“Most, like Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung and LG, have opted for some sort of Android-based strategy,” Faulkner writes. “Still others like Research in Motion are back at the drawing board hoping to develop a new device that will generate more sales than yawns… With the iPhone opening the doors to corporate networks, RIM is scrambling. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Research in Motion comes out with a fabulous new family of devices. They’d still likely be number-three in the battle for mindshare among consumers and software developers.”
“My gut feel [when Apple unvield the iPhone in 2007] was that it was a game-changer, and now a full three years later, its ‘competition’ is still struggling to figure out what hit them” Faulkner writes. “There’s an old saying in the technology industry that if you don’t eat your own children someone else will. In this case, someone else did because of the inability of the entrenched competitors to take risks and innovate. Their management preferred to make minor changes around the periphery and milk their cash flows. But when real change arrived, they were the proverbial deer in the headlights.”
Faulkner writes, “There once was a huge industry for companies like DEC, Data General, Apollo, Prime and Wang. They were the hot growth stocks of their time but they disappeared very quickly, just like the dinosaurs. Nokia, Research in Motion, Motorola, and others are the minicomputer companies of the current era. They just don’t know it yet — nor do their investors.”
Full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, so it’s nice when the truth cuts through the FUD.
One thing is for sure: If the iPhone rumours do turn out to be true, it will crank up the heat even further in what is already a hotly competitive market, and companies like Nokia, Palm, Motorola, and Research In Motion could really start to sweat. – Mathew Ingram, The Globe and Mail, December 07, 2006
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dow C.” for the heads up.]
The problem the other companies have and it begins with those in charge, is their focus is “how do we make money?” while Apple’s focus is “how do we make technology experiences better?”. Apple’s philosophy leads them to the products they design; the customers love it because it makes their experience better and they vote with their cash. Apple makes money.
The rest of the industry is focused on how to take money from the customers and they’re trying to copy Apple’s products in order to take and keep taking money from customers. People can tell the difference and unless these so-called competitors wake up and realize how to compete with a player like Apple (make the experience better for the USER) they’ll just be parasites relegated to being marketplace paparazzi watching Apple be the star. At that point they’ll just try to “compete” by attempting to damage Apple through government intervention.
@breeze
Apples time is now the future is now.
that’s my point. Apple will become ubiquitous over the next decade. They will be everywhere, in everything. How does Apple compete with that? Especially after everyone else gives up?
Apple cannot survive without competition. They absolutely need the likes of Dell, Google, and Microsoft to do it their way. If these giants all started copying Apple then Apple’s innovation stagnates.
You’re right though, that’s a ways off. By then Apple won’t have SJ around to say NO and Apple will become passé until someone from sales introduces a strategy to sell billions of dollars of product, afterwhich he is proclaimed to be the savior of the company.
Next thing you know, the sales guy’s in charge of Apple once again.
I know I’m cynnical and pessimistic but, when the Jobs era passes, Apple will have lost all its cache.
Clearly, Apple has infused itself with talent from every walk of life, but there will never be another Steve Jobs; one who says no, nine-times out of ten. That is what makes him so remarkable; his ability to say no even when yes sounds so right, only to find his competitors said yes and failed.
Steve Jobs has uncanny insight into human nature and what we want in a gadget that enriches our lives; he’s designing these things for himself, that’s all. If it enhances his life, we’ll use it as well.
My only hope is, Apple will continue to design products for Steve Jobs long after they’ve errected a bronze statue of him on the Apple campus.
What do you imagine the plaque will read? Anyone?
G4Dualle:
Apple’s like and kind DNA is prevalent in it’s current management and will reign well into and beyond the next decade. Enjoy breaking the frontiers with it and making the difference that matters till such time as the idiocracy becomes chronic
As for the bronze statue:
Stev Jobs-True to the bone …The world would be so boring without his vision, inspiration and high standards.
