“Most new announcements by Apple are digested and understood by the tech press instantaneously. Great products are great products, and it doesn’t take much time to realize how exciting things like the iPad or Retina displays are,” Dalton Caldwell blogs.
“But some moves can take years to completely understand,” Caldwell writes. “So, I now bring you, my two favorite tactical moves by Apple, which I have only recently come to fully appreciate.”
Two brilliant moves that helped create the Apple iOS powerhouse:
#1: Windows Compatible iPods: By casually co-opting the Windows userbase, Apple made Windows desktop marketshare irrelevant in the mobile-centric world that would soon come into being.
#2: Market segmentation by Moore’s Law: Let’s drill down into the full implications of this: in the Apple org chart, the iPhone is a single product. This single product is built by a single product team, a single software team, and a single marketing team. They put all of their energy into building the single greatest product they can. Without expending any effort, they simply let Moore’s law transform today’s great product into tomorrow’s entry-level device. No need to re-tool, no need to pollute your own channel, no duplicative corporate ass-hattery.
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Attribution: Daring Fireball. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
To my mind, the most important move of all was to create an ethos within the company where only the very best will do. It starts with the initial design of products and goes right through to the way that customers are treated, even years after having bought the product.
Japan took the auto industry by storm by simply defining quality as the producing best product and user experience possible.
Twenty years later, the lost much of that ground by taking on the US car maker’s definition of quality: good enough to satisfy most of the customers.
Are you kidding me. By any measure, cars are much more reliable, including the Japanese cars, than they were 20 years ago. What has happened is other manufacturers have closed the gap.
Other manufacturers closed the gap, and even got ahead, helped by Japan, Inc. lowering their quality standards.
An iPod from “The summer of 2002” would have been a 2nd Gen iPod, which still had a FireWire port and required a computer with FireWire. That was a good thing, because most USB ports back then were still the slow 1.1, not 2.0. He says the “the software wasn’t great,” because it wasn’t even a Windows version of iTunes yet. It was a third-party application called Music Match that Apple had licensed, until iTunes for Windows was ready (along with the iTunes Music Store).
It wasn’t until the 4th gen iPod (and the iPod mini) in 2004 when iPods were on equal terms with Windows users. And that’s when iPod sales really took off. So “brilliant move #1” took a few years to complete.
Now, with iCloud and iOS 5.x, the OS of the user’s “big” computer is irrelevant. The iOS device does not even need to be connected to that computer, not even once, because it is now an “independent” computing device, and an iPad can really be the user’s only computer. So Windows compatibility, which helped to build Apple’s customer base, will also become more and more irrelevant going forward.
The brilliance of a one Steve Jobs
great insight, Dalton.
I think the 2 best moves where:
1. Inventing stuff people WOULD use.
2. Saying “no” to everything else.
This is why Microsoft wanted Apple to knife the QuickTime baby. The single greatest tactical move Apple has ever made.