People say Apple is a tech company or a toys for millenials company, but I claim that fundamentally Apple is a user experience company (maybe the only one).
They dominate because Steve Jobs realized what business they're in, and none of their competitors have. This is like when the railroads' lunch was eaten by the tractor trailer because the railroads thought they were rail companies, when in fact they were transportation companies. Samsung and all the other competitors think they're in the device business, but they're not. They're in the UX business.
It helps to have Steve Jobs, who was actually a user experience zealot and in a normal org would have been the CUXO, masquerading as a CEO. As an example, think of the difference between being an Apple vs. Samsung customer, all the way through the value chain. Shopping in that beautiful airy Apple store, experiencing those matte textures and ingenious packaging while unboxing your new devices, the industrial design wizardry that constructed a machine with such amazing fit and finish and tight panel gaps and textures, software that (sometimes, mostly) just works.
Jobs was a strong enough leader to make a bunch of mostly-orthogonal disciplines (e.g. manufacturing, industrial design, software engineering, packaging design) subservient to the company's ultimate objective, which is UX. It doesn't hurt that Apple tends to execute best-in-class on each of these axes, but that's tactics not strategy.
The big question for the future is whether Tim Cook understands this. It's left as an exercise for the reader whether the Apple watch is a product made by a UX company or by a company intent on duplicating the financial success of the ipad and iphone by cargo-culting the "create new device class" methods that worked before.
That's tough. I think it's becoming more and more true these days; but I very much disagree if we look at a long story of best-in-class UX that truly set the tone for the entire industry and beyond.
Apple used to be much, much more than marketing; in fact the very smugness of their image and marketing comes from their unprecedented domination over computer-user satisfaction, superior design language that contributed as much to art as it did to tech, and so on and so forth. Even typography, one of Job's first huge intuitions and success, is a true user's benefit well beyond the looks.
I'm particularly harsh with Apple these days when I criticize their choices (UX, UI, manufacturing quality, product design, pricing, whatever), but that's because I hold one of the world's biggest company to much higher standards than what they're currently outputting; and I did not set those standards — they did for themselves over their own history. That has been their true gift to the world.
Apple's value add is the same as it has been since the very first iPod: User Experience. Apple is a UX company; they've been successful because everything they did was laser focussed on the UX.
Right now buying and operating a car kinda sucks in a lot of ways [0] because GM doesn't have anyone whose job it is to subordinate all business functions to UX. Steve Jobs did that at Apple and maybe today somebody is still carrying the torch. The fact that Apple has a culture of design and implementation oriented around UX is the value add.
Imagine the process of purchasing and repairing your car feeling like an Apple store. Imagine Jony Ive designing the fit and finish of the car hardware, inside and out. Imagine a center-console human interface that was designed by someone with taste [1]. All of this is going to be packaged seamlessly with that beautiful attention to detail in subsystems integration that makes my grandma want an iPad, just because it feels amazing, even though it does literally nothing useful.
Obligatory disclaimer: For political reasons I strongly disagree with Apple's walled garden philosophy, and it makes me so angry that the best laptops available run closed source OS's natively. But I have to admit that Cupertino's hardware, shopping process, and unboxing experience is beautifully designed, and that their focus on UX does lead to a nice experience if you stay within their ecosystem.
This is something I've been harping about for a long time. Apple is a _user experience_ company, not a hardware or software company (perhaps they're the only UX company out there).
There's an old saw about the railroads getting killed by the tractor trailer in the 20th century because they thought they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business. This time, Apple knows exactly what business it's in, while the competition seems to have no idea (compare the highly-curated experience of shopping/buying/shipping/using an Apple product to the Android or Lenovo analogue).
Explain Apple's popularity, taking OS X and iOS completely out of the equation.
Steve Jobs and his quest for perfection.
Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Apple can easily compete on price with anyone nowdays. They choose not to in (low to mid range) computing, but the iPod/iPhone/iPad are ultra-competitive price-wise with anyone out there.
The real reason is because Jobs believes controlling the entire experience (both the hardware and the software) gives the best experience for the user. He may well be right, so long as he is in charge of the experience (cite: any other company that tried the same strategy).
Steve Jobs is a genius, but he's also 55. He's a once-in-a-generation leader, and Apple is lucky to have him.
There are two things that have always set Apple apart in my opinion:
1) Landscape-shifting new product categories
2) Holistic, "scenario"-driven product design (as the author was advocating for)
#1 mostly died with Jobs, imo. But #2 seems to still have deep cultural roots at the company. They don't think in terms of component parts (at the hardware, software, UI, or any other level). They think in terms of making a device that a person can use for things they care about. They start from the top and work downward, everything else serving that ultimate end. Microsoft still doesn't do this, Google still doesn't do this.
That was enough on its own, but now 14 years of investing iPhone profits have added "sheer technical excellence" to the equation, giving them an additional edge.
"Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple’s five software platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud. Apple’s more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it."
Sure maybe at one time, perhaps early 2000's. Apple you can thank samsung for all the success you've had over the years. lets be frank!
Keep in mind that Apple makes a superior (or at worst equivalent) product, sells it for the same price, and makes 4x the profit.
I agree that market share is a leading indicator, and that Apple's biggest challenge is to run faster than everyone else, while keeping the imitators at bay and not outrunning consumers or the laws of physics.
But they've got some runway due to their efficiencies (and cash). It's not sexy, but it's how Tim Cook earned his job, and I don't think anyone at Apple is confused about any of the above. :)
Apple products are generally just better, eco system or not. Apple almost literally defines the industry particularly in ergonomics.
