It staggers me that time and time again Apple lays out the reasons for it's unrivalled success for all to see, yet non of it's rivals seem interested in copying their methods and opt for simply copying their products.
This applies to Silicon Valley in general, I think. We take risks, we bet on long shots, we try to serve markets with zero demand and squeeze blood from stones. We spend money like it was just paper, and when we don't have money we give our time away for free working on things we believe in.
According to traditional business management practices, no startup should last more than a couple of months. And most don't. And yet, somehow, Silicon Valley as a cultural economy is the most innovative, successful, profitable(?) place in the world.
What the MBAs don't get is that a rising tide lifts all boats. If my company creates a new market, can't meet demand, and goes under, I can easily find great work with the competitor that put me out of business. Or start a new business that serves their customers in a new market. Shoot, even if all I get out of it is that I can use their product, that's great. I'm still better off, even though I "lost".
And as long as we have this understanding with each other, that failure won't be punished, but rewarded, not with a golden parachute, but with more chances to fail-- then we're not afraid to take risks. We're allowed to be crazy. We're allowed to innovate.
Bet our future on an insanely great new project for which there's no demand, why not? We have nothing to lose. It's just a company, there will be more like it. We might not get rich, this time, but we'll know we made a dent.
Steve Jobs might not have invented that idea, but he sure taught it to a whole bunch of us.
I'm flattered. Feel free to redistribute it as much as you like; in a country that's struggling just to pay the bills, I feel like we should be talking about this a lot louder.
A big reason for this is that what Apple does is very, very _hard_. It's really hard to build physical objects with design good enough to be featured in museums. It's really hard to build your own software ecosystem, from operating system to software distribution to entertainment services. It's hard enough just to do them; it's extremely hard to be great at them.
Even if other companies _wanted_ to replicate Apple's way of doing business, it's like Paul Graham pointed out in his Great Hackers essay: you have to have great people at the top to know how to identify the great talent below that actually dooes the work. Excellence has to permeate the entire organization. Do you see that coming from Samsung, HTC, or Motorola? They clearly don't have the capability, so they get the software from somewhere else, and then make it worse by adding their own differentiating layers.
Google or Microsoft can obviously make the software, but, unfortunately, they choose not to make the hardware, and in my opinion their products suffer for it.
The true reason as you point out is organizational and it is the same as that age-old killer of creativity: fear. The subordinates are afraid of doing something the boss does not want. The boss is not pushing ahead either because he/she is afraid of making decisions that may entail risk.
The article you link to has a photo of arguably some of the greatest designers of the mid 20th century, and Ive and his team are perhaps as consistent as the Eames or Saarinen. Doing good design is easy, great design however is much, much harder.
I personally think it's impossible to replicate what Apple have done. It's not just one thing that has caused a change but a series of changes starting when they introduced the iMac.
Apple is more of a "love mark" than a technology company. Back in 95, Microsoft was a love mark, people loved it when a new version of windows came out, now people dread it.
People started looking for an alternative and Apple was there, all different and shiny. It wasn't 1 year that turned them around, its the result of 12 hard years.
Microsoft released a tablet back in 2000, did anyone care? Apple does it and millions rush to buy it, they have created a following, this is not easily replicated. They innovate, amaze and move onto the next thing. There is nothing simple about this process.
To be fair there is little in common between the iPad and Windows Tablet computers, it is a shame they both manage to be called the same thing simply for lack of a physical keyboard. The windows ones, with the stylus, certainly deserve the name, as they are identical in spirit to a stone tablet: the defining feature is the ability to write freehand. Definitely not the case on the iPad, in fact, we use a digital keyboard on the iPad! It's no "tablet."
You could take everything you just said and apply it to Sony in 1980. Then their founder, Akio Morita, retired with poor health and they diversified into lots of sensible business decisions about owning studios
Then some little computer company in California moved in on their territory and began making beautiful, simple, well made upmarket products.
Might I just add, I am not your typical fan boy for Apple. Quite the opposite actually. I am a Microsoft geek at heart, learnt basic when I was 13 and loved them since. They can do minimal wrong in my eyes (except for windows ME).
