‘Apple must’ have lost its vision, or something

When even the mighty Bob Lefstez begins to say it then you must be certain there’s a new meme in town — but given the train wrecks of logic which pass for analysis, these days, it’s hard to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg: does this criticism follow months of anti-Apple tirades, or does Apple have a problem?

I think we’ll find pretty soon that Apple has no problem, particularly when it uses the youth-friendly muscle of Beats to popularize the human-centric fashion meets technology vision of the iWatch. Because the Beats acquisition is nothing to do with Apple lacking vision, but everything to do with it ensuring it has the right team to push forward the vision it has. Lefsetz is clearly committed to his position, but he’s still wrong.

Ultimately so much of what passes for criticism comes down to the disappearance from the world’s stage of Steve Jobs: “Tim Cook is an operations guy, he’s clueless, the company has no vision and this is evidence of it,” Lefsetz writes. Except he’s wrong for the reasons stated above — vision takes time to build. “As that dominance erodes, you come up with a new dominant product, one that hopefully ties all your others together, so far Tim Cook has failed to do this,” Lefsetz continues. To which any right thinking person will of course add the word, “yet”.

Beats is part of a bigger picture. It is not the big picture.

Image c/o Martha Soukup/Flickr