[lit-ideas] Re: Could an academic discipline do this?

I agree with Andreas that Apple has sound marketing but they have been truly innovative. The original article pointed out that ten or so years ago Apple was almost bankrupt and those were the years when Steve Jobs was missing from Apple. The several interim CEOs were not innovators and when Steve Jobs was brought back he elevated creative people like Jony Ive. Ive is responsible for the design of everything from the original iMacs to the iPod and the iPhone. 

To my mind Apple has been innovative in three ways:

Design
Simplicity
Beauty
If you look at the iPod as an example you can see all three. It is designed for simplicity and that's the main reason it is still on top of the portable music player market. They weren't the first but they created an interface that is simple and elegant. Like many other Apple products it doesn't do a myriad of things but what it sets out to do as its main purpose it does very well. Same case with the iPhone. When it was announced people complained it didn't have GPS and a video camera and MMS yet its design and interface are what set it apart. The multi-touch technology embedded into the phone is certainly innovative and now several other phones are coming out with something similar, hoping to compete. If you've ever used a web browser on another PDA and then Safari on an iPhone there is no doubt which is a better experience.
Not to mention that when the OS X operating system came out in 2001 it was years more advanced than Windows. Having a UNIX foundation under the hood with a pretty GUI above is a wonderful step forward for consumers and tech geeks alike. Their security - and especially the interface - is something that Vista tried hard to duplicate, and to some success. Jobs and company are obsessed with user experience and a long time ago they saw Microsoft choose the path of commodity hardware and lowest common denominator compatibility and they rejected that in favor of superior architecture. 

Happy New Year,
Brian

On Dec 27, 2007, at 12:14 PM, Andreas Ramos wrote:


Apple has a very high profile. Is there anything behind the smoke?
Its computer business (remember? they make computers) is no longer the core business. They even dropped the word from the company name Apple Computer. Apple computers have perhaps 2% marketshare, which is basically nothing.
They now make iPods, which are Walkman which use mini-harddisks or RAM memory instead of tape. SONY invented the Walkman, and they had a far larger impact on society than iPods. Many other companies offer Walkman devices with mini-harddisks or RAM memory. Apple managed to use a massive advertising campaign to grab marketshare (about 80%) for the devices. Apple's innovation isn't in technology: it's in marketing.
Apple also makes iPhones, a PDA cellphone. There isn't much innovation there either, asides from a pretty interface. It's... a PDA cellphone, just like all the other PDA cellphones on the market. It too is promoted with massive marketing.
But how innovative is that marketing? It uses billboards and TV ads. That's... so 80s. That's innovation?
Apple is on thin ice. PDAs and Walkmans as "cool products" have a very short lifetime. SONY Walkmans were a huge fad for several years, until people got used to them. Apple now must deliver a major cool product every few years to stay ahead. But the iPod was a copy of the Walkman and the iPhone is a copy of PDAs. What's next? iTV?
Could an academic discipline do this? Sure. Use massive marketing, with continuous declarations of innovation, led by an enigmatic promoter, idolized by cult followers. Deconstruction theory comes to mind. 

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com

Other related posts: