Comment on Apple Doesn’t Innovate by Bill Eldridge

Bill Eldridge — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 18:12:08 +0000

The fact that this question keeps coming up makes me think few understand innovation. What’s worse, it puts into question of how people can do sales.
Of course Apple innovates – think Quicktime, iTunes, the AppStore, iPhone, iPad, iTV, successive lines of MacBooks….
You might question whether they innovate successfully – which these days seems to mean their stock price, not their revenues or profit margin which are still fine.
It might mean “innovate as consistently successful as Steve Jobs”, which hasn’t always been a compliment (look back at 2001-2002) – but is key in the post-Jobs era.
But we also seem to ignore process innovation – such as Agile methods, or WalMart’s revolutionary hub approach to delivery.
Most business innovation is incremental. Complete blue sky innovation is risky and often unnecessary.
The iPhone success was arguably only a bit about a phone – much was about successful carriage deal with AT&T, a pleasant user experience with the AppStore, significant apps and content based on iTunes, and lessons learned + design taken from the very successful iPod.
In terms of what people think of as pure “innovation”, iPhone was more akin to what RedHat did in transforming Linux into decent usable distributions. It was at heart incremental, but holistic – the user experience took 2 giant steps ahead.
But in terms of features, well, it wasn’t about features. It was about a usable system that left a satisfied customer.
And the common wisdom in sales is, “don’t sell features – sell value”. Along with “don’t compete on price”. You would think Apple following these simple guidelines would be met with “like, well duh!” Instead, there’s disbelief – “how can they succeed without x, y and z, or when so-and-so did this before?”
Innovation is about successful change, which is something akin to fulfilling vision. Visions usually aren’t cluttered with wishlists and schematics. They’re about an idea that precedes and gets modified along with the plan, including priorities required.

Comment on Is the wait for Surface Pro now obsolete? by PBX

PBX — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 03:38:30 +0000

Wow. I only thought that only Ipads can be jail broken. So there’s no need to buy a Surface Pro then.

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Comment on Apple Doesn’t Innovate by Bill Eldridge

Comment on Is the wait for Surface Pro now obsolete? by PBX