Ask Paul: August 18 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, it's another monster Ask Paul this week, thanks to a great set of reader questions. Let's jump in.
Consultant mindset
TheJoeFin asks:

I was chatting with a friend about how consultants can frequently be toxic to a product by taking on tech debt then leave before they have to deal with it. He shared the famous Steve Jobs video where he calls out consultants. I posed the theory that employees of mega corps (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) frequently have a "consultant mindset." I characterized this mindset by a lack of long-term ownership and focusing on doing new trendy buzzword things to pad a resume before quitting and taking a higher paying job.

So many thoughts.

The Steve Jobs and Apple examples of anything are classic on so many levels, but let me focus on two. One, that Apple, especially under Jobs, is in many ways unique, and as a result, there are no lessons to be learned there, no ways in which other companies can emulate what they do and be successful too; they are an exception. Except when they're not, because two, Apple often gets it wrong and would have benefitted from a thoughtful feedback loop with customers and/or outside consultations. The hockey puck mouse on the first iMac, for example. Apple Maps. The butterfly keyboard. The secret performance-killing behavior in iOS that was allegedly just about saving our poor batteries. And so on.

Point being, Apple is like the bible and not just because there is a tablet: people will highlight the good stuff that makes their point but selectively ignore the contradictions. When you're an Apple fan, Apple always gets it right. And the implicit follow-up to that is that, because Apple is always right, how it does things and makes decisions is always right. This leads us to the notion that Apple's singular vision (or whatever) is so much better than whatever other companies do.

That's bullshit. Microsoft, which could not be more different from Apple, is the second-largest company in the world. It's doing something right, and it's creating money in ways that Apple doesn't even contemplate. There isn't always a right and a wrong. Different approaches can both have value. (For example, Apple's go-it-alone approach vs. Microsoft's partner-based approach.)

Do you think Microsoft products suffer from this problem? If so, which ones are particularly afflicted?

All of Microsoft's products suffer from this problem. But then, all of Microsoft's products benefit from this way of doing things too. It's a double-edged sword.

You may recall the hilarious College Humor video about Windows 7 that was a riff on Microsoft's advertising of the day (and ironic given that the team that made Windows 7 could not have cared less about anyone's feedback). It's funny because it feels true: Microsoft would listen to every idea and just implement it all. And it feels right because where Apple (generally) provides one way to do things, Microsoft provides many. And...