Hubris Versus Humility: The $15 billion Difference
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Apple seems to be doing rather well out of promoting the iPad as "magical" and "revolutionary" rather than a "widescreen iPod Touch" which everyone would be familiar with. I seem to recall the early iPod adverts were aimed at creating a market rather than promoting it as a "better MP3 player". Twitter wouldn't have attracted the early-adopters with "free public SMS". The web itself took off with hype about being an "information superhighway" and not simply "connect to documents on other people's computers".
Apple is promoting the iPad as a different kind of iPod Touch. The thing sits right next to the Touch in stores and on web pages. It runs all the same software. It even looks like a giant iPhone. The "magical" and "revolutionary" adjectives are different, but differentiation is an essential part of the strategy: You can't just clone the product with an existing market, you have to improve upon it somehow.
On the one hand, promoting the iPod as a "better MP3 player" would have been a losing strategy because "MP3 players" were not an existing market worth entering. The number of people using MP3 players ten years ago was tiny compared to the number of music buyers. And on the other hand, iPods were aimed pretty directly at the market for existing portable music players, which was much larger. The slogan was "a thousand songs in your pocket", and the iconic image was a pair of white headphones snaking out of that pocket. I don't think people missed the fact that the iPod was a Walkman, only better. Apple could, instead, have played up the fact that the iPod was a tiny computer that played games, or a tiny portable hard drive that let you tote documents around, but in fact these aspects were very muted, because they distracted from the story that the iPod was a super-Walkman.
Apple's actually really good at playing the existing-market-only-different game. The iPod was a different kind of Walkman; the iMac was a different kind of Windows PC; the iPhone was a kind of phone and a kind of iPod; the iPod Touch was a kind of iPhone and a kind of iPod; the iPad is a kind of iPod Touch. It seems evident that Apple could have launched the iPad ten years ago as a new product, and failed. In fact, that seems evident because it actually happened: The Newton came out, it was a new kind of product at the time, and it died horribly. So instead of repeating that mistake, Apple bootstrapped the iPad market, one tweak of an existing market at a time.
The biggest "failure" (or, in Apple terms, "hobby") in the current Apple product line is the Apple TV, and a big reason it's failed so far is that nobody knows what kind of thing it is. (It isn't even "a kind of TiVo", for all the good that would do.)
What is...
Everyone knew what a TiVo was regardless of the description. It was such a hot topic that blogs about it made fortunes from AdSense in the early years. Perhaps calling themselves a better VCR would have worked out, but I can't imagine it would have been an extra $14.75 billion.
Another big piece he's missing: through 1999-2003 blackberry had enterprise sales teams selling into companies driving corporate adoption, vs. TiVo being the redheaded stepchild that none the satellite and cable providers wanted anything to do with. Not to mention they would later ape it's features, or in the case of tivo/directTV fuck the consumer over completely.
1) It's made by Apple. If the Tivo had been made by Apple it would have sold vastly better.
2) You can carry it around with you, and let people play with it in public. When the iPhone first came out every time someone got theirs out they were surrounded by people wanting to have a play. Tricky to do that with something that's plugged in under your TV.
Also note that Apple entered the smartphone market after securing a deal from AT&T to subsidize the cost of the phone. That was their execution strategy and it delivered.
But they completely flopped here in the UK, where the culture of cable/dish TV was much lower. And that was down purely to not getting their message out.
It really wasn't that long ago that Apple was the pariah of the technology world. iPod might be a better comparison. At the time they introduced iPod, the people buying Apple products because it was Apple was a small, rabid cult following, not a sizable part of the general public.
Personally, when they decided to lock up the system (predating GPL3) I put the company in the AVOID column : not a good step for a tech company to alienate potential enthusiasts.
This article is, though, a neat illustration of that basic point.
TiVo faced a wide array of business challenges and I doubt they would have avoided any of them if they had release their device as some sort of "tape-less VCR". It would have seemed silly and probably wouldn't have fooled anyone. The cable and media companies would still have smelled blood in the water and the early adopters would have been put off by the silly positioning.
1) Tivo was different from VCRs, which were used mostly for pre-recorded content, cost far less, and had no recurring fees (except tape rentals)
2) the value chain: mobile phone networks compete, and accepted a symbiotic relationship with branded, value added devices on their network. If the other network has a better device, you better get it too. Cable companies are a local monopoly, and don't compete by having exclusives with branded boxes. They saw Tivo as a threat and integrated the functionality in their service and settop boxes.
You can't parachute in a new market from the sky ! ( however , I have argued that it was poor execution strategy that doomed Tivo and not marketing --which they blew as well.)
RIM's success can be in part attributed to the explosive growth of the mobile technology industry. Maybe TiVo did great in the DVR/ VCR industry, but that industry just isn't nearly as lucrative.
A better question to answer would have been how did each company do in their industry. Or even better, give an example of a characteristically "hubris" approach of a product in the mobile hardware space, and compare it to RIM's "humility" approach.