Apple's Biggest Challenge:
Overcoming Stereotypes
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- 2001.02.21
Several articles have recently touted the fact that Apple wants
to compete directly with Sony in the digital appliance market. This
is all well and good. Moving beyond the "computer" market and into new
spaces that service Jobs' "digital lifestyle" is a good idea - a good
idea that will face an uphill battle, I suspect.
Currently most people categorize the things they see around them.
For example, a person knocks on your door and tells you that they're on
a scavenger hunt. The last item on the list is a 7-foot piece of wood.
The person is very rich and will pay you $10,000 so that they can get
every item on the list. Unfortunately, you don't keep wood of that
exact size in your basement so you have to turn the person away and
lose out on $10,000.
This is a prime example of missing the forest for the trees. Of
course you have a 7-foot piece of wood. It's right in front of you:
your door.
Your door has been categorized as a door in your brain. It's a door,
not wood. This same problem applies to Apple's movement into the
digital appliance market. Currently, computers are workhorses that
people use to assemble documents, surf the web, and exchange email.
Apple must aggressively promote the Mac as more than this.
One excellent example of this is in the area of digital music. A
friend of mine has several hundred MP3s. He's interested in playing
these MP3s on his stereo. After a lot of hemming and hawing with his
friends over the best method to do this, he decided to convert all of
his MP3s to a format that his stereo could understand and burned
everything onto CDs.
Anything wrong with this? Yes, there is. It's cumbersome, it's time
consuming, and it's not particularly flexible. Why not just hook your
stereo to your computer and run everything from there? Response from my
friend: "You can do that?"
People don't think of the computer as the center of the digital
household. Currently what they see is a computer and myriad of other
objects that are not connected in any way. All the objects are
categorized. The stereo plays music, the TV displays images, and the
computers accesses the Internet.
What Jobs must do is to convince the population that the computer
plays music, displays images, accesses the Internet in addition to a
thousand other things.
Apple is slowly moving toward my ideal living room setup. I've
wanted to use my Mac as a central unit for awhile. I'd like to have my
Mac display DVDs on my TV (so I don't have to buy a DVD player), hook
up to my stereo so that I don't have to switch CDs, as well as do all
of the other things I currently use the machine for. If I can do all of
this wirelessly, so much the better.
While I can see the computer being the center of it all, I'm sure
that there are thousands of others who think that the computer is just
another box among many.
If Apple can convince people otherwise, they will definitely be in
for some good times. If they can convince people that a Mac is the best
way to do all of this, buy your Apple stock now.
Unfortunately, changing human behavior is not the easiest thing to
do. Apple will definitely face an uphill struggle.
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