Mutating for Innovation - Apple (Computer) Inc
Apple Computer Inc was recently renamed as Apple Inc, in the recent Mac Expo 2007. With the success of the iPod and the introduction of the iPhone in the coming months, Apple has defied the odds of making a transition towards a highly competitive consumer electronics industry. Our resident contributor, Bjorn Lee, co-founder of Entrepreneur27, traces how Apple has been mutating in the changing face of innovation and technology in the 21st century.
In 1984, Apple pioneered the Graphical User Interface (GUI)’s usage on computers and began the killing of the mainframes along with IBM. They were the first, real PC company although they didn’t really benefit from the PC boom over the next decades. Thankfully, Steve Jobs retained his visionary instincts to launch the iPod at a time when Apple was a lackluster competitor in the ever-increasing competition of the PC industry. Its integrated software-hardware approach to making computers was not going to hold against Dell and Microsoft in their respective strongholds.
Faced with increasing ecosystem pressures, the business organism we know of as Apple, simply evolved. From Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc, the Apple of 2007 made more than a cursory semantic change in its name, but a paradigm-shifting strategy that had taken shape over the past 5 years. Apple and Steve Jobs (to be used interchangeably here) realized they were no longer in the business of digital education, as was the 19080s vision of Bill Gates who wanted to “put a computer in every family”. No, Steve Jobs just hated being beaten to that goal by Gates. So what did he do when he lost at that game?
He changed the rules and created a new game.
Today, the game is digital entertainment. In the same way humans of the 1980s ditched text-only computers for those with colors and graphics, humans today don’t want to only work on their computers, they want to play, communicate and show themselves off to the whole world over the web. The iPod unearthed the innate need of humans for entertainment, from both the professionally-produced, copyrighted kind and the user-generated, “copyleft-ed” genre. But Apple itself knows the bulky form factor of Personal Computers (or Macs for some of you) hardly suffice in serving the entertainment needs of today. The willingness to take both its software and hardware competencies, from making big desktops to the miniaturish iPod, was a bold and ultimately right move. It won’t be a surprise if Steve Jobs has a secret goal to have “an iPod in every human’s pocket”, just like his nemesis Bill Gates 2 decades ago.
The iPhone is another bold leap of faith.
If there is one company that is as ruthless as it is successful in conquering new markets, it is Apple. It successfully grew the MP3 player market to a multi-billion dollar business and created iTunes, the world’s first legal music downloading service that actually made sense. It has also killed off so many generations of iPod since its debut on October 23, 2001 that we have almost stopped counting. Few companies in the world, especially Apple’s competitors would have the gall to kill the iPod Mini, which was the best-selling player of its time, and make way for the iPod Nano. But Apple did it, or rather Steve Jobs did. Will the Midas touch apply too for his next killer product, the iPhone?
According to this iMediaConnection article, the iPhone might herald the true growth of mobile advertising. A new world, where low-end phones are subsidised by advertising and given away for free, could emerge when high-end phones like the iPhone forces a new round of innovation in phones and new demand from consumers. The iPhone, with its fully-featured and more powerful Mac OS X, might be the panacea to solving the software problems plaguing the data access capabilities and content consumption abilities of cell phones today. Integrating solid software engineering with a beautifully designed phone might just convince consumers that the phone is the new computer. Should that belief hold, technology will be no barrier as companies invest millions in order to chase this new, previously undiscovered need.
Yes, I believe Apple is a mutant. A mutant strain that forces evolution of the technology race. Sometimes, all we need is a vision and a leader with the guts to see that vision and the gumption to see it through. Much like how John F Kennedy initiated the vision of humans on the Moon, Steve Jobs might be crafting the digital future of mankind with the visionary iPhone. Like the crazy Moon-dream of yesteryear, many of us might be skeptical today, but some of us have seen the future. And hell, it sure looks like a beauty.
Loading ...
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
SamCheng
Apple’s products are as fascinating as their history:
Read the following books to understand their history: (Books that I have read)
1. The Cult of Ipod =>
In this book, it says that Ipod is just a matter of luck and opportunity. No marketing by Apple could confirm Ipod’s success. Only when put on market did Ipod’s success surprised Apple. And Ipod almost never make it to market. Surprising, the first prototype is developed for Sony! The inventor of Ipod is actually a consultant of Apple, not an employee. Just show that no company can ever have too much talent.
2. Apple Confidential 2.0 =>
Trace the development and history of all Apple’s products and its politics. Many good pictures including the garage and places that start it all.
3. iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It =>
The co-founder of Apple, the brain and inventor, Steve Wozniak, that start it alone by himself. Wow, read the following extract from last few pages, and that’s really wisdom from a true innovator, Here it is the quote that create the next great thing.
Start Here ===================================
Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Because the committee would never agree on it!
Why do I say engineers are like artists? Engineers often strive to do things more perfectly than even they think is possible Every tiny part or line of code has to have a reason, and the approach has to be direct, short, and fast. We build small software and hardware components and group them into larger ones. We know how to route electrons through resistors and transistors to make logic gates. We combine a few gates to make a reg¬ister. We combine many registers to make an even larger one. We combine logic gates to make adders, and we combine adders to create others that can be used to create an entire computer. We write tiny bits of code to turn things on and off. We build uponi and build upon and build upon, just like a painter would with on a paintbrush or a composer would with musical notes. And it’s this reach for perfection—this striving to put everything together so perfectly, in a way no one has done before—that makes an engineer or anyone else a true artist.
Most people don’t think of an engineer as an artist, probably, because people tend to associate engineers just with the things we create. But those things wouldn’t work, they wouldn’t be elegant or beautiful or anything else, without the engineer carefully think¬ing it out—thinking how to create the best possible end result with the fewest number of components. That’s sophistication.
In my entire life I’ve only seen about one in twenty engineers who really exemplify that artistic perfection. So it’s pretty rare to make your engineering an art, but that’s how it should be.
I was very touched recently by a scene in the movie Walk the Line. In it, a producer tells Johnny Cash to play a song the way he would if that one song could save the whole world.
That line summed up a lot of what I look for when I talk about art in engineering or in anything.
If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.
When you’re working for a large, structured company, there’s much less leeway to turn clever ideas into revolutionary new products or product features by yourself. Money is, unfortunately, a god in our society, and those who finance your efforts are businesspeople with lots of experience at organizing contracts that define who owns what and what you can do on your own.
But you probably have little business experience, know-how, or acumen, and it’ll be hard to protect your work or deal with all that corporate nonsense. I mean, those who provide the funding and tools and environment are often perceived as taking the credit for inventions. If you’re a young inventor who wants to change the world, a corporate environment is the wrong place for you.
===================================
Except for Cult of Ipod, book #2 and #3 are available in National Library.
use http://www.bookjetty.com
Feb 6th, 2007
SamCheng
There probably some spelling errors since I scan it. Well, the devil is in the idea.
Feb 6th, 2007
SamCheng
The above is by no mean discouraging one from taking funding. Rather, something can be learnt from a true innovator. Whether to receive funding or not will be up to individual. Who knows, Steve might not have make it if he did not receive funding and investment earlier on and probably become “innovator in his own fantasy world”.
Anyway, it is insightful to understand the mindset of many innovators and inventors like Leonardo da Vinci who tend to be more introverted than extroverted. Because inventor tend to live in their own world, that they do not feel the constraint, limitation of the real world and conform to reality. They are great dreamers, do’er and most important, they are master and engineer of their domain. Only by many hand-on exploration and experiment personally can these wonderful “species” create wonderful thing for a better world. Ideas, invention, innovation etc fill every moment of their lives and there is no such thing as engineered innovation, creativity and definitely no 9-to-5 mentality.
Only by understanding these rare “species” can we truly learn to appreciate them.
Feb 6th, 2007
Willylee
“Necessity is the Mother of Invention”. The Sony Walkman invented by Akio Morita back in 1979, uses the standard storage devices called the compact cassette tape, then; in turn compact cassette was invented by Philips; committed recording companies to support this new type of media.
Essentially, Akio observing Amerian teenagers having a “problem” listening to music on the go, hence his idea of getting a “package around a compact cassettee”. For 30 years Walkman cassettee to CD portables, never looked back … until some silicon valley hotshot sees the opportunity in using standard storage devices called Flash Memory and Hard Disk Drives; committed recording companies to support this new device copy-protection. Well put a bit of white-color and you see the invention - reinvented again, using today’s technologies and music infrastructure with the support of the internet.
See the similarity, A Need drive An Invention. I am petty sure that this guy is going “Back to the Future” and apply current technologies into products or services that we are doing it traditionally or inconveniently. The challenge for Singapore to success is to be “hungry” to improve our lifestyle and others, this successful effort will convert into the global economic unit called money. In technical terms, an engineer converts PSI into KPa, just like nature.
By the way, I don’t beleve in mega long-term investment and mega funding, move with the world and look around to apply technologies at the right time, with some help that invention make lives a little better, it will work.
Feb 8th, 2007
Reply to “Mutating for Innovation - Apple (Computer) Inc”