I appreciate Apple in a completely different way, I think how they have created their following in nothing short of amazing. The spot a market potential and they make it work, really well.
The iPod worked really well but it was really the iPhone that did it for them, they brought Apple to the absolute masses. I am still not 100% sure if the iTunes store was a fluke, I don't think it was on the first iPhone. If it was planned in it's entirety then hats off to Steve.
Look at the market share now, Microsoft should be scared. I don't think Microsoft has ramped up it's game much either, Ballmer is a bit of a joke so I'm going to find it hard to take him seriously but I think I will always be Microsoft at heart.
The iTunes Store came with the original iPod, and it was an integral part of Apple's strategy.
You probably meant the App Store, which wasn't on the very first iPhone and was, in fact, a bit of a lucky strike. Jobs didn't want anyone installing anything on the phone (classic Apple control-freakery at its finest), so he insisted for months after launch that extensibility would come exclusively from sandboxed web-applications. Eventually they did release a SDK and establish a process to publish apps, but only after encountering overwhelming demand.
By "sensible" you mean "disastrous." Owning Sony Pictures has been a consistent money loser, and the studio IP concerns at Sony Music and Pictures hamstrung their electronics arm from innovating in the face of the iPod threat.
In Sony's defense, the idea of a modern electronics company owning actual content was an interesting idea, especially as they introduced new media formats. It's not far removed from what Amazon is attempting in publishing and what turned out to be a very successful model for the game industry. Unfortunately for Sony, it turns out that the economics just don't work for music and movies.
It's more than the economics of owning a studio - Sony's ownership of their studios actively harms their other, actually profitable, product categories.
Look at the PSN's movie rental store - perpetually hamstrung by limited selection. Why would competing studios want to get into bed with one of their biggest competitors on their closed service?
Similarly, it creates internal conflicts of interest. Sony's electronics are constantly crippled when it comes to content, probably at the pressure of owning their own content themselves. For the longest time it was impossible to get any movies on a memory stick, forcing PSP users to buy them on expensive and battery-murdering discs instead. It took years to fix that mistake, but of course, by the time they did, public interest in mobile movies had basically all but disappeared.
It was a very 'sensible' decision if you are an MBA! If Sony had been a little more flexible and far sighted it could have worked. But as you say, it resulted in the DAT tape and minidisk being restricted to protect the studio.
It's the same sensible that means Apple shouldn't have started iTunes (we aren't a record company) and Amazon shouldn't have done Kindle (we aren't a computer company) !
At its heart, design is a risk, because it looks to create what isn't. Most businesses are focussed on improving what is. The unknown is unquantifiable, and doesn't fit well into a spreadsheet
Could you be more specific on what these reasons are? You seem to imply that it's easy or obvious but I think it's neither. Success is never easy. There is no magic bullet, there is no blueprint.
There are queens and princes and other high ranking royal family memebers in this metaphor, such as marketing, sales and operations. But they all take their orders from the King. And Design is the King.
Anyone who thinks that is "harder than it sounds" isn't thinking straight. It's hard producing, marketing and selling badly designed products. It's hard motivating a work force who aren't happy or proud in their work. It's hard trying to compete with a company that's better than you at designing products. It's hard whichever way you choose to go.
Process takes a long time to change because you have to overhaul the entire bureaucracy or get entirely new companies. They are trying. It might take them 10, 20 years.
I wonder if that is true. By the time Jobs came back in '97 he had recognized Ive's talent and they released the iMac in '98. It took Apple one year to make that adjustment. How long should it really take others to do the same?
Twas ever thus.
Ben Rich was Kelly Johnson's assistant at the original Lockheed Skunkworks (creator of the U2, SR71, etc) - he was regularly approached to leave and create skunkworks for every other aerospace company.
As soon as he talked to them they enthused about the Skunkworks setup and how their version would be better since it would be in the main plant, with it's own set of VPs to supervise it and be properly intergrated into the main business etc.
Fortune favours the brave.