Is Steve Jobs Repeating His Past Mistakes?

Actually I believe this myself. It's hard to say exactly how well he would have done at fending off Microsoft, but it would have been a closer race than it was. Apple seemed totally lost during that period.

It seems to me really strange to find people like Steve Jobs that belong to the group of "most successful people in the world", economical, personal and socially, being criticized by someone random on Internet, giving him lessons on what he should be doing.

Of course Steve Jobs is human, and makes "mistakes",he is not a deity, but as a human, he had more successes than anyone else I know in the IT field in a sustained way over the time.

In fact what this blogger considers "mistakes" is what I like about people like Steve "everything that Jobs has ever done in his career has suggested that he loves great products more than market share."

Thank God!! some people care about products and not getting more and more rich like the Banks, whose financial successes come from stealing other people work, or getting monopolies from destroying competition and benefiting from that, or getting(paying) the politicians to agree with them.

Not everything in life is money, marketshare ... and I respect the guys of google or Apple because they cared first about the product, and the got money and marketshare as a consequence later because people love good products.

Their primary goal was to benefit their customers and they benefited from that. Those that try to first benefit themselves with crappy products, tricking their customers to buy it using only false advertising, corrupting others to give them market privileges(today you have to pay corrupt officers to have the right to sell to some countries), well, those are the mistaken companies.

True, but not quite in the way that the author thinks. The Macintosh lived on if you wanted one, and Windows itself only existed and innovated to catch up with Mac. The Mac made its dent on the world even if you never bought one, because it forced Microsoft to make their operating system more Mac-like.

Learning to accept partial victories is part of life, and Steve's partial victories are a little more complete than some people's. (Alan Kay, anyone?)

This just reads to me that Microsoft has been failing hard since the great succession and Apple is capitalising on the void more than Apple's excellent strategy would've won the game against Microsoft back in the day.

My take is that Apple will lose, and yes, history is repeating himself. They'll lose in the mobile/tablet space to Android handset/tablets, and they'll maybe lose in the "real computer" space (eventually) to Ubuntu/Chrome OS or a revitalized Microsoft. I'm more confident of the former than the latter though, have heard "year of the linux desktop" just too many damned times.

So no, he's not repeating past mistakes.

Success through high margins is less visible and less obvious than success through high market share, and I'm guessing that contributes to the strange idea that Apple is somehow making a mistake with a high-margin lower volume strategy, but come on, they make more money selling cell phones than almost any other company in the world.

Apple could certainly license their OS to other vendors. But in doing so, they would be throwing out an extremely successful business model for one that eliminates their biggest differentiation from their competitors: the polish and quality they can provide by having complete control over all aspects of their products.

Apple treats Apps as a switching cost. The more Apps and content that a user purchases, the less likely there are to move to a competing platform.

Microsoft won because Office, Outlook, games, etc increased the switching cost. Once you were over in the Microsoft camp, you were there forever. There was zero user churn.

The whole point of the Get A Mac campaign was about how the switching cost was now low.

Google treats Apps and content as a commodity. Ship your App and make crumbs from AdSense and AdMob. Google's switching cost is in the data in Gmail, Google Apps, etc. Google needs to ship Google Checkout worldwide and then store your purchased Apps like mail and docs to build up the same competitive advantage and attract developers.

1. iPhone leads out of the gate.

2. Apple charges a premium.

3. Apple does not license the OS for clones.

4. Google not only licenses the OS, it's completely free, as is their development kit and app store.

5. Apple lacks some infrastructure redundancy and is reliant on ATT and Foxcon, maybe others.

Some differences this time around:

1. Meta standards. There's no longer the Microsoft file formats vs the Apple file formats that locked so much of the world into Windows/Office. These open meta standards eliminate the possibility of lockin. Hence even if Android pulls ahead in market share, it won't have the lockin that Windows had.

2. Apple has fully transitioned from a computer company to an industrial design company. They just happen to specialize in consumer technology (and are not too shabby with the business tech either, thanks to BSD). Most people, consciously or subconsciously, perceive Apple this way as well. Apple owns this niche.

3. Unlike Microsoft, Google actually has a sense of design and aesthetics. Not quite at Apple's artistic level, but, crucially, intuitive, easy to use for noobs, with power-user features under the hood.

I do see Android eventually outselling iPhone simply because of its cost, openess (to handset makers, app devs, and end users), economy of scale, and Google brand.

But I think there's room in this field for both, and no lockin to prevent that. Apple will do fine as the BMW of handsets, I don't see them coming so close to death in that role as they did the last time.

The thing about the markets these days is that a tablet and a phone are very different from an office computer. They're much more personal. They're also cheaper to start with, so people might just be willing to pay for quality in ways that small/medium/large-sized businesses wouldn't for PCs.

But all of this is sort of thinking relativistically in terms of the desktop/tablet/phone space. However, there are too many paths out there these days for things to proceed slowly, linearly and predictably.

That's the one huge advantage that Linux has over all of this. It attracts people who are in left field who are going to change the entire paradigm. Maybe the future is 3D CSS transforms. Maybe it's Apple. But maybe it's a completely different dialogue. All it takes is one or two misguided people on HN, e.g.

I don't think Jobs is naive enough to think he could have out-competed Microsoft with the "aesthetically pure products" strategy. I'm pretty sure he does think he could have maintained a much more significant chunk of market share for Apple through the 90's, but I bet he recognizes the strong pressures toward commoditization of the PC concept. And would we have iPods, iPhones, and iPads if Jobs hadn't been fired and grew complacent instead? Doubtful.

29:00 into this video.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2457

I think the iPhone will continue having a significant market share and I think Apple will continue innovating. In the meantime, the Android market share will grow, possibly beyond the iPhone share, but I don't see why it's necessary to only have one winner that takes it all. I think both companies, along with RIM, will do fine

Hard to understand how that idea could be outlandish considering how many times Steve himself has repeated it.