it our Private Plan Phoenix; call it
Don Quioxte Tilting at Windmills; call it whatever the hell you like. It
may fail—hell, most likely will—but at least then we did our bit.
One more post—oh, and BTW, *it's*the one you should read, not this—and
then I am done for the night.
Interesting Times indeed! :)
has
--
† My bad too, of course: had unique, priceless opportunity to get
appscript into 10.5; sat around with big grin on my face and thumb up my
ass. Yup, that dumb.
But you go ask the Konfabulator folks, or the Growl folks, or the
Facespan folks: How can a small, minimally-funded third-party vendor
*possibly compete* with the OFFICIAL FREE PRODUCT brought to you by the
biggest, shiniest, and most trusted vendor in the world? Even if your
product is absolutely first-rate and theirs is steaming shit?
Lesson learned—by me at least.
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