“Back when Steve Jobs first announced how Apple was just going to focus on four essential products—a consumer and pro version of a desktop and a consumer and pro version of a mobile computer — that ‘quadrant vision’ of his had a zen like appeal that suddenly made Apple (and Steve) look quite smart,” Anthony Frausto-Robledo writes for Architosh. “It was the panacea Apple badly needed in the late 90s.”
“To the Wintel crowd Jobs’ vision didn’t make sense; it was counter-intuitive to say the least. How can you serve all of your customer’s various needs and constraints if you limited your product road maps’ addressable footprint? But the strategy worked. It worked beautifully,” Frausto-Robledo writes. “The new radically designed iMac energized Mac users who found the consumer-facing machine useable in lower and higher education settings, in addition to homes around the world. But it wasn’t something you found in professional settings too often, especially if it had to handle ‘pro software.'”
“Fast forward today, 15 years or more, and you have a completely different reality. Today’s modern iMac is found literally everywhere and for years even software developers making tools for ‘pros’ have been both using and displaying their ‘pro’ apps on them at conferences and trade shows serving Apple’s pro customers,” Frausto-Robledo writes. “Perhaps it’s time Apple spent some deep thinking sessions on what constitutes a hardware product for ‘pros’ and what attributes does a pro product need to have deserve that moniker?”
Read more in the full article here.
