The Messy Business of Reinventing Happiness - Fast Company

Austin Carr wrote a fascinating piece in Fast Company about the behind the scenes struggles to implement Disney's MagicBand at Disney World.  It details the infighting and politics at one of the most revered brands in the world.  The MagicBand is a new innovation to Disney Theme Parks (only at the Orlando Disney World Theme Park at this time) which brings NFC technology to life in a 40 year old product.  The ideas behind the MagicBand were well thought out and they were trying to solve real problems at Disney World, but they couldn't deliver on the entire dream and it proves that Customer Experience is a cultural change more than an initiative which I have been writing about for a few weeks now.  

The article is very in depth and I think points out a few mistakes in launching an initiative this grandiose.  The main point it proves is how hard it is to change a culture when it comes to customer experience, because so many people in the organization want to eep their points of power rather than thinking of the customer.  It is human nature to be scared of technology that may serve the customer better, it puts people in a defensive mode.  Even when a company as big as Disney commits $1 Billion to the initiative, without the cultural change it makes it near impossible to create magic.

Dream Big, Implement in Stages

The dream was large for the Next Generation Experience (NGE) team at Disney.  They wanted to solve the real world problems that were influencing customer satisfaction at the park.  Long lines, juggling multiple pieces of paper and keys were bringing down an experience that is supposed to be one of enjoyment.  One of the main issues is they were trying to bite off more than they could chew with their implementation.  At one point they were trying to change the airport arrival and had meetings with TSA on airport security procedures.  I understand controlling the entire experience, something Steve Jobs has taught all of us, but at some point these types of distractions take away from the big picture, which is implementing and iterating.  

The biggest problems Disney was trying to solve was long lines and handling of multiple items (tickets, Fast Pass tickets, money, hotel room keys, etc.).  The team was 2 years late delivering on their initiative because they forgot what the main goal of the project was.  The team was distracted with all the technology could do, instead of solving the immediate problems and then iterating on the technology to enhance other experiences.  Always handle the low hanging fruit first, then iterate to enhance the next set of opportunities.  

Keep the Team Small for as Long as Possible

Once the team grows to include more people to implement, projects start spinning out of control.  Change is very hard for people and they will fight it especially when it comes to areas they control within an organization.  Because the plan was growing larger than solving the immediate problems, more people from the organization had to be brought in which slowed the project down to a crawl.  The leaders of the areas being affected wanted control and they wanted a say in the development of the technology.  Embrace the leaders of the areas that will be affected and make sure they are represented on the early small team.  If they embrace the change and feel they had a part in the development, they will get the troops aligned once implantation begins.

Clearly Articulate Goals

The goals of the initiative in my eyes were to enhance the customer experience at the theme park.  What happens in these large initiatives is the organization gets hung up on the technology instead of what the technology is trying to help solve.  Technology in and of itself is worthless, unless used for a purpose to solve a real world problem that cannot be solved another way more efficiently.  NFC technology in a bracelet does not solve any problems by itself, it is the implantation of this technology that is the magic.  Always keep the goals, which is enhancing the customer experience in this case, front and center.  Never start from the technology and work backwards, start from the problem and work forward to how the technology can help solve the problem.

I am fascinated how organizations behave.  Each culture is very different, but they all tend to have the same issues.  The bigger the organization becomes, the harder it is to accomplish innovative change.  Politics and human ego can be the death of innovation.  The Disney project succeeded through sheer will to get it done, but proves that even throwing money at something doesn't guarantee success.  The culture of the company has to be customer-centric before it can solve the problems of the customer.   

The Real Leadership Lessons from Steve Jobs part 2

I decided to break up this post into 2 parts because there were so many lessons and I liked most of them.  So here are the remainder of the lessons from the Walter Isaacson HBR article.

Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” He invoked Henry Ford’s line “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’”

Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained. Instead of relying on market research, he honed his version of empathy—an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers. He developed his appreciation for intuition—feelings that are based on accumulated experiential wisdom—while he was studying Buddhism in India as a college dropout. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do; they use their intuition instead,” he recalled. “Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.”

