Posted on 12/09/2009 6:29:26 PM PST by Star Traveler
By Joe Wilcox
Published December 9, 2009, 9:45 AM
Simply put: Apple doesn't play by the rules. It reinvents them. Apple applies what I call "David Thinking" to its broader business, product development and marketing. Apple is David to Microsoft Goliath -- and other ones, too. Goliath plays by one set of rules. David choses to change the rules, which favor his strengths rather than those of Goliath.
David Thinking is most provocative and surprising when Goliath acts like David. After all, David sometimes becomes Goliath; Apple is a giant in music with iPod and iTunes Music Store. But David turned Goliath also risks making mistakes that would allow another upstart advantage. Today, Apple is both David and Goliath, depending on market.
March 11, 2009, The New Yorker magazine story "How David Beats Goliath" is what got me to looking at David Thinking and making the realization this is how Apple operates its business. Writer Malcolm Gladwell could easily have written about Apple, but his examples are 12-year-old girls basketball and T.E. Lawrence.
Gladwell tells how obvious losers are winners more often than might be expected: "David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time." Gladwell explains why: "The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact."
David wins almost 30 percent of the time when playing by his opponent's rules. But the percentage dramatically increases when David changes them. Gladwell explains:
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped...and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, 'even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't.'
Nearly two-thirds of the time is a remarkable figure. The approach defines almost every line of Apple's business.
Steve Jobs as David
Apple isn't a team player, particularly under the two chief executive tenures of cofounder Steve Jobs. The examples of Apple's rule-changing behavior are simply too numerous to recount. So I'll start with a few around the 1984 launch of Macintosh:
Apple's business was at its worst -- closest to expiration -- during the early 1990s, when the company played more by rules Microsoft established. Apple had put on Goliath's mail and brandished his sword. For example, Apple embraced clones, allowing third parties to release their own hardware running Mac OS. The seemingly sensible strategy was anything but. Apple's attempts to play by DOS/Windows PC rules put the company at grave competitive disadvantage. Steve Jobs' late-1996 return to Apple and ascension to interim CEO in 1997 set forth dramatic changes in the company's business strategy. Among Job's first actions: The end of Mac cloning. Only Apple would make and sell Macs.
Since Jobs' return to Apple, there are so many examples of Apple changing the rules, it's hard to find ways the company played by Microsoft's -- or other Goliaths' -- rules. Some examples:
Microsoft was once David
At one time Microsoft changed the rules, too, when David to the IBM Goliath. For example:
There are many other examples how Microsoft defied convention over the years, how the company changed the rules. No longer. Microsoft seeks to preserve the status quo it established through success and becoming Goliath. For example, top perennial design principle for Windows is backward compatibility. It's the preservation of the past way of doing things.
Status quo thinking prevents Microsoft from being competitive and disruptive like Apple. Goliath thinking is so pervasive, Microsoft fails where it shouldn't. Microsoft will not beat Google in search as long as it plays by the information giant's rules. Microsoft must change the rules of the engagement, leveraging its strengths against Goliath Google. Gladwell writes in The New Yorker:
David, let's not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn't know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords...He brought a shepherd's rules to the battlefield.
Microsoft must leverage its strengths, by battling Google in an unexpected way. Perhaps Microsoft should apply Apple's David Thinking to search. Apple's sales priority is profit share rather than market share. Maybe Microsoft should seek to make more money off lower search share, as Apple does today in the personal computer market.
Yesterday, at the Loop, Jim Dalrymple asked: "Apple can be copied, but can it be beat?" Apple can be beat if its David Thinking approach can be copied, I assert. But competitors let Apple set the rules in markets where it competes.
So far, Apple has resisted Goliath thinking, consistently competing, at least under Steve Jobs' leadership, in ways that emphasize its strengths rather than complying with rules set by others. Even as Goliath, Apple has consistently changed the rules to its advantage. The challenge ahead: Resisting the temptation to protect the status quo -- to truly be Goliath.
“Mac Plus” — brain fart on my part. The “big memory” Mac with a SCSI port.
Their board has put in such idiots as Scully (a former soda pop exec)...
Hey now... Scully was Steve Jobs' choice. Jobs is at fault there... :-) And he sure was sorry about it later, too...
“Mac Plus” — brain fart on my part. The “big memory” Mac with a SCSI port.
Yes, I remember that one. I thought I was "coming up on the world" when I upgraded to that one... LOL...
I started out with the first one made (i.e., the first model, not the actual first machine...).
Scully was Jobs’ choice when Jobs was planning on staying around. Scully was hired to do the scut work of execs.
Scully then fired Jobs, which Jobs had not planned.
I couldn’t stomach the number of floppy drive changes necessary on the first machine. As far as I was concerned, if I had to swap that many floppies back and forth, it was no better than a PDP-11 with RX01 drives.
I had two floppy drives on mine (one external) and that was a big help for me. But, as soon as I heard about a hard drive for the Mac, I got one. It was a mere 80 MB (that’s “mega” not “giga”... LOL...) and it cost $800 back then... hoo-boy!
But that hard drive made a world of difference...
Did you watch the MacBook Wheel video? Get a life, and get an ad hominem sense of humor, FRiend.
Now THAT would be the Bill Gates inspired Windows compatible version.
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