I agree with most of Malone’s basic arguments. But I would add that he ignores an important aspect:
**Innovation happens by deep/agile engineers as much as innovative CEOs**
In other words, a CEO matters rather less than how many deeply committed, intelligent, innovative, and “fast” (able to execute rapidly) engineers who care passionately about pushing into new technologies and forms, factors, and functions, exist at a company.
Its fine to have a visionary executive, but execution matters. It matters and depends on the people who actually execute the vision. Which is the line engineers.
Apple’s problem is the same as Microsoft’s after options stopped being part of a big payout. Apple depends like most of silicon valley on cheap, disposable H1-B engineers and/or outsourced engineers even cheaper in China, Vietnam, and Taiwan.
That gives Apple a cheap labor advantage, with engineering right there alongside production lines. But it makes technical goofs and shoddy quality and lack of innovation, basically guaranteed.
Only designers are paid well, and consist of basically, middle class, traditional Americans. Design is not surprisingly the only thing Apple does well. At other companies, they don’t even have that — highly paid, traditionally American designers.
No, a guy from India, even spending a great deal of time in the US, will not understand American culture, “deeply” enough to push forward new ideas of technical innovation to solve real world problems Americans face in daily life, creating an “indespensible” and must-have gadget. “Diverse” (read: cheap H1-B visa folks, outsourced teams, and so on) lack the trust that the early guys at Microsoft had (look at the pictures of the founding Microsoft employees) or at Apple, or at HP. Trust from a shared background, mono-ethnic culture, that allowed free ranging discussion without the cost of diversity (basically, mistrust and constant hedging).
A mono-ethnic Apple, with nearly all its engineers employed on site, and production lines here, could and would have mocked up a prototype of an antenna inside and outside, and shown Jobs conclusively the folly of an antenna “outside” no matter how “cool” it looked design-wise. He’d have seen for himself that half his calls would have been dropped. You’d have a cheap, but reliable, Apple Netbook, just a bit upwards of price of the Ipad. You’d have an Apple TV device, able to browse and for a modest fee, download off Hulu or what have you daily shows for watching.
You’d have a solution to the problem of “I’d like to watch my favorite TV shows on a portable device, later, even if I have no network connectivity. At a time and place of my choosing. At Starbucks or on a plane, or a train, or on my lunch hour.”
Because well paid, traditional American engineers could see the problem and devise, very fast, an elegant solution to it, one that Apple could sell quickly before anyone else for more money.
All we have now is “cheap diversity” where lowest labor costs equal shoddy workmanship, not caring, and mistrust all around.
