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How Apple Had a Spectacular Year
Hugh Pickens writes "John Boudreau writes in the Mercury News that during its just-completed fiscal year, Apple broke four consecutive quarterly revenue and profit records and amid the worst recession in decades, hired thousands while others cut jobs, but what most distinguishes Apple is that while other tech titans spent 2010 cutting costs and acquiring new technology through mergers, this $65 billion company has been relentless in innovating like a startup and ruthless in promoting technologies that disrupt its own product lines. '"It's been an awesome year. The frequency of new stuff just boggles the mind," says Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co. "There is no company that is remotely close to what Apple is doing. They are the Energizer Bunny." In September 2005, Apple killed off the popular iPod Mini to make way for the the iPod Nano; Apple openly acknowledges that the iPhone is cannibalizing its iPods — and they don't seem to care; and the iPad tablet could ultimately threaten its core laptop business. "[Apple] has a different cultural mind-set," concludes Wolf. "They are acting like a startup, though they are becoming a $100 billion company."'
Why wouldn't you release the iPhone, a beefed up iPod + phone service, which gives you much larger profit margins, and having everyone who bought an iPod upgrade for a significant extra outlay? I'm confused.
Again, how does the iPad, which can't connect to a printer, run multiple apps at once, connect to most peripherals easily cannibalize your laptop sales? It's like saying when Sony introduces a new netbook or ultralight laptop model they are cannibalizing their other sales. This sounds like apple worship. Give credit where it is due, don't start acting like they are doing things no one else does with their business lines.
and where do they get 65 billion from? the market value is 250 billion+.
Apple is a software company that sells most of their software inside custom hardware. The hardware isn't special, its pretty much the same as anything else, but what makes it better than everything else is the software inside. In fact, the main reason they sell hardware is to ensure the software works perfectly.
Actually, "we think..." might be core to Apple's success, but not for the reason the GP implies. Maybe they only release products where they can say that with some level of sincerity. Do you think that ANYONE at Microsoft thought about the Kin, "We think this is the best solution"? Or WebTV? Or PlaysForSure? They may have been able to say, "This is an also-ran means of allowing us to capitalize on the innovations of others."
And other companies? I'll bet Google engineers have thought that about their products. But Dell? HP? Hell, HP even sold branded iPods a few years back, because they couldn't make a music player that would come anywhere close to the iPod's popularity.
The CB App. What's your 20?
iPods we only for Mac users at first. I saw one and saw what Creative had and iPod was better. I almost bought a Mac just to have it handle my MP3s. I know a few people who did.
If you compare the basic functionality only, there was no difference. The "marketing" was that it was easier than all the others. It still is. If you buy a MP3 player that is not iPod, what do you get to manage the tunes? WMP? WinAmp? How does it sync? Push button automatic or do you have to mount it like a drive and copy the tunes over manually? Honestly, I don't know. I just know that iPods just work, and no worries about having to learn how to get stuff done.
iPhones are the revolution in smartphones for the rest of us. Sure Blackberries existed, but they were (and still are) mostly for Corporate. iPhones made the Smartphone market. Droids are close behind.
iPads have made the Tablet market. Now everyone wants to make a tablet, and they all are copying Apple's design. And iPad is still a better tablet than exists elsewhere. Android Tablets may compete with them, but I don't see Acer, HP, Dell or any of the others that are making tablets that don't suck.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Just a quick comment from a former Apple employee; most people are familiar with the old saw, "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." I.e., instead of trying to get something perfect, you should get it good enough and then ship it. Within Apple the perspective is slightly different. There, it's more along the lines of, "Good enough is the enemy of great." I.e., good enough isn't acceptable -- for an Apple-branded product we're going to look for the next level of polish and care that differentiates our stuff from everybody else's.
I think this comes from the fusion of NeXT and Apple engineers. Most people recognize that NeXT brought a heckuva foundation for Apple's next generation operating system to the table in 1997. However, few people recognize what Apple brought to the table -- an engineering culture that regards rough edges as anathema. There was plenty of NeXT software, but much of it was very rough; it wasn't easy to pick up for the new user, was missing essential features, crashed often, or all of the above. This was a direct consequence of the fact that Foundation and AppKit allowed you to create apps quickly and easily, but then as a software developer you still have to trap errors, check for corner cases, add documentation, tweak the UI design so that common tasks are easy to accomplish, etc. This can easily take three to four times as long or more as standing up the initial core functionality. Most NeXT apps never went through this stage and so they lacked the polish for mass market users. Once the NeXT technology went through the polishing process (and it took four years before the first consumer release, really five years and 10.2 Jaguar before it was truly ready for my mom!), the new OS was a completely different animal from OpenStep 4.2 -- much more polished and suitable for mass-market consumers.
--Paul
it's making products that work
This whole Apple-products-just-work spiel is plain marketing BS.
Two months ago my sister bought my dad an ipad. Guess who got to spend 5 hours this past weekend helping him try to get it working in various ways. That's right, me.
First he wanted to update the OS. So I read the instructions:
Hook your ipad to a computer and then run iTunes. Follow the instructions from there.
That's it. Well iTunes is a program on my father's ipad, it is a web site from which Apple sells music, and it is a program that one can get for their desktop machine. WTF are they talking about? In their effort to simplify everything for stupid people, Apple has named everything "iTunes", creating substantial confusion. iTunes is a program that gets music from Apple, it syncs your device's content, and it is used to update your device's OS. Of course.
So after my father realizes he forgot his "Apple ID", we play 20 questions to get a new password. ("This is like taking a God damn exam. Why can't I just get the update software?") Then the software starts downloading. An hour later we get "Unknown error 1602." Shit. Disconnect ipad. It won't run. It is foobarred. Our only option is to "Restore" the ipad, which it tells us will wipe all programs, books, videos, photos and music from the ipad. WTF!? Apple didn't put the OS on a different partition from the media? Are you serious? So we wipe the iPad and my dad spends a couple more hours putting stuff back on it.
Then he wants to hook the iPad to my TV set. So we go to a store for a video connector, because the video cable is nonstandard. (Good idea, buy a device with a nonstandard video out, mumble, mumble.) Store is out of them. Drive to another store. Pay an absurd amount of money for a six inch cable. Hook iPad to TV. Nothin'. Check cables, etc. etc. An hour later, read on web. It turns out that only certain programs can be displayed on the TV out. WTF?! Who would buy a device that limits what you can see on an external monitor? Apple is making Microsoft look good here. After another hour of mucking around with the device we finally get it to show the Netflix video on my TV. It looks like shit. The video is only half the size of my screen.
My dad is typing an email. He gripes about the screen not being easy to type on, but says you can get a keyboard for it. I say, I have keyboards! But, hey, there is no USB connector on the device! Are you serious? You can't just plug in a keyboard or mouse? WTF?
People buy Apple products due to hype, marketing, and they think the products make them look cool. That's it. I have fewer problems with my Linux laptop. It just works.
I couldn't have said it better myself. In the end, the primary things that are important to a typical end user are ease of use, quality of features, customer support, and design excellence, all of which Apple excels at producing.
A simple example is product activation. There is none for OS X. Its something that many end users of Windows will hit at some point in their day to day use and upgrades of a Windows OS. They are treated suspiciously, and in short, like criminals if too much of their hardware has changed. Apple treats their customers like customers in this respect. There are no limits to your install, no activation keys, no phone numbers to call, and no tedious 16 digit keys to input.
Another example is simple hardware reliability.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189986/report_gives_apple_top_honors_for_reliability.html
Apple consistently performs at the top spot for reliability, and that makes for happy customers. These are things that they don't need to check the web reviews for, or ask their geek friend for advice. Simple word of mouth carries this sort of appeal to new customers. They are obviously doing something different if they consistently get top grades in product reliability. All hardware is not created equal, even if it comes from China. Apple has a good reputation with it's customers, plain and simple.
Last but not least, is ease of use. There is a simple expectation that products from Apple are fuss-free. As a general rule, those hold true. They spend a great deal of time and money getting things 'right' so that their customers don't struggle with technology, which in turn also benefits from word of mouth.
There are many things that a techie can dislike about Apple, but there are many things that they should appreciate. It's willingness to advance new tech even if it is potentially risky in the market place, it's willingness to open source and contribute to open source, it's stance on privacy (google Apple Facebook), and it's basic ability to get people excited about technology in general.