It staggers me that time and time again Apple lays out the reasons for it's unrivalled success for all to see, yet non of it's rivals seem interested in copying their methods and opt for simply copying their products.
Fortune favours the brave.
Fortune favours the brave.
According to traditional business management practices, no startup should last more than a couple of months. And most don't. And yet, somehow, Silicon Valley as a cultural economy is the most innovative, successful, profitable(?) place in the world.
What the MBAs don't get is that a rising tide lifts all boats. If my company creates a new market, can't meet demand, and goes under, I can easily find great work with the competitor that put me out of business. Or start a new business that serves their customers in a new market. Shoot, even if all I get out of it is that I can use their product, that's great. I'm still better off, even though I "lost".
And as long as we have this understanding with each other, that failure won't be punished, but rewarded, not with a golden parachute, but with more chances to fail-- then we're not afraid to take risks. We're allowed to be crazy. We're allowed to innovate.
Bet our future on an insanely great new project for which there's no demand, why not? We have nothing to lose. It's just a company, there will be more like it. We might not get rich, this time, but we'll know we made a dent.
Steve Jobs might not have invented that idea, but he sure taught it to a whole bunch of us.
Even if other companies _wanted_ to replicate Apple's way of doing business, it's like Paul Graham pointed out in his Great Hackers essay: you have to have great people at the top to know how to identify the great talent below that actually dooes the work. Excellence has to permeate the entire organization. Do you see that coming from Samsung, HTC, or Motorola? They clearly don't have the capability, so they get the software from somewhere else, and then make it worse by adding their own differentiating layers.
Google or Microsoft can obviously make the software, but, unfortunately, they choose not to make the hardware, and in my opinion their products suffer for it.
True, it's hard, but not that hard. These guys did it on a regular basis: http://www.lushpad.com/articles.php?id=16&pag=1
The true reason as you point out is organizational and it is the same as that age-old killer of creativity: fear. The subordinates are afraid of doing something the boss does not want. The boss is not pushing ahead either because he/she is afraid of making decisions that may entail risk.
Apple is more of a "love mark" than a technology company. Back in 95, Microsoft was a love mark, people loved it when a new version of windows came out, now people dread it.
People started looking for an alternative and Apple was there, all different and shiny. It wasn't 1 year that turned them around, its the result of 12 hard years.
Microsoft released a tablet back in 2000, did anyone care? Apple does it and millions rush to buy it, they have created a following, this is not easily replicated. They innovate, amaze and move onto the next thing. There is nothing simple about this process.
Then some little computer company in California moved in on their territory and began making beautiful, simple, well made upmarket products.
It's the same sensible that means Apple shouldn't have started iTunes (we aren't a record company) and Amazon shouldn't have done Kindle (we aren't a computer company) !
Look at the PSN's movie rental store - perpetually hamstrung by limited selection. Why would competing studios want to get into bed with one of their biggest competitors on their closed service?
Similarly, it creates internal conflicts of interest. Sony's electronics are constantly crippled when it comes to content, probably at the pressure of owning their own content themselves. For the longest time it was impossible to get any movies on a memory stick, forcing PSP users to buy them on expensive and battery-murdering discs instead. It took years to fix that mistake, but of course, by the time they did, public interest in mobile movies had basically all but disappeared.
I appreciate Apple in a completely different way, I think how they have created their following in nothing short of amazing. The spot a market potential and they make it work, really well.
The iPod worked really well but it was really the iPhone that did it for them, they brought Apple to the absolute masses. I am still not 100% sure if the iTunes store was a fluke, I don't think it was on the first iPhone. If it was planned in it's entirety then hats off to Steve.
Look at the market share now, Microsoft should be scared. I don't think Microsoft has ramped up it's game much either, Ballmer is a bit of a joke so I'm going to find it hard to take him seriously but I think I will always be Microsoft at heart.
You probably meant the App Store, which wasn't on the very first iPhone and was, in fact, a bit of a lucky strike. Jobs didn't want anyone installing anything on the phone (classic Apple control-freakery at its finest), so he insisted for months after launch that extensibility would come exclusively from sandboxed web-applications. Eventually they did release a SDK and establish a process to publish apps, but only after encountering overwhelming demand.
But this introduces a paradox. If the top levels of your organization do not understand design, then they cannot hire or promote the best designers.
There are queens and princes and other high ranking royal family memebers in this metaphor, such as marketing, sales and operations. But they all take their orders from the King. And Design is the King.
Anyone who thinks that is "harder than it sounds" isn't thinking straight. It's hard producing, marketing and selling badly designed products. It's hard motivating a work force who aren't happy or proud in their work. It's hard trying to compete with a company that's better than you at designing products. It's hard whichever way you choose to go.
As soon as he talked to them they enthused about the Skunkworks setup and how their version would be better since it would be in the main plant, with it's own set of VPs to supervise it and be properly intergrated into the main business etc.
ps. Read his biography http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/d... if you think any of this Silicon Valley stuff is new