When I was a product manager for a software company that catered to database marketers and analysts, customers would always speak in terms of features.  "I want the product to do this" was a common request.  I quickly learned that putting features into the product just made the product more complex.  The true genius is in solving the problem the customer is having in the most elegant and simple way possible.  Customers mostly focus on what they can see and what they already know.  To be great you have to translate what your customer is asking for and then really solve their problem, because adding features can spaghetti your product before you know it.

Bend Reality

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force. An early example was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Woz said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.

I believe that people want to be great at what they do, but when left to their own devices will let the fear of failure get in their way.  Failure is a much bigger enemy of greatness than the lack of talent for the individual.  The fear of failure gets in the way of taking risks and leapfrogging yourself.  If you can put your team in an environment where failure is viewed as a success or a learning opportunity on the way to greatness, your team will succeed in greatness.

Impute

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people dojudge a book by its cover,” he told me.

First impressions make all the difference.  The product, experience or the deliverable have to focus on delivering an experience worth returning to in order to succeed.

Push for Perfection

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. That happened even with the movie Toy Story. After Jeff Katzenberg and the team at Disney, which had bought the rights to the movie, pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker, Jobs and the director, John Lasseter, finally stopped production and rewrote the story to make it friendlier. When he was about to launch Apple Stores, he and his store guru, Ron Johnson, suddenly decided to delay everything a few months so that the stores’ layouts could be reorganized around activities and not just product categories.

In the world of database marketing there is always a push for perfection.  The mantra I use is "The campaigns are a living, breathing entity".  A good database marketer is always looking for ways to improve the performance of a campaign.  It is never complete, it will never be perfect, but one should always strive for perfection. 

Tolerate Only “A” Players

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around. “I don’t think I run roughshod over people,” he said, “but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest.” When I pressed him on whether he could have gotten the same results while being nicer, he said perhaps so. “But it’s not who I am,” he said. “Maybe there’s a better way—a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code words—but I don’t know that way, because I am middle-class from California.”

It’s important to appreciate that Jobs’s rudeness and roughness were accompanied by an ability to be inspirational. He infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. And we have to judge him by the outcome. Jobs had a close-knit family, and so it was at Apple: His top players tended to stick around longer and be more loyal than those at other companies, including ones led by bosses who were kinder and gentler. CEOs who study Jobs and decide to emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty make a dangerous mistake.

Find great people and then get our of their way.  Great "A" players will be great without you telling them what to do.  Set the expectations, guide them when needed and then be hard on their results.  If their results are subpar, let them know.  You don't have to go Steve Jobs on them, but an "A" player will be harder on themselves then you could ever be.

Engage Face-to-Face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

Jobs hated formal presentations, but he loved freewheeling face-to-face meetings. He gathered his executive team every week to kick around ideas without a formal agenda, and he spent every Wednesday afternoon doing the same with his marketing and advertising team. Slide shows were banned. “I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

Greatness happens with spontaneous collaboration between individuals who trust each other.  Meetings with different groups who are not accustomed to working together and are forced to collaborate never work.  Grabbing a few individuals from their work space, bringing them into a meeting room, getting into the issues at hand can encourage an atmosphere where greatness can evolve.  Great ideas do not happen on a timetable.  They happen spur of the moment and they can be lost if left to fester.

Know Both the Big Picture and the Details

Jobs’s passion was applied to issues both large and minuscule. Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.

Probably the biggest issue with leaders is they are one dimensional.  It's great to have a vision and be able to articulate that vision, but if the leader is so detached from the execution of the vision, they lose respect from the team.  Beyond just losing the respect, the team may build or execute on something that is in an entirely different direction once complete.  The leader needs to be involved with the team on the details to ensure the vision is executed to perfection.  Being both visionary and implementer is key.

