As much as I disliked Steve Jobs, the man was 100% correct when he talked about companies rotting from the inside. They get taken over by sales & marketing types and the product designers and user experience experts get kicked to the curb.
In comparison with Windows and iOS, Mac OS is a paradigm of respecting the user. Of course that's only because the bar is firmly embedded on Earth's inner core.
Apple has always been about locking down the system and forcing the user to do things the way Apple wants. Not only within one device, but also in locking down inter-device protocols and removing standard ones, as well as obfuscating information about the hardware, not letting the users make an informed decision. And that's already after the fact that you aren't legally allowed to use the system on non-Apple hardware.
Yeah, he was a hypocrit and I despised the guy. Woz was the real hero of Apple. But Jobs did say that stuff, and he was correct in that moment. We see it over and over.
What are you on about? Yes they made sure their gadgets were easy to use, but Apple and Jobs were the pinnacle of "locking you in" on their ecosystem for the profit of it. Sure they weren't as careless about users when compared to Microsoft but they weren't too favourable of you using anything else. They invented this stuff.
From a company perspective, it's a common sentiment. Google and Amazon have mantras around trying to stay agile and relevant despite being behemoths, and both have arguably kept into boomer tech territory the second they made a poor CEO hire. Microsoft had their Ballmer era, and while Nadella did a lot of good at Microsoft they've had a lot of failures in established divisions to be soaked up by AI and sales.
I think that all of big tech has struggled over the last 3 years. Sacrificing employee skill for shareholder value has ultimately moved them all into IBM territory, whereas the cool tech is happening at startups again. If AI is a bust, and another company comes along and eats their lunch in their established markets like consumer devices, web tooling, or cloud computing, they're in real danger of another huge set of layoffs and resetting their businesses to only core profit-making ventures. What I think we've seen companies shift towards death, Day 2, rotting from the inside, or whatever your business calls stagnation.