Apple's Shifting Differentiation

> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.

Ben can write paeans to this new "cloud" business model. But at the end of the day, the question for us, the users is simple.

Do we own what we buy?

When I buy a Mac (and I've bought several), I am buying a computer. A general purpose computational device. And by selling it to me, the company is selling me a general purpose computational device.

What right does the company have to stop me from installing/modifying my device in any way that I see fit? Sure, they may refuse support/warranty, that is their prerogative, but what gives them the right to stop me from having someone else repair it? Or, to boot into Linux? Or, to open my own computer?

I have a MacBook Pro from 2016. Recently, I wanted to give it a thorough cleaning. So I took out my speciality screw driver and unscrewed the screws for the bottom plate.

It wouldn't budge.

It was then I realized that I needed suction cups and strength to move the plate downwards to unlatch something inside to make it "pop".

This design serves no engineering purpose. It exists to make it harder for me, the device owner, to access the device I've purchased without sacrificing dollars at the altar of Apple.

And this was their most "open" product. Prior to the M1 announcement, you couldn't boot into another OS - or significantly alter - your iOS device. And now we can't do so with our Macs. We seem to have collectively decided to blur the line of ownership.

A device we buy isn't ours even after purchase. No, we must continuously give our money to the corporation for the benefit of their revenue projections.

Which returns us to this,

> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.

With Sketch you own your data, and thanks to the open format, you can port that data to other mediums.

With Sketch you own a copy of the tool that allows you to do your job.

With these other, less powerful but "collaborative" software, you don't truly own your data or the tools to access it. You merely rent it.

Should there be an event where Figma is acquired or goes out of business, then (in all likelihood) every user of this platform will lack the ability and the choice to preserve their work for future generations (and for their business).

What are the odds of Figma staying as it is, in the control of founders, chugging along as a profitable business a year from now? 5 years from now? A decade? Two decades?

I do not wish to single out Ben, but this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. They have made a growing argument that the future is one without ownership. Where it's one where you don't own your devices, you rent them. And they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing.

But that sounds like dystopia to me. It is one thing to have a tradeoff between accessing all the songs in the world and owning a few on vinyl to having the tools of your trade be abstracted away.

Spotify and Netflix aren't essential services to me. My computer is. My vector design software is. My ability to write code is. My ability to make things is.

They argue that there are benefits to "collaboration" with the "cloud", but that doesn't need to be so. The only reason why they're operating in the browser is because the tradition of web apps started within them. There is no reason why every other application can't collaborate natively, with combined local + server-based data storage with other apps across the world.

Video games do it all the time! Games like counterstrike etc are in some ways far more collaborative than a Figma file. The state of what occurs in the world depends on every other person in the world, with the context being time sensitive, and the state being additive. And it works beautifully.

If it can work for non-essential entertainment, why should we accept the reduced paradigm for our essential tools? Why should we buy into crippled software that is limited by the fact it runs in the browser? Why should we buy into the abusive business model of having to rent our ability to do work from another company? Why should we buy into the idea that we don't own the fruits of our labor? And that we don't get to have a copy of our work nor access it without paying the toll?

Bohemian Coding, if you ever read this, don't go down with this ship. Add support for Windows. Or, Linux. It will save your company.

> "...this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. ...they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing."

it's good to remind ourselves that stratechery is a marketing vehicle for consulting services, not an inquiry into truth. these blog posts are examples of standard strategic analyses learned in any decent MBA program. absent relevant experience, these analyses may seem oracular, but they're not. they're decent and competently researched, but not amazingly insightful--by design: why give away the real crown jewels (if there are any)?

it's pretty clear that the trend in software has been toward subscriptions (renting software) for the last decade or two, and that subscriptions are more advantageous for profit-seeking businesses, so connecting two very well-known dots provides all the "insight" here. a third well-known dot, that apple has a lead in this regard, provides context.

If Ben is using Stratechery to market consulting services, he's the worst marketer in existence, as I can't find any evidence he does consulting.

He's not giving away the Crown Jewels, the vast majority of his writing is behind a pay wall, and, to my knowledge, he's full time and only funded via that pay wall to write Stratechery (https://stratechery.com/about/ indicates this as well).

The free articles are an example of his writing to generate traffic to maybe convince folks to sign up and pay him for the rest of the content (which is pretty good, consistently).

> “...pay him for the rest of the content (which is pretty good, consistently).”

having read this free piece and a number previously posted here, the analyses tend to be fairly average in comparison to mba-level work. perhaps you can enlighten me—who pays, and why? who has interest but also doesn’t otherwise have access to mba-level analyses or analytical tools?

a solid position, line of reasoning, or conclusion is difficult to draw from this article. he seems to want badly to say something, anything, insightful about apple’s new silicon to not miss the short window of opportunity afforded by the recent announcement. but what did he say other than repeat some numbers from anandtech and sidetrack onto sketch vs figma?

apple‘s strategy isn’t new or surprising, and this chip is one (comparatively small) part of jobs’ original vision of ubiquitous consumer computing, with apple at the center of it. the switch to arm isn’t even a strategic surprise. they wanted ever smaller and more powerful chips (which intel could have owned but f-ed up) to drive that ubiquitousness and be at the profitable forefront of it (that’s also why they’re so obsessed with thinness). apple has always wanted to own consumer computing. that’s it. that strategy is not that hard to make sense of. but somehow this article badly flubs that low hurdle.

First define for me what you mean by 'average in comparison to mba-level work'? What analytical tools are you referring to?

As to who pays? People who have things to do, and don't have the time to do the 'mba-level' work it takes to track all these different trends and such, and want just a short overview of 'whats important' and "who's moving where".

And your 'obvious' take is not obvious if you look at where apple is spending money, effort and hiring, etc.

And another aspect of this is that he's been talking about some of this stuff for many years, which isn't at all obvious from one of his pieces stand-alone. The weekly updates blend together and consistently reference stuff he's previously discussed, and he also has no problem calling out where he's gotten it wrong.

it's average in comparison to the many similar papers i read (and wrote) during my mba program. he's doing the same thing, except instead of turning papers in to professors, he's blogging about them. some are better than others, but this one is certainly below average. any manager for whom such information is critical will either have an mba, or have access to similar (and likely much better) strategic analyses (e.g., the strategy group at any mid-size or larger company).

You still haven't given me an idea of what you think is 'lacking' in these 'strategic analyses' that would be appropriate for something like this writing?

As to strategy groups, I've worked with strategy teams from a big chunk of the Fortune 100, did time at a Big 4, and I think your expectations of levels of critical analysis are ....overshooting reality :)

Ben's definitely not some strategy messiah, no question - I doubt he'd even claim to be in the top percentage. But he's consistent, thoughtful, and lets me just not think chase tons of other sources on a regular basis.