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Why Every Company Needs to be More Like IBM and Less Like Apple
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[Bill Davis] “I kept seeing it as the writer having a single construct of what “the customer” is. It’s a cohesive entity that will have a consensus answer to those kinds of questions.”
I’m not sure what the writer meant, but I’d argue that Apple has a much more unified model for “the customer” and one-size-fits-all approach to meeting their needs than IBM does.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
They didn’t call their cars lemons but they did call them ugly. The first line in that ad says “that it may not be much to look at..” The point is, they got into the game with a strategy of practicality but they have long departed from that. Apple got into the game playing the underdog and now they are one of the richest companies in the world. The underdog role no longer fits.
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[Walter Soyka] “I haven’t figured out who the hammer-thrower is yet.”
Google and the Hammer will have an ad on it
“FCPX Agitator”
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[Craig Shields] “They didn’t call their cars lemons but they did call them ugly. The first line in that ad says “that it may not be much to look at..””
Read the rest of the ad. “After a while you get to like so much about the VW, you even get to like what it looks like.”
Also, Google “lemon vw” and you’ll see an ad showing a VW Bug with the headline “Lemon.” The copy, of course, explains that VW keeps the lemons so you can get the plums.
The point of both of these ad was to insinuate something shocking about the car, something that was so unexpected that it encouraged people to actually read the rest of the ad. (When these ads were run, VW still had a WWII-era stigma and faced an uphill climb in the US market; just a few years after this campaign, VW was instead associated with peace and love.)
Apple’s ad wasn’t just meant to get attention with a quick, ironic shock. It was a statement of Apple’s values — the things the company stood for.
Do you think Apple still stands for the same things they did almost 30 years ago? Do they still provide unique value by allowing their users free self-expression? Do they still make tools for the crazy ones, the round pegs in square holes?
I don’t know, myself. I could make arguments either way. I’d have to give this a lot more thought.
[Craig Shields] “Apple got into the game playing the underdog and now they are one of the richest companies in the world. The underdog role no longer fits.”
I agree — I’m just pointing out that not only are they no longer the underdog, they now risk actually becoming what they originally fought against.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Hey Walter I think we’re on the same team here but just seeing things slightly different. The word Lemon was just to draw you in. They were actually praising the car of course. However, I can post a few ads were they refer to it as “ugly”. That’s what people said about it back then. I do not believe they thought it was a physically beautiful car. The beauty was the gas mileage and blah blah blah. But I totally see your point about Apple.
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Craig, I apologize if I came across as too argumentative. I’ll switch from coffee to tea and cede the floor.
I did mean the question about Apple’s values sincerely, not rhetorically, though.
I’d be very curious to hear people’s opinions about whether Apple’s raison d’être has changed now that they’ve achieved mass-market success (again).
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “I do think anyone who has ever jailbroken their phone or had their app rejected from the store might not see this the same way that you do.”
I think his point was that Apple built a platform for innovation and they let much of the really cool innovation happen from without, while cultivating their platform. It is the difference between iPhone 1.0 with exclusively Apple apps on it and the iPhone today with over a half million apps, some of which are very innovative.
[Walter Soyka] “The part of this piece that really resonated with me was the idea that Apple is no longer the scrappy underdog or subversive force, fighting against an externally imposed homogeneous world view; they are now the Big Brother character, imposing a homogeneous world view on their customers.”
Be careful not to construe market cap with market share. Apple is hugely profitable, but still holds less than 10% of the desktop/laptop market (though they claim 20% of the sales recently), 10% of the phone market, and only dominate in tablets if you consider them a discrete market segment.
Maybe they don’t “feel” like the underdog anymore, but by the numbers they have a lot of room to grow.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “… Apple’s raison d’être …”
… summarized in a handy chart.
(via arstechnica – a bit out of date but the point stands).
Franz.
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Less like 1984, and more like Brave New World, as in:
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
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The personal computer is dead, by Jonathan Zitttrain
“The fact is that today’s developers are writing code with the notion not just of consumer acceptance, but also vendor acceptance. If a coder has something cool to show off, she’ll want it in the Android Marketplace and the iOS App Store; neither is a substitute for the other. Both put the coder into a long-term relationship with the OS vendor. The user gets put in the same situation: if I switch from iPhone to Android, I can’t take my apps with me, and vice versa. And as content gets funneled through apps, it may mean I can’t take my content, either—or, if I can, it’s only because there’s yet another gatekeeper like Amazon running an app on more than one platform, aggregating content. The potentially suffocating relationship with Apple or Google or Microsoft is freed only by a new suitor like Amazon, which is structurally positioned to do the same thing.A flowering of innovation and communication was ignited by the rise of the PC and the Web and their generative characteristics. Software was installed one machine at a time, a relationship among myriad software makers and users. Sites could appear anywhere on the Web, a relationship among myriad webmasters and surfers. Now activity is clumping around a handful of portals: two or three OS makers that are in a position to manage all apps (and content within them) in an ongoing way, and a diminishing set of cloud hosting providers like Amazon that can provide the denial-of-service resistant places to put up a website or blog.”
https://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2011/11/30_zittrain-the-personal-computer-is-dead.html
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