I speak as a lifelong and self-confessed apple fan-boy so this bothers me to say so (more than it should arguably), but they have a product problem. From the awful experience that was Yosemite, to the truly appalling Apple Music UI/UX, to forcing you onto their iCloud, to installing an album into your library without your ok, Apple have walked away from releasing great product and having their finger on the pulse of their customers.

These are all product/brand mis-steps to which, as someone who dealt firsthand with most of them, they have responded like the giant mega-corporation they’ve become, with a shrug of their unconcerned shoulders. Their response to wiping out my library of over 5000 songs, built up over a ten year period, “nothing we can do”. I thought I’d dialed Microsoft’s number by mistake.

Yes their marketing has lost its way, but if they address only that as a potential fix they won’t have gotten to the root cause of their problem: they’ve become a soulless mega-corp since Jobs death and that’s infected the product they put out. Failure to address that will negatively impact their stock more than failing to return to their marketing heyday.

Apple is a lifestyle brand…if you look at the big picture…and it is a brand that is pushing creative people and the human race forward. It is a brand that has merged art and science, business and poetry, music and math. There is a bigger brand narrative waiting to be uncovered…to inspire people with the innovation to come.

But, consciousness is a funny thing in business. People work in boxes. Goals are set for those boxes. Very few people are given permission to look around and connect the dots, and to become the hidden pattern masters.

Steve Job’s protean consciousness got him in and out of all kinds of trouble. But he was learning the entire time. The thought piece I posted above is about something profound that Steve discovered, which has already been forgotten it seems.