“Some may say that Apple could be lackadaisical about determining the intent of the iPad because they have blindly loyal customers that will buy anything blessed by Steve Jobs,” Richardson writes. “That may have been true in the past, but Apple today is a mainstream consumer brand, and many of its customers today are not its traditional niche base. They buy based on perceived value, some of which is functional value (what it does for them) and some of it emotional value (how it makes them feel).”
MacDailyNews Take: We have never purchased an Apple product “blindly” and we challenge Richardson to find a more loyal Apple customer than anyone here at MacDailyNews. (Good luck with that quest, Don Quixote.) We buy Apple products because experience has taught us that the company’s products work well because Apple sweats even the most minute details. Apple products are not perfect, nothing is, but they are routinely far closer to perfect than competitors’ inferior wares.
Richardson continues, “It takes great discipline — not lack of it — to leave a product so open to determination by consumers and, in Apple’s case, developer partners. The typical temptation is to button up the product definition very precisely so that you know exactly how to pitch it to consumers and retailers, and how it stacks up against the competition.”
“This doesn’t mean you should aim to launch vanilla products that lack clear value propositions. There still needs to be a hook to generate interest, but when you’re entering or creating an emerging category that’s still in flux, you should not prematurely shut down options,” Richardson writes. “If Apple had over-constrained the iPad it may have missed out on people outside its traditional markets seeing the opportunities with the device and feeling like it was open enough for them to try out experimentally.”
Read more in the full article here.