On Jun 15, 2009, at 10:39 PM, James Fraser wrote:
> I like Apple, (short of drinking the Kool-Aid, that is) but they've
> always made their money, not from being the first on the market with
> a given product, but from being the first on the market with
> products that consumers both want to buy in large numbers and
> (perhaps most importantly) feel they can incorporate into their
> lives better than comparable products offered by other firms.
Yes. This goes to the heart of the comparison I made between the
Wright Brothers and Professor Langley? Langley was brilliant and I
don't want to take anything away from him, but his flying machine sank
to the bottom of the Potomac on it's maiden voyage. It was a flying
machine by design and it had all the parts that the Wright Brothers'
airplane would later have, but it just wasn't designed or constructed
well enough to actually get a person off the ground and keep them off
the ground for some period of time.
I don't want to sound like I've drunk the Kool-Aid, but I hear this
criticism not just of Apple but other successful companies: that they
didn't really invent anything at all, that they aren't a technology
development company, that they just borrow other people's ideas and
learn how to make them so that people will like them and feel good
about buying them. There's a false distinction made between being a
"technology company" and a "technology marketing company."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that at least by one way of
looking at it, Apple DID invent the digital music player. Yes, there
were devices that would store MP3 files and output them into
headphones prior to the iPod, but all of them sucked. Sorry, but they
did. The iPod had its flaws back then too, (still does, but many have
been addressed) but almost none of the portable digital music players
that preceded the iPod would let you make a playlist or select what
songs to play and in what order. Creative Labs' "howto" docs suggested
that to get the order of songs you wanted you could RENAME YOUR FILES
so that the songs would be alphabetically arranged in the order you
wanted them. Synchronization was dismal. These devices really truly
made listening to music no fun.
Making a product that does more than fulfills the requirements in a
functional specification, but actually serves a purpose which will
benefit people seems to me to be a valid metric of whether the product
has actually made it to market. If people won't want it because it
doesn't actually make their lives better or happier or easier, then
the product hasn't done its job and has essentially sunk to the bottom
of the Potomac.
No one would spend much money on Langley's flying machine, but boy did
the world go gaga over the Wrights'! Were the Wright brothers just
better marketers? No, they looked at what other people had done and
improved on it. It was an incremental improvement over previous
designs, but it was that incremental improvement that made enough
difference to be obvious how this could benefit people so people lined
up.
This was a windy way of saying that I think it's unfair to call Apple
"merely" a technology marketing company because they aren't ever first
to market, and to accuse them of simply appropriating others'
inventions. If they were the first to make it work right, they
invented it no matter how many others came before.
I wouldn't pretend that this is the only valid way to look at it, but
there it is.
Steve
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Received on Tue Jun 16 04:36:30 2009
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