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Apple's Focus is Still Software
bonch writes "Via a Forbes interview, Steve Jobs reassures Apple faithful that despite the runaway success of products like the iPod they are still a committed software company. He also talks about the real motivations behind negotiating Microsoft's 1997 $150 million investment in Apple, the development that went into the original iTunes (only four months!), their future expected revenues, and much more. MacObserver provides an overview, and Fortune has excerpts here."
I watched Steve's kenyote speech, and he spent fiteen times as much time demo'ing software than talking about the Mac mini -- which I thought was the big event of the night. Some totally noncharismatic VP demo'ed Pages for ages, a band was called to demo GarageBand, and Steve generally spent a lot of time clicking around.
I ended up thinking "wow, Apple is really a software company that happens to make hardware".
"My God, there really has been a genie locked in that bottle! Apple's innovation and creativity have been unleashed in a way that they haven't been in 20 years. Look at the results. This isn't a company about 5% market share; this is a company that is capable of competing with world-class competitors and achieving market shares of 65%, 70%, and even 90%."
.Mac (pronounced dot-mac) Internet subscription service, and a popular line of easy-to-use wireless networking gizmos to link computers and stereos and other devices in the home and office. And, of course, the iPod. The company has even become a player in retail with its 100 Apple Stores: chic glass and anodized aluminum temples that fuse fashion, technology, and reverence for personal creativity into something Jobs likes to call the "Apple user experience."
Steve Jobs, the silver-tongued king of Apple Computer, is explaining how the world's opinion of his company has risen with the triumph of the iPod. We're in our third phone conversation, following up on a 2 1/2-hour interview in the Apple boardroom a few days before. Jobs is obviously feeling good, and with good reason. Overnight, it seems, Apple has broken out of its box as a boutique computer maker and emerged as a force to be reckoned with in consumer electronics, music, and who knows what else. "The great thing is that Apple's DNA hasn't changed," he says. "The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it's not like we're having to cross the river to go somewhere else; the other side of the river is coming to us."
Apple's recent achievements, in fact, make it look as if it is walking on water. Its stock price, which languished during and after the dot-com crash, suddenly more than tripled last year. (It recently hit an all-time high of nearly $80 a share.) In January, Jobs crowed that Apple had posted the highest revenues and profits in its 28-year history for its fiscal first quarter ending Christmas Day. Propelled by sales of 4.6 million iPod portable digital music players, revenues zoomed by 74%, to $3.5 billion for the quarter, putting the company on track, by analysts' estimates, for a $13 billion 2005. Meanwhile profits more than tripled.
The DNA may not have changed, but the external transformation is dramatic. No longer is Apple's business limited to computers--though it did sell more than a million Macs last quarter for the first time in four years. Today the company's ever-expanding products encompass multimedia applications for creative professionals and consumers, the thriving
In his first extended interview since undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer last summer, Jobs eagerly explains how Apple has pulled all this off and drops hints about where the company is going and how big he expects it to get. (For excerpts from the interview, see 'Our DNA Hasn't Changed'.) But as the conversation unfolds, Steve doesn't talk about the next gotta-have-it gizmo or ultracool ad campaign or trendsetting industrial design. None of those, he says, is Apple's core strength or primary competitive advantage. Instead he's going to talk about software--the central strand that runs through all of Apple's success.
Steve being Steve, he's doing this partly because he's selling something. This spring, Apple will unveil Tiger, an update of its OS X operating system that, at $129 a pop, will generate hundreds of millions of dollars of high-profit sales. (More about Tiger later.) Even so, for Steve to credit software for Apple's success sounds so hopelessly dweeby, so Bill Gates, that it seems hardly worth muting your iPod for--until you consider the new business model it has helped Apple spawn. Indeed, the whole iPod phenomenon is, underneath it all, one big interwoven software creation. The iTunes jukebox that coordinates the mind-meld between your iPod and your Mac or PC is just the most obvious chunk of code. The iTunes Music Store, which accounts for 62
Why? Because you want to use OS X?
You're trolling, but it's worth pointing out that Apple would die a death if they ported OS X to x86.
Several things would happen:
* People would either pirate it or buy it for their PCs
* It wouldn't work as well on the non-vertically-controlled hardware, so people would believe it was crap.
* Microsoft would work it's typical magic with PC vendors and make it financially painful for them to buy Windows licences for their PCs if they also sold PCs with OS X on them, or with no OS. Microsoft do this already, which is why PC vendors only ship Windows-pre-installed machines.
* The market share for Apple computers would decrease.
I have yet to figure out why they havent botherd to make an OS to run on x86 based systems rather then there mostly proprietary hardware
Heh, x86 is proprietary and closed. Intel reverse engineered it. AMD reverse engineered it. Transmeta has an implementation. Contrast this with the PowerPC platform. IBM wrote most of the specs. It is completely open and documented. IBM and Motorola sell large numbers of systems and their is no barrier for any other company to enter.
In Bizarro world "closed but popular" means "open" and "open, but not as popular" means "proprietary."
If apple botherd to try and spread out into the larger PC market they would slaughter MS rather quick and I woudlent mind seeing it happen. Apples software is limited mostly to apple branded hardware and that limits how well the company can compete.
Yeah because so many companies have done well competing with a company convicted of abusing their monopoly to stifle competition. That is why OS2 and BeOS are so popular. It is especially a good idea to destroy 95% of your income by entering into an overpopulated commodity market where all but one player is losing money at the same time as trying to compete with said monopoly. Brilliant!