Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

> Innovative design and intellectual property are no longer long-term competitive advantages.

Really? Google and Apple don't get advantage from their great design and engineering talent?

> You live in the era where the most powerful programming frameworks and tools are free, local broadband and high-availability servers are cheap, and world-class people are willing to work 60 hours/week in exchange for Ramen noodles and the chance to be a part of a cool new startup.

Yes, but tools are tools. Most people still make shit with them.

View on HN

Apple's innovative design is a short-term competitive advantage. If they did not have anything else going for them, android competitors would tear them apart. The thing with apple is that they continue to innovate (and market) successfully time and time again. That's the secret that other's can't seem to figure out.

One of Apple's strengths I think is that they have the resources of a large company and yet do a decent job at moving & pivoting like a small company. They're at a point lately where they seem to release some major new cool thing each year that makes consumers drool and their competitors tremble or at least scramble to catchup.

The flipside is that if they feel too much pressure to keep moving fast they might move too fast and then the quality drops and they stumble (as possibly evidenced by the recent iPhone 4 signal issue.)

I don't completely disagree, but wouldn't you agree that for every company so amazing at design as Apple and Google there are 100 or 1000 who are successful for other reasons? And therefore just saying "better design" is not IN GENERAL something you can compete on?

Furthermore, wouldn't you also agree those two companies also have a tremendous quantity of innovation, and never take the gas off innovation, to an extend probably not feasible or necessary with other companies?

I would agree with you that if you have the design talent of Apple, plus the output of Apple, plus the marketing success of Apple, that this is of course a wonderful advantage.

But that's rare... maybe other paths to success are more practical for many founders out there.

I would say that Google and Apple are successful because they execute well. Many talented people have tried to copy their designs and features but few have been able to execute those designs and features as well as them.

It's not a sustainable business strategy to assume the competition is not going to catch up

You're right, but that is neither Google nor Apple's strategy. A winning strategy is to hire and cultivate the best {engineers, designers, leaders, etc.} - if you get the best, then by definition the competition cannot catch up.

Apple's unfair advantage is a massive base of loyal fans who will follow every move Apple makes, track the SteveNote live and buy the products on pre-order (and pay a high price for them).

Other companies release products of a similar quality to Apple and don't get anywhere near the press coverage or sales.

Apple's advantage is marketing to people who respond to their message, thus CREATING loyal fans.

do you remember the 90s?

man, everyone thought apple was stupid. something you'd only use if you got it for free.

I mean, the same complaints were voiced then as now (e.g. it's essentially a closed hardware platform) but unlike now, they didn't have the upside. They weren't "cool"

At the time, most people had used apples because apple gave computers away to schools. Really, I think it was a bad strategy, because we all came away with the idea that apples were slow, outdated, broken garbage which couldn't run anything more interesting than 'Oregon trail'

so, uh, yeah. I'm personally still not a fan of apple. but I can certainly say they didn't always have the masses of loyal fans they have now. (I mean, they had fans, but they were few, and generally looked upon with the pity one has for BeOS or Ameiga fans.) This large and "cool" apple fandom is actually a pretty recent development. Now, i'm way out of touch, and most of the people I meet are *NIX users, so I wouldn't really know, but as far as I can tell, it really started with the advent of OS-x.

edit: as others point out, my point of view is probably a little different... as I'm a technical person, and apple did not really start appealing to the technical crowd until os-X.

I would say it started with translucent iMacs, that caught them up and got riding the hipster wave until now.

Yes I remember the 90s, I was working for the later part of that decade on and off.

I encountered a number of die hard Apple fans during that time who simply wouldn't consider another computer other than a Mac and continued to buy whatever Apple made. That was before the iMac really hit. No technical person I knew would use a Mac in the 90s, which they more than fixed with OSX in the 2000s.

Numerous computer companies failed in the 90s though Apple didn't, I had thought it was due to that loyal fan base, but maybe not? (though clearly they still needed a turn around when Steve Jobs returned)

Um, Apple' has always concentrated on well-designed, top-end products. They have always charged huge margins. The drum beat of their marketing throughout the '90s was "our products are better designed". And they were. Even the "boring" beige pizza-box Macs from 1995 were amazingly well put together, both hardware and software.

What's changed is that the good design has moved from the heart of their products out to the skin. Today an iPhone looks great (really, great) but you can't even change the battery! How far have Apple come from the days when they cared so much about their users that they even thought to put little pull-out feet on the inside, so that when you opened it up to change the hard-drive everything unfolded with an easy grace?

Far enough to be far more successful, it would seem.

Unless you're suggesting that any company named "Apple" would have those fans ... in what sense is a massive base of loyal fans an unfair advantage?

They (we) are loyal fans for good reason.

My use of the term 'unfair' was in reference to the way the term was used in the article. I thought this would be perfectly clear to everyone, since everyone would have read the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com