Combine the Humanities with the Sciences 

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

Combining two disparate disciplines into one creates bridges for teams to collaborate in one distinct language.  This ability os very rare in individuals.  The passion that an individual has usually overtakes one discipline for another.  When doing analytics, I often articulate to the team it is a combination of art and science.  The science part can give you an answer, but without the art side, the articulation and strategy coming from the data will get lost in interpretation.  The nuggets of information cannot be articulated in pure scientific form for a strategy to unveil itself to the business side.  

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

An admixture of these cultures was found in publications such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space, and its subtitle was “access to tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Jobs—who became a hippie, a rebel, a spiritual seeker, a phone phreaker, and an electronic hobbyist all wrapped into one—was a fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school. He took it with him to college and then to the apple farm commune where he lived after dropping out. He later recalled: “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’” Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel. In every aspect of his life—the women he dated, the way he dealt with his cancer diagnosis, the way he ran his business—his behavior reflected the contradictions, confluence, and eventual synthesis of all these varying strands.

Even as Apple became corporate, Jobs asserted his rebel and counterculture streak in its ads, as if to proclaim that he was still a hacker and a hippie at heart. The famous “1984” ad showed a renegade woman outrunning the thought police to sling a sledgehammer at the screen of an Orwellian Big Brother. And when he returned to Apple, Jobs helped write the text for the “Think Different” ads: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes…” If there was any doubt that, consciously or not, he was describing himself, he dispelled it with the last lines: “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The world will miss out on all the great things Steve Jobs would have done over the years he lost.  

The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs

In the latest HBR article by Walter Isaacson, the author of the Steve Jobs biography, had more interesting things to say about the man who cofounded Apple and made it into the most valuable company in the world.  This article goes into the management style of Steve Jobs.  This article comes at a perfect time because I have been talking to my team and others about this very topic and how Jobs was portrayed outside of the company is probably too harsh compared to the reality of the day-to-day life at Apple.  My take on Steve Jobs is he demanded excellence, however if he was such a tyrant and maniac, he would never be able to keep "A" players.  

In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.

Isaacson goes on to list many reasons why Steve Jobs was a great leader that are getting missed by most pundits and scholars.  These are the attributes that made Jobs a great leader.

Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After a few weeks of product review sessions, he’d finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a Magic Marker, padded in his bare feet to a whiteboard, and drew a two-by-two grid. “Here’s what we need,” he declared. Atop the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro.” He labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other products should be canceled. There was a stunned silence. But by getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

Focus is so important in an organization.  Without focus, organizations have individuals who determine what is important for themselves or their departments, even if it is not in the strategic direction of the company.  Many of these decisions might make a profit, but what all of these decisions will take is time.  Time is the most important asset of a company and if individuals are using their time to pursue endeavors that will not move the company forward in a focused direction, it is a massive opportunity wasted.  Focus comes from the top and Steve Jobs was more focused than any other CEO of such a large company.

Simplify

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. To see what that means, compare any Apple software with, say, Microsoft Word, which keeps getting uglier and more cluttered with nonintuitive navigational ribbons and intrusive features. It is a reminder of the glory of Apple’s quest for simplicity.

Simplification takes extreme time and effort.  Most organizations don't obsess over the details, they want to get the product to market, to be first.  Simplicity is what makes Apple successful.  I love reading tech pundits talk about Apple and they don't appreciate some of the simplicity that Apple sweats and what that means to a normal person using the product.  It's so easy to build products for yourself, it's very tough to build products for others.  Jobs had a knack at designing for others.

Take Responsibility End to End

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated.

Own the entire experience.  An organization cannot create the ultimate experience without ownership of all aspects from beginning to end.  This is what Tim Cook is talking about at the end of keynotes when he says only Apple can do this.  Others are trying to copy the model, but it's very hard.

When Behind, Leapfrog

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

The obsession for great products or experiences allow for leapfrogging the competition.  So many times companies are content with catching up to the competition.  Always understand what the competition is doing, but focus on making the best product or experience. 

Put Products Before Profits

John Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, was a marketing and sales executive from Pepsi. He focused more on profit maximization than on product design after Jobs left, and Apple gradually declined. “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

I worked for a company where the owner had the philosophy of "Get famous first, then the money will come".  That has stuck with me through my career.  Focus on making great products and experiences because that is what will make you famous.

