Apple Has Magic The Others Don’t

Revisiting Apple’s iPhone strategy

Apple’s tightly bound software and hardware provides unique differentiation in a world of mostly undifferentiated PCs and mobile devices. RIM’s Blackberry also has had success by controlling its entire product.

Oh stop it!

There’s a certain Finnish company I will never mention by name. It has control over its hardware and software.

It’s no Apple. It will never be Apple.

It’s more than just having hardware and software control.

Some of the secret ingredients are:

1) Not mimicking what everyone is doing.
2) Not settling for second-best.
3) A burning desire to change the world.

The Finnish company has dominated the cellphone world not because its products were world-class or trend-setting. It managed to get to the top because its competitors were just absolutely awful.

No one ever looked at the Finn’s phones and gasped, “Yes! Yes! That’s the way it should be done! My God! It’s so obvious!!”

In other words, they never had an iPhone. And they never will.

He also states:

On other hand, it would be interesting to see what developers could do if Apple open sourced the iPhone software. The mobile Web experience is the new center of attention and R&D spending in the tech industry. Google’s Android will be a good test case. If Android were to become successful, due to its openness and developer community, Apple would feel the heat. An army of smart developers with Google behind it could create a next-generation mobile Web operating system and application platform that challenges Apple far more than the current set of incumbents.

He’s conflating two vastly different things here: the web and handheld access to it.

We’re definitely in Bubble 2.0. The valuations of web services are just laughable. It’s financial musical chairs all over again. And just because some services are seemingly hot today doesn’t guarantee they will remain hot — or even remain.

For instance, how many “social networks” do they really think people have time for? I’ve already gotten MySpace fatigue — and I like MySpace! This is the techmeme narcissism in full-play. They think their all-tech lives are forerunners of what everyone else will be doing. Puh-leeze!

As for Android, someone I quoted earlier is worth reading again:

You see, that palpable fear I associate with Microsoft products is the fear that no one company is truly accountable for the Microsoft experience.

Substitute Google/Android for Microsoft and you have a good peek into the future. Yeah, good luck with that!

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