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."'

Comments

Re:Props to Apple

[bennomatic]

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.

Good vs. Great

[plsuh]

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

Re:Thank you. Not only that, but they are

[DJRumpy]

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.