The iPhone Keynote 7 Years Ago

I have been reading all of the annual anniversary articles about the iPhone keynote 7 years ago.  Every once in awhile I like to go back and watch the keynote over because I believe it was the best technology keynote ever delivered, Steve Jobs at his absolute best.  

One thing has always struck me when Steve goes into the three revolutionary products part of the presentation.  There was a widescreen iPod, a phone and a revolutionary internet communicator.  What strikes me is the audience reaction to all three.  The first two get very loud applause, while the third, the internet communicator, gets no applause, well a cursory clap I would say.  

Why this is interesting is that 7 years later, it is the internet communicator that has been the most important one of the three.  Very few people in the audience appreciated what was being introduced.  In 7 years the constant communication with the internet has been the killer app.  

It took the creation of the app store and third-party apps to really take full advantage of the internet communicator, but it has revolutionized our lives.  I cannot remember how bad phones were before the iPhone.  I had Palm Treo's, Windows Mobile and Blackberry's before I bought the first iPhone and they were all very limiting.  They all fetched email (the Blackberry pushed), made calls and were decent for SMS.  

There was something different when going to the internet with the iPhone.  It was night and day.  Also, the maps were incredible, they still are.  But behind all of the data on the maps were communication to the internet.  That app showed just what was possible when you could have a revolutionary internet communicator going along with a rich client application on a mobile device.  Most apps that have come since have used this same model to create amazing mobile applications that the web alone cannot replicate.  The brilliance of Steve Jobs was seeing the future and by announcing this functionality as he did, instead of something like an enhanced web experience, shows that he knew what the iPhone was all about.  Hats off Mr. Jobs.

The Fate of Apple in the Post-Jobsian Era

Apple has been an innovative company, but was Jobs the only man behind the magic?

Steve Jobs was an amazing innovator, but to say he was the only man behind the innovation is a crazy question.  Where I believe they will miss Steve the most is how dedicated he was to innovation.  Because he was in charge, innovation was the most important thing.  Does Tim Cook believe in innovation above all else?  Time will tell.

Apple has yet to release its latest new, breakthrough product. A careful observer would notice that about every three years Apple Inc. releases an entirely new product. In 1998 it released the iMac, in 2001, the iPod, in 2004 the Mac Mini, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. So 2013 should have been the year the world was to see Apple’s latest gadget.

What???  In 2004 the Mac Mini?  Now this is a stretch.  That's like saying the iPad mini was a breakthrough product.  What was so breakthrough about the Mac Mini?  I think the breakthrough was it was 3 years after the iPod, which made the math work.

I don't know if Apple will have another big breakthrough in a new market, but it wasn't a every 3 year magic as everyone likes to say.  The iPod wasn't the killer breakthrough as much as iTunes was the killer software that made buying music and syncing music very easy.  

Apple CEO Tim Cook might have been great as CFO, but he’s not the one who should lead Apple.

What??? CFO?  What is happening to CNN?  How does a major news outlet get something like this wrong?

Apple launched a “cheaper” iPhone, the iPhone 5c, made of plastic and cheaper quality than the premium iPhone 5s. Apple’s advertising places the iPhone 5c above the 5s, a move which suggests that it cares about the cheaper 5c more than the innovative 5s.

Another giant leap for techkind.  Because Apple is pushing for a higher margin phone to sell to the masses over the more expensive "S" series of phone, this means they are caring more about cheap products?  Not the innovative one?  Who edits this?  If Apple really cared about "cheap" over "innovation" they would have made the iPhone 5c much cheaper than they did and have the "true" low cost iPhone the analysts are all clamoring for.  The fact they built a mid-range phone shows they are interesting in protecting margins and staying away from the costly low-end.

Despite Jobs’ legacy as a great innovator, credit often falls short of the people who truly deserve it. Jony Ive, Apple’s legendary industrial designer, has played a key role throughout the years in designing iMacs, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller has also played an influential role at the company. Apple still retains many of the individuals who served under Jobs and helped to design some of Apple’s greatest hits. 

One cannot even count the legions of software developers and hardware engineers who have made these products possible. Apple today retains many of those same people who once served under Jobs, a good indication that the company has a strong future.

So Apple is not in trouble?  What is the point of this article?  

Apple also has over $110 Billion -- a number that’s not going anywhere in the next few years (if not increasing). With that much cash, it can easily stay afloat in the market.

Great reporting.  Any simple search would have let CNN know Apple has $147 Billion in cash.  The link baiting from the headline is the only reason this article made the web.  

Apple will be fine in the short run.  Tim Cook is making sure the next product is fully vetted, and why not?  If Apple would have put out a watch or TV this year and it would have turned out like Samsung's great watch debacle Apple would have been panned.  Can you imagine the articles about Tim Cook if that happened?  Dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

How long can Tim Cook avoid taking any risks at Apple?

Under his leadership, Apple hasn't entered any new markets. It's only done one radical overhaul of a product, the ultra-high-end Mac Pro, which represents only 4% of all Apple sales. The most aggressive new product features it has introduced—Siri, Apple Maps, and Touch ID—have had very mixed results.

Wow.  Just because they have not entered into markets that either are controlled by content creators (TV) or where the technology is not quite ready (smart watch).

To say Tim Cook hasn't taken any big swings, Jason Hiner hasn't been paying attention.  Apple just overhauled their mobile OS, called iOS 7, has he not heard?  iOS runs the hardware that is responsible for most of Apples profits.  It was very decisive.  If that wasn't aggressive, I don't know what is.  To aggressively move to 64-bit on hardware and software a year before anyone thought possible is very ballsy.  

The boldest thing Cook has done during his two-year tenure as CEO was to fire Scott Forstall, one of Apple's most talented executives. That's not a great sign. While Forstall was legendarily difficult to work with, he was also one of Apple's most creative and innovative leaders and had a lot to do with the success of the iPhone and iPad. He was rumored to be one of Apple's future CEO candidates, so his departure clearly smells like a battle for control and influence in the post-Jobs era.

These are not moves by someone that is holding innovation back at Apple.  Firing Scott Forstall, while seemingly a political move, is something that needed to be done.  Steve Jobs is a different type of leader.  He was the alpha dog and people like Forstall understood that.  Tim Cook has a more easy demeanor, he will never be Steve Jobs.  Under Tim the organization has to make up for what Steve brought to Apple, innovation.  To do that, there needs to be a cohesive team.  Sometimes in organizations there are leaders that drive an organization to do amazing things, but can't take it farther into greatness because to get to the place they are they had to ruin many relationships on the way.  That was Scott Forstall.  It was probably the best move for Apple.  Scott Forstall is great, but Craig Federighi will take them a lot farther now.  

The Steve Jobs Nobody Knew - Rolling Stone

Great insight of a great man. 

The Myth of Steve Jobs Constant Breakthroughs

For every great leap forward Apple ever made, it accomplished at least as much through small steps that made its products easier, faster, thinner, lighter, more polished and/or more useful. Apple’s most important products may have been the game-changers, but its best products, always, have been those that benefited from smart, evolutionary improvements. And as far as I remember, Jobs never seemed guilty about the profits they brought.

Super article.  Why does everyone want to put a fork into Apple and call them done?  The product they put out on Friday is so superior to every smart phone out there.  Incremental or not, they are still innovating.  

The items in our new iPhone 5s' are the foundation for their next jumps.  The M7 processor is the beta test for a wearable technology.  The 64-bit A7 chip is the baseline to take over TV and move the low end laptop computer world into the modern era.  

Remember, the time between the iPod and the iPhone was 6 years.  The iPod led the way to develop the iPhone.  Without the iPod, there probably never would have been an iPhone.  You can argue the iPad was an incremental improvement on the iPhone.  

So Apple is ready for their next disruption, we just have to realize we are already using it.  When the next disruption comes out, you can bet it has many of the technologies in the current phones.