The supply-chain part is true about Amelio in the case of Apple. The lower-quality products the company pushed out during his tenure changed me from an Apple evangelist to someone who wouldn’t buy or recommend their products again. He poisoned the brand the brand for me to the extent that after he was gone I still didn’t trust it (these days for the “we know better than you, stupid user” approach to things, which the design no longer justifies).
It’s more accurate to say that Jobs was a packaging and inudstrial design guy. In Apple’s case people understandably confuse those things because it’s the glossy and streamlined luxury shells put over the actual products (the commodity hardware guts and the *nix OS) that allow Apple to charge a premium price for their products.