Right now Apple can be thought of as a good king. They have more often than not chosen consumer centric strategies to consumer exploitative stratagies.
However absolute power corrupts absolutely, and apple is starting to make business first rather than consumer first decisions. App store moving to a more subscription based model was apple dipping it's toe into customer exploitation. As apple skirts the line of ads, it turns icloud backups and your entire photo library into a treasure trove of information to be exploited and profited from.
If apple ever thinks that they are in a position where people would not move to competitors, or there are no competitive competitors it means apple can choose to exploit their lead at the cost of consumers, like every other big tech company has done over time.
Using iCloud is one step further to Apple lock in and one more vote to giving apple power over your digital life.
Steve Jobs was a vision guy, but Tim Apple is a capitalist, next quarters profit kind of guy. Next quarters profit people see a brand, not as something to be protected, but as something to be exploited.
Agreed. I wasn’t trying to say Apple gets every bit of UX perfect (or even acceptable) in all products.
But they do have a history of disrupting markets by leveraging superior UX. Mainstreaming the GUI, the click wheel, the all-glass multitouch phone, etc, etc.
Apple is the best exmaple of a company that is lead by design. Their products aren't a confusing maze of options and complexity where anything goes, but instead holistic human-friendly devices that are a perfect balance between form and function. Not everyone will be happy with the compromise of "configurability" in favor of "usability" - but the incredible success of Apple products can not be argued with, society at large agrees with simple humanized technology, and will increasingly demand products and services that display good design traits.
That's a false argument. These are separate points of discussion. You're arguing that they're right because they were first to market in a new space and have achieved significant momentum. Momentum is just that. They've been riding on it for a while. The last significant innovation was iPad, which was just an evolution of the one real innovation: iPhone. That's only going to carry them so far. Android is eating their market share while Apple is extracting what they can from this momentum and iterating on a theme.
I think Apple's products are great. Their ID is fantastic. Their developer ecosystem leaves much to be desired. The fact that I no longer buy their products due to their closed nature (and, by extension, their philosophy for the future: closed, controlled, and owned) does not take away from my admiration of the company from a product and engineering perspective.
I have long wondered why no one seems to be able to compete with Apple.
The reasons are fairly simple I think.
1. Apple has 34 years of history. This adds value to their brand. When you buy an Apple product you are buying much more than just the good looks.
2. Apple has complete vertical integration. In other words, should you choose to go after them, you won't just be competing with them on a few verticals but on every possible vertical, from chipset, to industrial design, to interface design, to server technology and the list goes on.
3. Apple has managed lately to build the de-facto strongest digital ecosystem out there. An ecosystem mind you based on product purchases, real money.
4. Apple seems to be following the principle of, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Apple simply creates their own markets.
5. Apple have perfected the art of profit making. Their real accomplishment is selling less than their competitors but still make more money.
It's not difficult to see just how strong this setup is. They are dependent on no one at all besides their customers, which seems to be loving them.
In other words. Nothing perhaps with the exception of an Apple without Steve Jobs can really touch them.
Yes, Apple is really good at creating usable, beautiful user interfaces and vertically integrated solutions. Yes, it's very difficult to quantify this, and yes consumers get it. However, Apple isn't the only company focused on getting the experience right.
Once the UX of a competing platform/product is on par (modulo product/company loyalty), Christensen's low end disruption model kicks in. The way Apple can continue winning is to be ahead of the curve, creating new features and product categories that can dominate, until the low end disruption model catches up to them.
I don't think Apple's success can be isolated cleanly to one pivotal variable. Steve Jobs was obsessed with product and obsessed with product marketing. Apple doesn't see product and product marketing as two wholly distinct functions, either. Most companies do -- and the fact that Apple doesn't is, in itself, a corporate strength.
People could probably quibble for days about whether Apple is a "marketing first" company, or what that phrase actually means. I think it's more apropos to say that Apple is a company that understands both product and marketing. And it understands the "full stack" of marketing in a way most tech companies do not. Apple is phenomenal at brand marketing, for instance -- not just MarCom, or advertising, or conversion optimization. A lot of its competitors relegate marketing to a series of discrete, necessary-but-evil functions, and not a pillar of corporate culture.
They dominate because Steve Jobs realized what business they're in, and none of their competitors have. This is like when the railroads' lunch was eaten by the tractor trailer because the railroads thought they were rail companies, when in fact they were transportation companies. Samsung and all the other competitors think they're in the device business, but they're not. They're in the UX business.
It helps to have Steve Jobs, who was actually a user experience zealot and in a normal org would have been the CUXO, masquerading as a CEO. As an example, think of the difference between being an Apple vs. Samsung customer, all the way through the value chain. Shopping in that beautiful airy Apple store, experiencing those matte textures and ingenious packaging while unboxing your new devices, the industrial design wizardry that constructed a machine with such amazing fit and finish and tight panel gaps and textures, software that (sometimes, mostly) just works.
Jobs was a strong enough leader to make a bunch of mostly-orthogonal disciplines (e.g. manufacturing, industrial design, software engineering, packaging design) subservient to the company's ultimate objective, which is UX. It doesn't hurt that Apple tends to execute best-in-class on each of these axes, but that's tactics not strategy.
The big question for the future is whether Tim Cook understands this. It's left as an exercise for the reader whether the Apple watch is a product made by a UX company or by a company intent on duplicating the financial success of the ipad and iphone by cargo-culting the "create new device class" methods that worked before.
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