[Sigia-l] Apple's success [was: Design(ers)]

[Listera]

Manu:

If I understand you correctly, the gist of your argument is that a company
cannot create and/or enlarge a market, it can only tap into a pre-existing
market, no?

I disagree with that: markets can both be created and/or enlarged.

PostScript -> unifies display and print
Macintosh -> enables cheap digital content production
LaserWriter -> allows cheap proofing
Higher-res rippers/plotters -> connects all to analog printing process

Combined these create the multi-billion dollar desktop publishing market.
Take away, say, PostScript you don't have the market at all. Take away any
number of the others, your market progressively gets smaller.

I don't believe in a preordained, "intelligently designed" timeline where
some higher authority determines roughly 20 years ago was precisely the time
in history the DTP market would come into existence. Apple, Aldus, Adobe and
a bunch of other companies introduced products/systems and *created* that
market. Certainly it was a confluence of events coming together at the same
time, but without the active participation (imagination, R&D and investment)
of certain companies, you do not get that market. There are obviously
endless examples of this notion.

And, I might add, many markets that some companies thought existed at a
certain time in history, did not materialize. TimeWarner/SGI/Oracle and
Interactive TV or PointCast/Marimba and push, for instance.

Some companies, like Apple, can indeed create markets, but they can also
fail to do so because of their strategic blunders or simply because material
conditions were just premature.

The iPod system was a bet on literally changing the music distribution
ecosystem. I don't doubt for a minute that Jobs aimed at anything less than
that. Others, including the big labels, had already tried and failed
miserably at it.

The tip of the iceberg we have seen with the video iPod and the Disney deal
is nothing less than Apple's gambit to create a different distribution
system for digital goods, not just music or video. (Some of Apple's recent
patent applications indicate as much.) This may, one day, eliminate
terrestrial and cable TV as we know it and create an entirely new market.
Others have tried it, without success. If Apple pulls it of it'll happen not
because of mere luck or historical coincidence, but intentional *design* in
Cupertino.

Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum. Factors external to Apple also play
a role. But they are not the principle drivers. The Samsung deal with NAND,
for example, allows the iPod nano at a certain price point, but even without
Flash drives, the nano's predecessor iPod mini was already the best selling
player in the world. Of course the upcoming WiMax deployment might allow
iPods to network and open up the gateways for Apple to stream digital goods
thereby creating yet new markets, but WiMax alone will not create that
market, it will be Apple's intentional design to pivot around that piece of
technology that will.

As to whether the iPod is the *sole* reason for AAPL's success in the last 3
years, I have nothing more to add other than suggesting a mental exercise:
keep everything else but take away iPod/iTunes/iTMS from Apple's portfolio
and see where AAPL would have been. Not its OS, not its iApps, not its
portables or any other segment comes even close to the engine the iPod has
been to its rise in mindshare and good fortune.

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.