Apple’s shortcoming became its biggest asset
Gruber rightfully bashes Blodget’s thoughts on Apple’s past and presumed future failures, and I have some thoughts on this.
What people like Blodget so often fail to recognize is that, back in the 80’s, Apple was incredibly ahead of its time. With the Mac, Apple created a product that would sell solely because of its vastly superior usability. Their whole sales argument was a user experience and an ease of use that was supposed to be better than anyone else could provide in computers at the time. It was the computer for the rest of us. And that was because of the innovative software and UI shipped with it.
I think the problem for Apple, back then, was the immaturity of the industry and the users. Selling a computer based on its ease of use was difficult because most people was unable to distinguish between good and poor quality. Likewise, the industry, while it probably saw its relevance, didn’t see the overall importance of it. Think about it. If you only have one tool with which to achieve an important goal, and don’t know about anything else you could do or use to achieve that goal, would you be unhappy with that tool? A taste for something doesn’t easily develop in the absence of options. And when the first option is very different from the original, would you immediately see its benefits? Today, however, we have all seen and experienced a lot of different options.
Another, more recent change that suits Apple well is that up until quite recently, computers, mobile phones and other hardware sold pretty much based on their hardware features, i.e. speed and whether they had a built in FM radio. Software was taken for granted. During the last 10 years or so, hardware features have become increasingly irrelevant, to a large extent due to innovations in software and usability. Today, software, and what you can do with it, is a more powerful sales argument than how many GHz the processor does. “You can easily make your own music” is better than “it has a SoundBlaster 32 sound card”.
I would argue that selling computers and cellphones based on their hardware features have never really worked, except for geeks. I can’t count the times I’ve been asked through the years by people less interested in computers what all those MHz’s, MB’s and RAM’s mean, and what to make out of them, and I’m sure many of you have heard the same questions. People don’t care about these things, and worse, don’t even understand them. The hardware is not the tool for them. The software is what you can describe in terms of actually doing something; it is the possible maker. While the wi-fi is what makes logging on to Facebook and interacting with your friends possible, the wi-fi in itself is not the interesting thing.
Now is a completely different time. People have tastes. People know good from poor. They know a lot more about what you can actually expect to be able to do with a computer. And Apple’s long history of innovation in software pays off. And that’s part of why they can initiate paradigm shifts in several markets, by offering a superior user experience based on software. And it’s also part of why what happened to Apple in the 80’s and 90’s will not repeat itself today.
