Apple became massively inept as they grew larger. Do you remember what they were like from 1985-1998? They had a wonderful product with the Mac, a lackluster followup, a huge explosion of new models around 1993 (most of which weren't all that good), and then they nearly went out of business around 1997. I was a die-hard Mac user for most of my childhood, but gave up on them in 1998 when they took the Microsoft investment and copied all the worst features of Windows.
They only got better when Steve Jobs returned and axed most of their product lines. (Okay, Gil Amelio was really responsible for most of the axing and some of the new development, but Jobs has an eye for design.) Apple now is lean and simple. Apple ten years ago had a byzantine product line of mediocre machines and buggy software.
Ah, informative, thanks. Nah, I don't remember those years.. I was born in '88.
So maybe the excellence of a company is directly tied to strong leadership. Wal-mart used to be an excellent company too, when Walton was around (or so I've read), and now they appear merely efficient.
Once there is a problem and then they fix the issue they end up hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of transactions behind which is now a new problem; catch up the old transactions until the system is entirely caught up or process new transactions and old transactions so at least some of the customers will be happy and the unhappy ones, well they were already unhappy anyway.
This is hard to compare to Apple, other then they seem to have kept the iTunes service online without interruption. I would be really unhappy if Apple iTunes service went down right when I bought a bunch of my favorite Britney Spears songs.
I didn't mean to jack the thread, just to observe that Apple is one example of a large company that has sidestepped the mysterious force that makes big companies appear inept. I'd like to define what exactly that force is and define how to prevent it.
Seems to be power in general - my MacBook power supply had issues, and apparently it's very common for the casing of the wire to start melting and burning, which is what happened to mine... Quite worrying really.
