Apple's real secret uncovered


It's not the amazing hardware, it's making the customer experience amazing
I thought this entry about Apple and consumer electronics was interesting.

If you think about it, Apple’s strength really doesn’t come from inventing things. I’ve been a Mac guy for pretty much my whole life, and so during college I was one of those people who’d watch the Steve Jobs keynote every year. Almost every time, my techie officemates would see a new Apple product and say “hey, there’s nothing new there. Linux has been able to do that for 6 months.”

Of course, to do it on Linux, you typically had to purchase some special hardware, download a tarball, compile it from source, tweak a config file, and then hope that the software supported your particular hardware combination. Apple doesn’t invent much, but they do take technologies that are currently only available to people who are intimately familiar with gcc and vi, and makes them accessible to ordinary people.

This is even true of Apple’s most legendary products. Everyone has heard the story of how the original Macintosh used concepts largely copied from prototypes that Xerox was too clueless to bring to market. There was nothing at all new about the iMac other than curvy colored plastic. (It did introduce USB to the Mac market, but USB wasn’t an Apple invention.) And of course there’s the iPod, which attracted a big yawn from the tech world because it didn’t offer any features that weren’t already available on other MP3 players. In all these cases, what Apple did is come up with just the right combination of features, put together with a great attention to detail, so that the whole was more than the sum of its parts.

It's pretty obvious that right from the start, Steve Jobs biggest contribution to Apple has always been his insistence on top notch design and making it easier for the customer. That was certainly true with the Macintosh project, and it continues to be true today. I can't think of another company that put the emphasis on soothing the customer BEFORE they even knew they wanted the product.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - February 24, 2007 at 08:36 AM  Tag


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