Fast Company has an excellent interview with Tim Cook. If you’re interested in this stuff at all, you should read the entire interview. I know that Tim Cook’s statements to the press are more deliberate than those we used to get from Steve Jobs but I also think Tim says what he thinks. This passage about collaboration struck me.
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“We’ve turned up the volume on collaboration because it’s so clear that in order for us to be incredibly successful we have to be the best collaborators in the world. The magic of Apple, from a product point of view, happens at this intersection of hardware, software, and services. It’s that intersection. Without collaboration, you get a Windows product. There’s a company that pumps out an operating system, another that does some hardware, and yet another that does something else. That’s what’s now happening in Android land.”
For so long, I felt that this was the missing piece at Apple. Specifically, it appeared that their obsession with secrecy was keeping the right people needed to make the magic happen in separate rooms. Apple’s words and actions in the last year indicate they’ve moved past that now.
I know there were problems (and continue to be problems) with some of the new continuity features and other iOS 8/Yosemite features aimed at making Apple products play together better but I’m convinced they are moving in the right direction with this and things are getting better.