Apple is currently run by 'marketing department.' It's just a good one.
'Marketing department' doesn't mean the advertisers that have nothing to do with anything else any more then 'engineers' doesn't mean techies in the back room that have never seen a user and only work when you can tell them exactly what to do. That's just what they seem like when they don't do a great job.
Deciding not to have any competitor below the 30-40th price percentile. Deciding to always have a coherent product line. The decision to focus on users wiling to pay outright for things instead of focusing on companies. These are all marketing decisions more then they are engineering ones.
What I've observed is that a lot of marketing departments are killing or at least slowly poisoning their company. I suspect that you have to get to somewhere between "good" and "great" to escape this.
Hmm. It seems that I've never been in a company that had even a good marketing department! (Until now.)
Hve you observed engineering departments, research departments, IT, Accounting, HR, Comms, legal... doing a bad job? Usually, most of these are not critical enough to "poison" a business, crappy HR or IT is annoying, but usually doesn't kill a company. Anything bad enough can, but if a department is far away from how the company makes money, good enough is usually good enough. Sometimes Marketing isn't important enough to kill a company either. Often it is though.
The types of companies that get discussed on HN are usually the kind where both marketing & engineering are important enough to do a lot of damage and important enough for everyone to have an opinion about them.
You can top that up with the fact that the stuff that usually gets praise or abuse (eg product development) can often be claimed or pawned off by both engineering and marketing.
Who is responsible for the ipod nano video camera thing? Engineers?
Sometimes things are obvious. Google has awesome marketing, but the original dynamite was creating the awesome search engine and the momentum caused by gmail & maps & such. Facebook is, as far as I can tell, a marketing achievement. In both cases it was important that the non dominant factor didn't mess things, but it was a hurdle.
Apple or MSFT? You could argue both or neither. If you wanted to teach how to be like them, the classes would probably be called things like 'strategy' or 'leadership.' I'm not sure that any department has a monopoly here.
If you have to choose between company A with lousy engineering but good marketing and company B with great engineering and lousy marketing, history shows company A is a no-brainer.
'Marketing department' doesn't mean the advertisers that have nothing to do with anything else any more then 'engineers' doesn't mean techies in the back room that have never seen a user and only work when you can tell them exactly what to do. That's just what they seem like when they don't do a great job.
Deciding not to have any competitor below the 30-40th price percentile. Deciding to always have a coherent product line. The decision to focus on users wiling to pay outright for things instead of focusing on companies. These are all marketing decisions more then they are engineering ones.