Apple is good at much more than design

There's a series of articles on Fast Company at the moment about Apple and Design. 

It's called an Oral History of Apple and they've interviewed ex-Apple employees and then just put that togeteher as a series of quotes. There's no Fast Co commentary and it's all the better for that.

Sadly trying to read the articles online is near impossible because of all the annoying whizzy Fast Companynesss. It's hard enough just to find where the series begins. So I bought it as a Kindle Single, much better and easier to read. Anyway.

The series is about "how Apple used design to rise from near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world". You see articles like this written about Apple all the time and it really annoys me. Yes, Apple are very good at design. Staggeringly, consistently, good. But they are not just good at design, which is what these articles always seem to imply. Apple have not gone from "near bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world" just because of design. That success cannot be down to design alone. To even suggest that is crazy.

You can't get to be the most valuable company in the world by being good at only one aspect of your business.

I know nothing about Apple but I assume they are very good at procurement, at HR, at negotiating and so on. In fact, reading between the lines, the Fast Co article seems to suggest that.

Good at finance.

Good at materials.

Good at lawyers.

Good at retouching.

You can't design alone. The era of a lone genius working in a garret is over and design writers should stop perpetuating that myth.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Jabley]

It's almost like you need multi-disciplinary teams to create great things.