Beating Apple Ping!
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Can Apple be beat? Naahhh... we know the answer... :-)
Oh good God not another one of these articles again!
Let’s just assume then that there will be no Apple Netbook or tablets then, because other companies have already made those. Cant have Apple “rip off” others.
No iPods with HD out, already done.
No subscription music service...that is already out
No streaming music service either.
No OLED iPhone...already done. Dont expect one with a keyboard either, that isn’t original.
Apple TV...isn’t that called windows Media Center?
Safari? Apple invented the web browser too!
iWork? Hmmmmm seems like a MS Office rip off.
But they did manage to put in MMS and Copy and Paste in their phone. Couldn’t they come up with something original?
Apple store? Gateway store? Sony Style? Naaaa, Apple invented the whole idea there.
But hey, if Apple’s cheerleading squad wants to feel Apple invented everything and everyone else is just “following”, then I’m sure reality isnt something they are all that interested in anyway.
Too bad other companies that innovate don’t have a media machine that Apple does, then maybe this Apple superiority myth would not have infected so many of its users.
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By Jim Dalrymple
AUGUST 18, 2009, 6:44 AM PT
According to a new report from market research firm NPD, Apple’s iTunes Store leads all digital retailers in music sales, capturing 69 percent of the market.
Looking strictly at the digital music market, Apple’s iTunes captured 69 percent of the market in the first half of 2009. Amazon came in second place with eight percent of the market.
Looking all music sold, Apple continues to lead with 25 percent of the market. Apple’s market share is based on unit volumes of music sold at retail and includes both physical CDs and paid digital downloads. In 2007 Apple’s overall market share for music sold was 14 percent and in 2008 it was 21 percent.
Russ Crupnick, vice president of entertainment industry analysis, said digital music sales will equal that of the physical CD by the end of 2010.
“The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple’s success in holding that market, has increased iTunes’s overall strength in the retail music category,” said Crupnick. “But the importance of the big box retailers shouldn’t be dismissed, as long as the majority of music consumers continue to buy CDs.”
Tue, 12/08/2009 - 2:22am — Jonny Evans
Nokia is shutting down its posh Regent Street shop following its failure to grab the hearts and minds of consumers.
The company apparently spent £4 million on the shop, which aimed to spread Nokia's brand and message at the hordes of Apple consumers at the flagship Regent Street store on the other side of the road....
On its opening two years ago, Simon Ainslie, Managing Director Nokia UK commented, "In championing our brand, Nokia Regent Street will be dynamic, original and beautifully designed. The store will provide world-class customer service and deliver a unique experience enhancing our customer's lifestyles."
A spokeswoman confirmed that the store will shut down in the first quarter of 2010. Nokia cited poor sales and poor footfall at the shop, which opened two years ago among much pomp and ceremony with a packed journalists junket, so it's not like it didn't have some support from London's "media types".
The store was intended as a showcase for the company's latest technologies...
Ben Wood, an analyst with CCS Insight, told The Times: “There was no question that the store was trying to replicate what Apple had done and build up the brand rather than shift devices. The question in why that strategy has worked for one company and not for the other.”
We think we know the answer; and it is interesting to reflect that Apple's Regent Street store across the road is now the most profitable (in terms of yield per square foot) in central London.
Um, I like my Macs and all, but they are NOT medical devices.
I’m not sure that Apple has anything as stupid as one of those Mission Statements cobbled together by marketing and PR Suits who believe hollow, pretty words = reality.
What I do think is that if we were able to overhear conversations at Apple, we’d be able to tease out the things that make that company do what it does. But we don’t need such eavesdropping power, however, because we can also derive Apple’s principles from its actions.
1) We can charge more because we offer more. It would drive the Microsoft fanboys crazy, this. They’d trot out article after article denigrating Macintosh configurations vs. PCs. You don’t see much of those anymore. Why? The iPhone killed that line of propaganda. Here were people lining up to pay six hundred dollars for a cellphone:
Why were they doing that? Because the iPhone offered more than anything else in cellphone history. And it still does.
2) Nothing else out there is good enough. I don’t have to cite the iPhone for this. This goes back to the original Apple-out-of-a-garage days, with Wozniak and Jobs cobbling together the original Apple I computer. This is the company’s bedrock DNA. When they became a company, the Apple II looked like nothing else out there. It was sleek and friendly-looking.
People who bought it felt as if they were bringing home an artifact from the future they’d seen in movies and TV.
3) Simple equals effective. I don’t know that this needs much explanation. Apple popularized and streamlined the Graphic User Interface — and then reinvented it altogether with the iPhone. But this has been part of Apple from the beginning too:
Look at the iPhone compared to all other phones: one button on the front versus up to six for the latest Android phones.
4) We create the future we want. Apple came out with the first mass-market computer that used a floppy disk drive instead of a cassette recorder. Then it dropped the 5.25″ disk for the 3.5″ disk with the Macintosh.
Then it dropped the floppy altogether.
5) Seize chance. Anyone familiar with the creation of the iPod knows its origin was not at Apple. But Steve Jobs saw its potential — given him, he probably saw in one blinding flash the complete ecosystem that could evolve from it. Instead of saying, “Nice, but we didn’t make it, we’ll pass” — which is what any other company would do (the Not Invented Here syndrome) — Apple jumped on it.
The result? We’ve all lived through The iPod Decade.
6) STFU and deliver. Apple’s secrecy is legendary. People think this is part of the Apple mystique. But that’s only a side-effect of what Apple does: creating history-making products that leave competitors frustrated and consumers delighted.
Apple doesn’t talk about what it’s going to do. It shows what it’s done.
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
– Steve Jobs
7) Help people create. When the original Macintosh was introduced, it came with a program called MacPaint. While the rest of the computing industry was focused on word processing and spreadsheets, Apple took the next step: marrying creativity to computing.
From that small start began the desktop publishing revolution which overthrew traditional production processes and continues to this day.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
– Steve Jobs
All of these things sound really simple, don’t they? You would think that any company that follows these would have inevitable success, no?
But how many times have we seen leaders of companies stand on a stage and prattle about things that have absolutely no relation to the crap they eventually release into the market?
That’s because there is one thing Apple has. It’s Apple’s secret. It’s Steve Jobs.
He will say to his engineers, “This isn’t good enough. Make it better.”
And he’s a CEO who will also say something like this:
Every company can be beat.
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.