The death of poetry: Has Apple lost its mojo in a decade of stupendous growth?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Apple in 2017 can be considered symbolic of how the company grew after its visionary co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs' death in 2011. Feeling creatively unfulfilled, Imran Chaudhri, a top software designer who had joined Apple in 1995 and was part of the teams that developed the iPhone’s multitouch technology and later Apple Watch interface, started planning his exit. He told his bosses he would leave in a few months after collecting equity shares that he was due to earn as part of his compensation, a normal practice at Apple.

A month before leaving, Chaudhri wrote a farewell email to colleagues announcing his planned exit.

He was fond of quoting a line from the 11th-century Persian poet Rumi: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Playing off that line, Imran wrote, “Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one.”

The email alarmed the bosses. In his 2022 book 'After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul', NYT tech reporter Tripp Mickle wrote that they feared the message the email had sent. «They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed,» Mickel wrote.

«Its river had run dry. It was one thing for outsiders to say that the company was no longer innovative, but another thing altogether for that critique to come from someone who had helped birth multitouch technology for the iPhone. They worried it would poison morale and moved to contain the damage.