iPhenomena
How has Apple become the largest market cap business in the world, and where did the mythical stigma of invincibility come from regarding this tightly controlled company?
The answer is “innovation” - or as the mac haters would prefer - “perceived innovation”. The Jobs / Apple method is to make technological solutions that are easy to use for the masses. Not “able to be customised”. Not “flexible”. Easy.
And it doesn’t matter if the idea isn’t new. Apple is all about taking existing concepts and making them more stream-lined. More simple. Easier.
When you buy an Apple product, you accept its limitations. Because it’s shiny, beautiful and “magical”, you ignore these limitations and accept the rhetoric that they are actually huge strides forward (lack of floppy drive / CD drive / flash).
In some cases they are. In others they are possibly just crazy, ego-driven ideals.
Whatever the rationale, the iNnovation of the iMac range laid the groundwork for what was to come: from the bubble-gum pop relaunch of Apple on Jobs’ return, through to the all-in-one, 2001:A Space Odyssey-inspired iMacs of the early 21st Century. I suppose there should also be a mention here of OSX. There you go. Mentioned.
These, while stabilising the Apple fanbase, were really just the launch pad for the new Apple.
When the iPhenomena was truly unleashed with iTunes (what appeared to be a simple digital music management system), no competitor blinked an eye. So what?
The birth of the iPod nine months later saw a Walkman that used a hard drive and low quality mp3s. There were already mp3 players on the market, the concept wasn’t revolutionary, and the market itself didn’t look like it was going anywhere.
Plus, this “iPod” was released by a company that had hipster status, but less than 4% market share of the computer industry. This was no threat.
Fools.
It wasn’t the iPod that was the killer that would humble them all. It was the first salvo in this war: iTunes.
You didn’t need to have an iPod to have iTunes. iTunes was free. iTunes organised all your music for you. It was simple, easy to use, and did I mention it was free?
Nobody cared when the Zune was released - it didn’t talk to iTunes. Who would redo their entire digital library for a mp3 player that was superior in quality?
When the iPhone was released, fantastic, people could plug it into iTunes and continue like nothing had changed. Except they now had a computer in their pocket that happened to make phone calls instead of just a mini-jukebox.
When the iPad was released, apart from wondering why the hell you’d want one, sales went through the roof.
Why?
iTunes.
It was seamless. Almost like it had been planned that way. And let’s not forget the behemoth known as the iTunes Store. Now 8 years old, it is the largest music vendor in the USA. It also sells games and books, apps and movies, and it has it’s claws deeply buried around the globe in not only Macs, but PCs.
That’s how it happened.
There was no way Apple could have made the profits they are now enjoying without dominating their arch-enemies. OK, there’s Safari for Windows, but not even Mac users utilise it (Chrome is far superior).
But in 2003, when the iTunes Store launched not only on Mac but the Windows platform, you could smell the reaction coming from the competition. It had begun.
Apple is no longer a computer maker. It’s a life enhancer.
Your iPhone, portable computer (Macbook Air / iPad) or iStapler will play your music, make your calls, tweet your location, fling angry birds to the nether-regions, entertain your wife while you’re off with the mistress, play movies, film and edit movies, count your calories, find your keys in the dark, find itself when it’s stolen, show you the fastest route to the 7-11, show you the highest mountain on Mars, shampoo the dog, and acts as a perfectly good prophylactic.
Looking at the charts above, you can see Apple’s revenue, profit and Market Cap starting to steadily climb upward a few years into the life of the iPod. By mid-2004 the word was spreading, and Windows users had started to buy into Steve’s reality distortion field view of how they could listen to music.
By the time the iPhone was released it was too late. The market had been conquered.
But now Steve has passed on the reigns, and the giant-killer Android is gaining ground. To break the mac-haters’ bubble: Android won’t destroy the iPhonePodPad’s base because it lacks one simple thing … the one thing that consumers latched onto years ago to make their lives easier.
Isn’t it funny, in a world where the shiniest gadgets are price pointed for either fast sales or luxury positioning, that the most important element of the digital music / smartphone war was a simple piece of software. That none of the competition thought was important enough to create a decent alternative for.
Because it was free.
Fact Sources: Business Insider, Wikipedia (sorry!), Wikipedia (again, sorry!), and Nasdaq.
Opinion Source: My Brain.
BTW, this is my opinion. Don’t like it? Tell me about it.
BTWA, you can also tell me about it if you do like it?
