How To Succeed Like Apple

Agreed, but the principles articulated about Apple can be applied to any field. You may not be able to out-apple Apple in computer hardware, but you could certainly use that strategy elsewhere.

One of my favorite quotes comes from someone I randomly met: Everyone tries to be Apple, no one tries to beat Apple. It's as of everyone has to follow them instead of trying to do their own thing.

That is so true. Maybe it is the reason why so many companies fail when they approach a new market: We need something like ... Twitter (lookin' at you, buzz)

Mr. Jobs' vision aside the biggest thing that they have going for them is that they don't try to succeed like someone else. Google has unique strengths and weaknesses inherent to its culture and leadership. Microsoft is exactly the same. So is any startup. However, for some reason people talk about success in a prescription sort of way. It is true that common strains will exist between companies who have achieved some measurable amount of success, but what works for one of them will not necessarily work for the other.

The interesting thing about Microsoft is that they fail whenever they walk outside of their strengths. Moreover they loose resources, time and mind share each time they do something like that. Some may call it a lack of focus, but they seem to aim at mimicking other people's success, and the saddest bit is that they aren't alone.

I read about people who want to be Steve Jobs and companies that want to be like Apple. I wish I could explain to them that you can't do that. You simply can't. Apple was unique. Steve Jobs is unique and so are you. So, why don't you focus on what makes you unique?

People fall down more often when they are pretending to be someone else. I don't know why but in the lure of the siren of success they kill the very bits of them that ensure their success.

What I am trying to say is that perhaps we spend too much time reading into other people's success than to see what is in ourselves. Perhaps that just sets us up for inevitable failure down the road. I can't base my life on the question; "what would Steve Jobs do?". I can't base a company on that either.

P.S. - Awesome article.

Yes, the soul of products made by Dyson definitely share that same sense of magic as those from Apple. The "fan" they put out a little while back is a perfect example - absolutely minimalist, not a single extraneous feature. But also like Apple, the products have an underlying technical prowess that just doesn't exist in their competitors. That fan - it's absolutely insane, there are no moving parts as seen from the exterior. It's like magic - does that remind you of another product?

I think products like this can only be created when it's a product person that heads the company. It's only when the product is the CEO's baby that enough passion is put into the product to make that magic. Of course, it also needs a bunch of money behind the CEO, because it's only with money that you can make decisions without having to worry about the bottom line during the design phase. Apple couldn't have done what they did without first starting with the Apple I/II. Those weren't magical products, they were just "good enough" to permit the bootstrapping of the Mac.

Hmm, this just gave me an inspiration for another article: Apple's failures and why. How To Fail Like Apple.

Best of all is to fail in a non-public way: I can't find the quote right now, but Jobs has said (roughly) that he's as proud of the things they've developed and then haven't shipped as the things they have. Presumably some really good products that just weren't right at the time for Apple to bring to market.

The example that comes to mind for me is Microsoft's recent Kin phones: because of the sunk-cost fallacy, they apparently felt like they had to bring something to market, even though everybody apparently knew the product wasn't good. So they made a few bucks back (not many!) from Kin sales, but got a ton of harder-to-quantify negative publicity from this very public failure. If they'd have just killed the project the day before public reveal and done something internally with the lessons learned, they'd be far better off.

Well, consider what would happen if you did the opposite of each one. "Keep your number of products high" might work in some market, but "have an inconsistent and unpolished user interface"? I don't see what you'd get out of that one.

Yup. Some of these items represent sound advice and not just superficiality.

To be fair, putting together an excellent company that can compete at the top of one of the biggest industries on Earth is not an easy task, no matter how much good advice you have to work with. However, becoming a better company by taking lessons from the best is something well in the realm of feasibility for many organizations.

Why is it that Hacker News linked blog posts and comments and such are so full of "you are not X" and "don't try to be as good as X because you are not, take the safe route and be safely mediocre" type stuff?

You guys are harshing my mellow.

Seriously though... no, adopting some superficial Apple-like guidelines will not make you Apple. But understanding at a conceptual level how Apple does what it does might help.

I think the root of these kinds of comments is what I've come to call "success mysticism" in business. It's the idea that the successful have some mystical thing called "what it takes" that is opaque and cannot be understood. You either have it or you don't. This is bullshit. Success comes from experience, intelligence, hard work, dedication, and a little bit of luck. Only the latter item is at all mystical.

Business is really different from science, engineering, and hacker culture in that it's really really superstitious. People usually refuse to examine the black boxes of success, and when they try they usually draw superstitious and superficial conclusions.

It's not about copying Apple directly or following this as some blueprint. It's about understanding why they have made a lot of smart decisions and maybe a few of those will factor into your company. Steve Jobs had many influences, but he meshed all of them together with his own thought.

I think there's a part II to that piece of advice. The full version would be:

Have a clearly defined leader that is not an idiot.

Having a clearly defined leader that is an idiot has the opposite effect. The order of excellence in companies goes: brilliant leader, well managed group, idiot-narcissist in charge (in decreasing order of successfulness).

I don't think it's contradictory, but it is perhaps mixing together two separate points, that Jobs or someone else ultimately accepts or rejects ideas and designs, and that Jobs claims these judgements are made based on the merits of the idea, not who came up with it.

Design by committee means that your design decisions is based on negotiation.

Design is a decisions, decisions that are negotiated are rarely if ever crisp and consistent but rather a trade-off between different opposing views.

That is the point more than whether there is a team. If the team thinks the same way, you don't need to do the trade-off.

Nobody ever built a statue of a committee.

That photo of the 911s is impressive. When you compare it to say Corvettes from 50 years ago, you really get the picture.

BMWs are great cars. They've kept the kidney grille for eternity. Some of the other cues have disappeared though.