“A working class hero is something to be”
@G4 Dualie
I disagree with your main premise. Apple has never needed the likes of Dell, Google, and Microsoft to compete. Apple has fostered a corporate culture of competing with itself. Ask anyone who works there – there is a lot of emphasis on making what they’ve done before even better. That’s the way it has always been (at least, during the times that SJ has been in charge), and that’s why they seem to be the gold standard in corporate excellence (and not just with product development – it’s pervasive in everything they do as a company).
Dell, Google, and Microsoft, OTOH, need Apple to compete. Just look at how they try something (like tablet computing), fail in the marketplace, wait for Apple to redefine that market, and then copy Apple. It’s a cycle we’ve seen over and over.
Steve Jobs-True to the bone …The world would be so boring without his vision, inspiration and high standards.
“A working class hero is something to be”
@disposableidentity
You missed the point of my comment; Apple innovates from others failures.
Aside from iPad, I can’t think of an Apple product that was born of Apple’s own skunk works. Can you?
I believe iPad evolved from Newton, that was developed before its time, when the tech wasn’t quite there.
All of Apple’s current innovations were born on the backs of other’s failures. The iPod has been Apple’s single greatest innovation in the last twenty-years. From it, sprang the iPad and the iPhone.
The first iMac was a triumph for Steve Jobs, who took up right where he left off, upon his return to Apple. In that moment of triumph, the idea of less is more was born and from it came Apple’s roadmap for the future; miniaturization.
Apple’s work is not yet done. However, they no longer take their cues from those who would copy them, they’re looking to the minds who are deploying Apple products in unique ways, but they’re especially feeding off the energy of the software developers.
Apple’s future will be in software. They’ll change their philosophical strategies when hardware is marginalized at a microscopic level.
Virtual machines is the future. Think biology. Apple will be getting under our skin and we’ll love them for it.
@technica
I completely agree with you regarding who Apple’s real competition truly is; the same could be said of Tiger Woods, who competes with himself, and not his opponents.
However, when he’s in a slump does he compete with his ideal, or the course?
I have always thought Apple need only continue to perfect its portfolio and please me and they’d survive any storm. Their customer-base, even at its lowest point or share was capable of sustaining the company by continuing to replace their last Mac with a new one.
We can credit ourselves for keeping Apple alive, when everyone else wrote them off for dead.
Given that, if Apple never converted another consumer, they would live a long fruitful life.
Before iPod there was what,
Newton? You believe from Newton came the iPod, iPhone, and iPad? That Apple was innovating, using the Newton as its inspiration? Sounds plausible, however as I understand it, Newton did not materialize in Jobs’ brain and like the off-spring touched by human hands, wanted nothing to do with it.
Neither Apple or Steve Jobs operates in a vacuum but, I will defer to your thinking that Apple’s skunkworks gadgets gave life to the i-series of products that we all enjoy today. That is until such time we see what Jobs reveals in his biography.
I appreciate yours’ and breeze’s arguments though.
Hey Steve Balmer,
“Dance Monkey Boy Dance”
The commenters on the original article are creaming themselves over Nokia’s hardware feature list and yet to be seen MeGo OS.
Wait till you see what we are working on at Nokia!
That BS doesn’t work for Microsoft any more but Nokia hasn’t tried to do it before so they think pushing vaporware will work for them for a while.
As if anyone would hold off on an iPhone 4 purchase just to see Nokia vaporware in the distant future.
“But it doesn’t have Flash”
“But it doesn’t mulit-task”
“Where is cut & paste”
“Can’t change the battery”
“No USB”
“Only one US carrier”
“Too expensive”
“Doesn’t have a ‘real’ keyboard”
“not enough megapixels”
“It’s just a fad”
“Not good for the enterprise”
“PC guys aren’t just gonna walk in and figure this out”
“It’s not open”
“The Pre’ will kill the iPhone”
“Droid does”
Did I miss anything?
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Apple just gets it right, Whats interesting, is that if you back track the last 3 years,
Look how many so called ” iPhone killers ” have come & gone, I saw a Laptop magazine from about a year ago and the cover had the Palm Pre on it, and it said
” why the Palm Pre could be an Iphone killer “. LOL !!!!!
Amazing staying power………