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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about Apple is that it doen't create disruptive products, but invents new markets altogether.

Smart phones existed before the iPhone; Apple/Jobs just made them orders of magnitude better. Tablets have existed before the iPad; Apple/Jobs just made the first one the market fell in love with.

What new markets have they created?

Now, don't get me wrong... I love Apple. I have a Mac and an iPhone and Cinema displays. I'm jealous of my friends with iPads. Etc. I just don't see any brand new markets.

How about iTunes? The App store? The iPad? I can go build some shit product and ship it first, but without a reliable customer base, there is no market. So yes, I think it is fair to say Apple has created new markets. Prior to 2007 the Motorola Razr was the most popular phone on the market. Enough said.

There was an existing market for MP3 players, smart phones and tablet PC's. Apple didn't create them. It expanded them and introduced the products to the masses.

"It expanded them and introduced the products to the masses."

And how is this not creating new markets? I think you are confusing markets with ideas. IBM wasn't the first to come up with the idea of the computer, but it certainly created new markets for it. Absent actually producing the product that is sold in the market, an idea (or a poorly implemented version of it) isn't much good.

Semantics. I would classify them as new market segments.

I would actually disagree. How many first-year undergrads did you see with a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile device in the pre-iPhone smartphone market? How many middle-aged couples on airplanes did you see with a Fujitsu tablet before the iPad? There were small business and enterprise smartphone and tablet markets before Apple entered them, but there sure weren't consumer markets for these categories.

> How many first-year undergrads did you see with a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile device in the pre-iPhone smartphone market?

Danger's Sidekick line was popular with those less enterprisey demographics and predated the iPhone by quite a while.

How about the mouse driven desktop computer market?

I just don't see any brand new markets.

Most everyone else didn't either a few years ago. Then came iPod, iTunes Music Store, iPhone, iPad. It all seems kinda obvious now, but nobody else did it. That's vision and leadership, and the world needs more of it.

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