When I saw the headline,
Four Things You Need to Know About Apple: Apple's actions seem
inexplicable - unless you understand how the company views the
world, I thought, "That's got to be a great article to read!"
Was I ever disappointed.
This Isn't News
Mike Elgan's starting point: Everything Apple sells is an
Apple product. While this true, it is true for every company in
the world. If Walmart sells a defective toaster, that reflects badly on
the Walmart brand. It doesn't matter that Walmart did not make the
toaster or that Walmart sold it for a really low price.
Anything a company sells is its choice, and those choices get
attached to its brand. This is nothing special about Apple. So, yes
Apple really does care that the apps it sells aren't a bunch of crap,
but "one man's trash is another's treasure".
It must be hard to pick through the thousands of new apps that
Apples gets every day. If Apple's approval process "sucks", it is a
simple combination of too much success and everyone's opinion of
"acceptable" being different. When developers, searching for gold, stop
flocking in the thousands, then maybe the approval process will get
better.
The next point, Apple products are disposable, is
laughable. Everyone in the computer business is trying to show how
"green" they are. This means that they use lower energy and everything
is recyclable. Recyclable is a just a fancy way of saying that
something will some day be trash.
Apple, Dell, and HP wouldn't care about making their products
recyclable if their products lasted forever. Once again, Elgan is
pointing out the obvious.
The third point, Nothing exists unless Apple sells it,
almost sounds true in a general business sense. Companies only care
about the products they sell. You should never mention the competition
in your advertising - why give them any publicity?
On the flip side, Apple fully understands the value of keeping new
products secret. Rumors can leak out and interest build up without
Apple spending a dime on advertising. This approach keeps the
competition off guard and the fan sites in business.
Does Apple Really Want to Fail?
After three boring blurbs about typical company behavior, Elgan sets
us up for the final revelation, Apple doesn't want to be a
successful business.
How can I begin explaining how dumb this statement is? Everything
Apple does is to be a successful business. You can't really believe
that Apple put $34 billion in the bank without even trying to succeed.
There are far too many things you could waste your money on if you
weren't trying to be a success.
Apple dominates almost every market it has entered, including
high-end ($1,000 and higher) computers. Apple wastes the least effort
going into markets that are commoditized, unless it has a plan to turn
its branded product into the one that steers the market forward. Apple
is definitely focused on being a successful business, and for Apple
wasting money on market share in a low profit market is for fools - and
tech writers.
Since Elgan's article has nothing newsworthy about Apple, I can only
conclude that the purpose of the article was to bring up every recent
story that criticizes Apple. The whole thing reeks of thinly veiled mud
slinging - not the four supposedly amazing facts we all need to know
about Apple.
4 Things About Apple
If you want to know four facts about Apple try these:
- Apple is a business that makes money, not fulfills a tech writers
wishes.
- Apple is run by Steve Jobs, and a whole bunch of excellent people
work at Apple to make it happen.
- Apple innovates more than it invents. It use existing computer
chips and technology to build things that anyone else could if they
tried hard enough. (Trying hard enough means the absolute focus of the
CEO and everyone working for him to make a category-changing
product.)
- Apple is building a huge infrastructure that will allow it to sell
all sorts of products. The competition is not prepared for what Apple
is becoming.
These four are all specific to Apple, unlike the other list.
