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posted by martyb on Friday January 30 2015, @05:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the On-a-desk->In-a-Pocket->???? dept.

James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he “couldn’t imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft’s, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple’s vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. “Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” says Toni Sacconaghi. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult."

According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. “But in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.” Can Apple continue to live by Jobs’s disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. “The question investors have is, what’s the next iPhone? There’s no obvious answer. It’s almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing.”

 
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  • (Score: 1) by TheRealMike on Friday January 30 2015, @06:52PM

    by TheRealMike (4989) on Friday January 30 2015, @06:52PM (#139589)

    Yep, I think we have a winner.

    The iPhone did not do so well because Steve Jobs is some kind of unknowable divine presence, it did well because at the time Apple launched it their competition was virtually non-existent. Their competition was so non-existent, in fact, that Google had already got exasperated with the shitty state of the smartphone market and decided to literally give away the R&D needed to make it not suck. That's how terrible it was. The only devices you could credibly call smartphones were all running operating systems designed for a prior generation of hardware that was rapidly becoming obsolete, and were made by companies that were sitting on their asses doing nothing.

    Apple had a fresh start and an unusual focus on animations, graphics and general UI polish over functionality. At the time the industry believed features sold phones and as they were expensive and thus bought mostly by business, that wasn't a totally untrue belief. The features vs UI bias of early Android vs iPhone models makes this clear.

    But, Android caught up in the UI polish department faster than Apple caught up in the features department and the iPhone has been losing market share since, especially in more price sensitive markets.

    To recreate the success of the iPhone, Apple would need to find a huge consumer electronics market where the competition is asleep at the wheel. It could have been watches. A few years ago I would have said smart TVs because they all seemed to suck, but Samsung and Android have started producing really slick units now that have completely eliminated any UI edge Apple might have had. Android Wear watches are likewise simple and slick. Without a competitive advantage in UI, Apple doesn't have much left to give. There's nothing else especially compelling about their kit.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @07:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @07:44PM (#139609)

    There's nothing else especially compelling about their kit
    Which is why you are starting to see them to lock in vendors. Not so they can use the stuff the vendor makes but just so someone ELSE does not buy the item. Atari did the same thing in the mid 80s. They would tie up hundreds of chip companies making them all think they are going to get into the next atari unit and sell millions. When the reality was they were being used so that Atari could lock out competitors. MS used to play this same game but with software companies.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by quacking duck on Friday January 30 2015, @08:02PM

    by quacking duck (1395) on Friday January 30 2015, @08:02PM (#139621)

    It should be noted that Apple has had 3 new runaway hits in the space of a decade, not just the iPhone. Apple clobbered the mp3 player market with the iPod, the smartphone with iPhone, and then the tablet market with the iPad. In each case there were many competitors before and after that were better, sometimes much better, on the spec sheet, but fell short on usability in critical consumer-centric areas. For example the so-called "first all-touchscreen phone" that beat the iPhone by 3-4 weeks in announcement and shipment by a few months, had a UI so bad (T9 keypad, scrollbars to move up/down a page, terrible browser) that it was outdated the minute the iPhone was announced.

    If you make the mistake of looking at market share and *nothing* else then yeah, Apple is falling behind. Except that's totally expected, since they don't play in the low-margin space, and that's where the majority of Android market share comes from. Their total annual sales have increased each year since the iPhone was introduced, even if there's some levelling off the last 2 years when larger-screened Androids were more popular. And really that's all a company should care about, not the childish Wall Street fantasies where companies must magically sustain exponential growth or be destroyed.

    I don't know that the Apple Watch or whatever else Apple introduces will be a runaway hit. But then I (and many Apple supporters in 2010, actually) didn't think the iPad would be that big a deal either.