Macworld Forums

Does anyone think the appointment of John Browett, formerly of Dixons, to oversee Apple retail is a wise move?
Personally, nothing from The Dixons retail experience could be good for an Apple store, but hey, what do I know.

fingerpost,
Dixons and Apple store does seem like two ends of the spectrum with John, hither to, being at the sh*tty end . That's probably being unfair, he's only been at Dixons since 2007, not like he founded it, and they did see a profit of £245,000,000 in 2011 !!!

What does it mean when they show figures in brackets BTW ?

My only concern is he's a Brit and as a generally rule, we couldn't run a bath. Good at designing things, but when it comes to commercial exploitation, or organising anything, nobody does that better than an American. We'll see.

fingerpost,

the appointment has nothing at all to do with bringing Dixon's brand values to Apple, I can't imagine that Tim Cook has ever been into a Dixon's shop. The appointment is solely because of the qualities of Browett as an individual and what he can now bring to Apple.

I'm no fan of Dixons and indeed have been extremely critical of them and PCW on this site on many occasions, but it's important to distinguish between the company and an individual who was brought in to help to get the company out of deep trouble five years ago. I have seen Browett in action first hand and he's an impressive operator. I can see why he caught the eye of Tim Cook.

If Browett hadn't been in charge, I doubt that DIxons & PCW would still be going today ( not that I would be worried if they weren't ), but now that he's left the company, it will be interesting to see if they survive.

The opportunity to head Apple's retail operation is the chance of a lifetime. The retail stores are already a world-class success story, so that makes it a difficult task to improve them, but if anybody can, I think that Browett will.

AlanAudio,
I continue to be impressed by your faith Alan.

And that was in no way sarcastic, as you have been proved right time and again.

fingerpost,
However...

But according to those with close ties to the retail stores, Browett feels the stores are “too bloated” with employees, and he is willing to gamble the stores’ legendary customer experience to gain back a few points of profit margin. Browett’s decision reportedly came despite strongly-worded advice from Retail segment veterans that reducing personnel ahead of the annual Back-to-School promotion and the September introduction of the iPhone 5 could create a customer service catastrophe. Browett disagreed with his staff, and said the chain needs to learn to run “leaner” in all areas, even if the customer experience is compromised. [

http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2012/08/15/store-personnel-cuts-linked-to-profit-goal/

fingerpost,

Brand reputation and the customer experience is worth much more than pure profit, that's what Browett seems to be struggling to grasp.

I expect he panicked after his previous decision to award staff with a 25% (yes, twenty-five percent!!!) pay rise, and then decided that to balance this out he had to reduce staffing levels.

I hope his next decision is a bit wiser than his last two.

fingerpost,

Haha, doesn't look good so far does it .

It's a typical British style of management.... cut costs, even if the customer experience suffers. That's why so many UK businesses thrive .

It'll be interesting to see what that, generally upward, graph does over the next 18 to 24 months. The Apple Retail Segment - Profit Margin doesn't suggest to me that they need to diminish the customer experience at all. It looks like they pretty much have the balance right, and that's during a recession.

On the flip side, I've walked past Stormfront a few times when I see 4 or 5 Staff standing there in an empty store, ready to pounce.

John is gone

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/10/29Apple-Announces-Changes-to-Increase-Collaboration-Across-Hardware-Software-Services.html

though the big shock is Scotty Forstall, who went back with Steve Jobs as far as NeXT.

The Dixons guy leaving.... who'd have thought that

I don't see how they can blame Scott Forstall for not checking the accuracy of every street on Apple Maps. The actual Maps app is pretty good, the Turn by turn software works really well, even off line if you allow the to calculate the route before hand. It's animated really smoothly and it actually reads street names out. There's no Street view that's my biggest peeve. They just need to refine it.

Really the failing with Maps was Apple should have released it as a Beta and stopped Google Maps when the ran out in 12 months. No point in following on Steve's battles. Google is popular, Apple won't succeed in making Google unpopular. My advice to the 'New Apple' is get over it quickly, and don't invite anyone on the Google board to sit in on Apple board meetings in the future. Doh !

Fair enough, nobody (outside the US) is really interested in Siri telling you the batting average of the Boston Red Sox when he / she can't figure out more basic and useful requests. So if that was Scott's call then he should have tried harder, but giving him the responsibility of creating AI, that's not a small task for one guy to lead. However he did take out a shed load of Apple shares earlier in the year, so he must have known what was around the corner.

Having someone in charge of both Mac and iPhone development is probably a bigger mistake. The Mac isn't a phone, the iPhone isn't a Mac. 5 years from now Apple will be just another player in a big phone / tablet market, but the Mac will still be one of the top 2 computer platforms. Don't give up on Macs Apple !!! for iPads to succeed it doesn't mean Macs need to fail. There's room for both.

The way that I see it is that both of the people going failed to be team players and they both failed to deliver what they promised.

Siri and Maps were less than perfect when launched, which allows Apple's many critics to portray them as failures, even though both have been substantially improved since launch and are now pretty good.

In retail, we saw far too much Dixons and not enough respect for Apple's traditional values. The initial promise was there, but the reality was that he was King Midas in reverse and managed to antagonise virtually everybody. I had high hopes, but Browett badly misjudged several important issues and lost the confidence of virtually everybody.

I think that Tim Cook has given a very clear message that while Apple is prepared to pay huge salaries for top performers, the expectation is that those executives must deliver to the level expected, which is very high indeed.

Apple these days is all about working collaboratively. Forstall can be very creative and has had some superb ideas, but he doesn't well with others. In particular Jony Ive and he had a very strained working relationship. Steve Jobs was a great supporter of Forstall, but those days are over. Things couldn't simply be left to sort themselves out. Tim Cook needed to act decisively and has done so.

I think it's a great thing that Jony Ive has now had his empire enlarged to cover the UI. We can look forward to more comprehensive vertical integration than ever before.