Dancing the Apple Pivot
Around and around we go but where do we end up?
by Mike Meyer
The hand wringing over Apple’s pivot to services is no surprise. We should be getting familiar with pivots as they are happening frequently. This is both the result of and a contributing cause in the confusion about how things operate now.
One part of the problem is the tendency to over use buzzwords, such as pivot, to describe shifting and complex conditions and the reaction of large institutions to those conditions. Pivot is a simple and dramatic word for a change in direction but how many pivots can you do before you are back where you started from?
I mention this because as these late stage capitalist entities begin pivoting it becomes an ongoing process. Do enough pivots and you are spinning in circles. Facebook, among others, seems to have fallen prey to this. Apple is just starting. Pivot, I’m afraid, is a thoroughly inadequate word to explain what we are seeing.
If we look more carefully at what is happening perhaps we can choose some better words to build understanding and, perhaps, begin to see what will result from these changes in direction of our largest organizations.
Because this is not simple, nothing is simple anymore, we need to establish some points of agreement on…
