Pundits are confounded by how Apple seems to ignore all their great ideas, but the company's strategy appears to be working out rather well on its own. Here's a look at why Apple has done so well while disregarding three major themes of Toxic Innovation Advice, pertaining to acquisition targets, obvious feature requests and commodity hardware.
Intelligence isn't just forming a plausible thought
Apple gets lots of advice, but real intelligence is not simply coming up with ideas. A key hallmark of intelligence is the ability to visualize parallel, potential scenarios, then determine the best alternative to pursue--while constantly reexamining how the environment and other players might change that playing field and require the calculation of a new decision matrix.
Much of the advice directed at Apple is not intelligent in an advanced sense, but is rather just reactionary, more akin to how basic organisms survive: seek to gobble up competitors, race to obvious goals, populate rapidly. That's the game plan for basic survival, not for successful "elite" advancement, whether in a civilization or an advanced commercial enterprise.
Consider why Apple is achieving an advanced level of success--not merely surviving--while it ignores the less intelligent thoughts and advice of so many bloggers, analysts and columnists, particularly in three major categories: acquisition targets; the delivery of many "obvious" technology features; and the pursuit of market share through high volumes of low end, commodity products.
Acquisitions: buy somebody else ideas after they become overvalued!
There's no shortage of advice seeking to explain how Apple should spend its cash making various acquisitions. However, those recommended acquisition targets are often companies that are already successful, such as Facebook or Netflix, or companies that don't report earning money but appear to be doing novel things, such as Tesla or Twitter or Spotify.
Buying something that has already achieved success (or is already valued as having achieved success) is risky. It's like trying to transplant a fully grown tree. Moving a large tree is complex and difficult; even if it takes root completely and isn't damaged in the transition, it isn't going to grow as fast a young tree, planted fresh.
Major mergers and acquisitions are often troubled with similar issues. If the two companies are already quite similar, there's likely lots of duplicative overlap that needs to be whittled away; if the two are too different, it is often hard to align their disparate corporate cultures.
Apple Beats acquisition rumors
Apple has been making dozens of acquisitions every year, but most of these are smaller companies or teams. The company's largest recent buy was Beats in 2014, a target that none of the usual advice-giving suspects had recommended that Apple purchase before the fact, and one that confused many after it was announced.
It's also noteworthy that there was little talk of how valuable Beats might be to anyone else prior to Apple's acquisition announcement. However, Beats appears to have been a brilliant purchase for Apple.
It provided a foundation for rapidly building out Apple Music, and brought an infusion of music industry executives and talent with deep connections into the Los Angeles entertainment scene, something that was literally and figuratively far removed from Apple's roots in Silicon Valley, where deals, solutions and products are arrived at in a completely different way.
There was also a strong diversity-synergy between the entertainment-world branding of Beats and the technology savvy at Apple. Among other things, this included Apple's unique custom silicon design savvy that gave birth to W1, a custom chip that now powers the wireless headphones sold under both the Beats brand and as Apple's own new AirPods product, a star hit of the 2016 holiday season.
Beats didn't have the capacity to launch such an ambitious custom silicon design on its own. It would also have been a huge risk for Apple to launch four different new wireless headphone products of its own. Together, Apple can share its technology with Beats while selling Beats' previously established product line in its stores as a youth, music and sport-oriented brand, enhanced with its custom chip technology.
Apple's other obvious home run acquisitions include Siri; P.A. Semi and Intrinsity (which helped Apple develop its custom silicon team) and AuthenTec (resulting in the Touch ID sensor, and eventually Apple Pay). All involved core technologies Apple wanted to own.
Like Beats, they were not ever recommended by pundits before the fact. Siri languished as an overlooked App Store title, P.A. Semi and Intrinsity were little-known specialized firms and other consumer electronics vendors saw AuthenTec sensors as being too expensive to use in mass market products. In part, the relative obscurity of these firms enabled Apple to snap up promising technology at an attractive valuation.
Apple didn't acquire Pebble
Conversely, there are also many examples of things Apple didn't acquire, despite many suggestions. For example, it didn't buy Pebble (as was being thrown about back in 2013), but rather developed its own Apple Watch program internally, using iOS as a starting point.
Nobody predicted this would happen, despite it all looking rather obvious in hindsight. Instead, Pebble's chief executive at the time scoffed that "the technology isn't sufficiently developed to truly miniaturize the full computing power of a smartphone in watch format," despite the fact that that was exactly what Apple was working to do.
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