MacDailyNews Take: Not a good analogy, if only because “Death Star” was ascribed so often to Microsoft back when they mattered.
Allen and McIntyre write, “The success of the company is particularly spectacular because it is largely a four-product enterprise, consisting of the iPad, iPod, Mac, and iPhone. It also produces a suite of supporting software that includes its OSX, the Safari browser, iTunes, and the App Store. These non-hardware products knit together the ‘iProduct’ universe. The reason behind its growth is simple: Apple clobbers the competition Today, Apple is most often blamed for the demise of other large technology brands. As tech evolution has accelerated, Apple has remained ahead of its competitors with innovations that gamble on its ability to assess the consumer and enterprise markets.”
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Allen and McIntyre write, “24/7 Wall St. has analyzed the brands and companies Apple has impacted. They range across many sectors of consumer electronics and mobile devices, and include much of the software that operates on both computers and portable systems.”
Companies and products Apple has impacted:
• RIM and Blackberry
• Amazon’s Kindle
• Asus
• Microsoft and Windows
• Mozilla’s Firefox
• Sony
• Adobe and Flash
• Google: Apple is now converting people from traditional search to the use of Apple Apps as their way to navigate the Internet. Among the most-used applications for the iPhone are those created by social networks like Facebook and providers of targeted content like weather information, movie show times and news. These are the very same terms that are most often searched in Google. The App Store is the first “search” system to provide any strong competition for Google.
Allen and McIntyre write, “Apple is an anomaly. It has the disruptive force of a startup and the consistent message of a mature company. It is one of the largest tech companies, and yet it is a darling of Wall Street. It is a hardware company that is also software company, content company and now consumer-electronics company. It has manufactured not one but three revolutionary consumer products back-to-back, and all on a content distribution model that seems to evolve with the needs of the product. It’s a killer because it continues to be the first to market and often times the only game in town.”
Read more about the companies and products that Apple has impacted in the full article here.