[Lianyun.com] report on March 5th (compiled: Kim)
Apple(NASDAQ(stock symbol: AAPL) was originally a hardware company. Its first product is a set of hardware, which users buy back to complete the assembly, which does not include software services. As for what kind of software is installed above, this is the user's own business.
But up to now, the reason why Apple Inc can be loved by users lies in his good experience of software system. Apple Inc's product design has always been the key to the company's success, iPhone's capacitive touch screen, iPod's simple and elegant design, MacBook's thin and portable shape. Looking forward to the future of Apple Inc, it looks more like a software company than a hardware company.
In fact, we can easily see this trend through its booming media business. But to illustrate this point, it is more certain of this change in terms of its hiring trends. From the vertical dimension of time, the following table records the position-related category data of Apple Inc company. As of today, the number of recruits in the "software and services" category (formerly known as software engineering) this year is the largest of all categories, and this is the first time that the category has topped the list.
Photo caption-title: Apple Inc recruitment position category chart; Abscissa: number of people; ordinate (from top to bottom): software and services, hardware, Apple Inc retail, sales and business development, operation and supply chain, service support, market, company intelligence, no vacancy, student internship, design.
Hardware engineering has been the most popular talent category in Apple Inc's HR recruitment since 2016. From the perspective of corporate requirements, the demand for hardware engineering far exceeds that of software for most of the period from 2016 to 2018.
Photo caption: from the first quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2018, Apple Inc ranked among the changes in the number of people in different job categories. The hardware engineering category remained at the top of the list until the third quarter of 2018, when the number of people in the software and service categories overtook the hardware engineering category to become the category with the most demand.
From the picture above, it can be found that in the third quarter of 2018, software and service talents became the most popular HR talent category for Apple Inc for the first time. It was at this time that Apple Inc began to talk more about its software and service products, such as Apple Music, new video media service software, news and personalized subscription information services.
This change means a lot to Apple Inc: its hardware is now ubiquitous, but the demand for hardware will eventually enter a period of gentle stagnation. By the end of 2018, Apple Inc began to seriously look for more software service talents to reduce its dependence on iPhone equipment.
Now that the development trend is changing, how can we build our own service ecosystem around devices? to achieve this goal, we naturally need more software engineers.
Photo caption: Apple Inc company software and hardware talent quantity comparison; red for software analogy posts, blue for hardware category posts; vertical axis: quantity; horizontal axis: time (from December last year to February this year).