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Competing with a Mac

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Re: Competing with a Mac

#61

Post by acomjean »

seanalltogether wrote: post #33
jseliger wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance I wonder if BlackBerry would've prospered by doubling down on enterprise buyers, maintaining their keyboards, and ignoring the consumer market. From what I can tell, BlackBerry haphazardly attacked the consumer market where Apple was the strongest.

I can only speak anecdotally here, but in my experience as an IOS contractor if blackberry had doubled down on enterprise buyers, it wouldn't have mattered. Top executives were buying iphones despite the enterprise features, and they were forcing their internal IT departments to make room for them. It's also the reason that so many enterprise apps are made for iphone while android is ignored, the top brass want to se…

This is correct. As someone who was programing a "mobile website" targetting the company's fleet of blackberries, it was clear the blackberries days were numbered. A fortune 500 company blackberries were king, but my boss made sure that we testing on ios/andriod as we starting to see non blackberry phones at work. The non blackberry phones were from higher ups who could push for support.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#62

Post by schraeds »

pekk wrote: post #57
QuantumGood wrote: post #43

Disruptive products as initially defined are reliant on advances in technology to become good enough to challenge established markets (while they advanced via emerging/self-created markets). Apple was always biding their time, waiting for the right moment for a giant leap forward in consumer satisfaction to become possible; it's the opposite of the incrementalism of the usual disruptive product. Few companies would c…

Apple was trying and failing for many years. Now they have found a bigger niche in little electronic devices. Good for them! But let's not pretend the earlier failures were all intended as some kind of grand strategy. Apple is not a perfect unicorn. It's just another company, selling products.

Apple makes more money selling macs than any other pc vendor...

Re: Competing with a Mac

#63

Post by utopkara »

This article is based on the false premise that somebody with deep knowledge can predict disruptors.

I'll tell you why talking heads/pundits/experts couldn't predict, because they are useless, and the whole business of market disruption prediction is built on a ridiculous premise.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#64

Post by guyzero »

eulerphi wrote: post #50
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not seem in line with the understanding of the word used in The Innovator's Dilemma , the book that popularized the word in a business sense. Guyzero's response above matches much more closely to it.

Re-defining what is a well-defined english word using hipster-startup-hack-bias is contrived and self-fulfilling. The phone caused disruption in the world, done, done, and done. Now quit trying to fit the word disrupt into every conversation. Products create a rift, or they don't. Products are worth their value, or they're not. There's no magical "disrupt" criteria to satisfy the startup hivemind rubric.

Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#65

Post by philwelch »

pekk wrote: post #57
QuantumGood wrote: post #43

Disruptive products as initially defined are reliant on advances in technology to become good enough to challenge established markets (while they advanced via emerging/self-created markets). Apple was always biding their time, waiting for the right moment for a giant leap forward in consumer satisfaction to become possible; it's the opposite of the incrementalism of the usual disruptive product. Few companies would c…

Apple was trying and failing for many years. Now they have found a bigger niche in little electronic devices. Good for them! But let's not pretend the earlier failures were all intended as some kind of grand strategy. Apple is not a perfect unicorn. It's just another company, selling products.

I'm pretty sure there was a plan at the very beginning of the Jobs era, to get the Mac line profitable again just to keep the company going long enough to go after new and different product lines. About a year before returning to Apple, Steve Jobs even publicly outlined this strategy:

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago." -- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/0...

Re: Competing with a Mac

#66

Post by guyzero »

josh2600 wrote: post #17
peterhunt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what differentiates a disruptive product from a better product? It seems like the qualities you listed are hallmarks of all good products, right?

A better product is one the public can imagine. A disruptive product is one that the public cannot conceive of, such that its introduction alters the standards in an industry. A better product is the HTC8525[0] over the HTC8500. A disruptive product is the HTC8525 versus the iPhone. [0] http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32... - The leading WinMo smartphone in Q4 2006, pre-iPhone.

So while I will be the first to admit that I certainly didn't predict the iPhone, some of the iPhone's success was based on Apple leveraging their success with the iPod. The existence of iTunes and an ecosystem of third-party accessories based on the Apple 30-pin connector certainly helped the iPhone, not to mention Apple's brand cachet which was on an upswing at the time.

it's an interesting thought experiment to consider if the iPhone would have succeeded if instead of Apple it had been put out by, say, Danger.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#67

Post by jryle70 »

sien wrote: post #56
jryle70 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that low price is a great competitive edge, but one can name many now defunct computer makers that were anything but full stack -- Compaq, Gateway, eMachine, Packard Bell, Siemens (the PC maker), Olivetti. As a matter of fact, one can argue that they went under because their products didn't stand out from the competition. Full stack can be seen as a great advantage. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't make Surf…

Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength. Most people are not fussed if they buy an HP, Sony, Compaq, ASUS, Acer, MSI or whatever for a PC. Android buyers can happily switch between a dozen manufacturers as well. The point is for general purpose computing full stack was common but is now exceptional. If it was a great advantage surely there would be more full stack companies around.

You seemed to imply that SGI, Sun, etc are gone because they were full stack. I just offered counterexamples of non full stack companies that are also gone. There are simply no evidence that full stack is inherently bad, or vice versa. It's all specific to individual companies.

> Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength

Or more precisely, that's a benefit of hardware commodity. From the business perspective however, it isn't fun to be a loser, full stack or not.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#68

Post by nl »

hosh wrote: post #47
nl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Google Glass disrupting? Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors. Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted. Shopping : price com…

Ok, if you had to fill in the blank, what would fill in? "Google Glasses are not better smartphones, they are ____ "?

By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more.

By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.

A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...

Re: Competing with a Mac

#69

Post by eulerphi »

guyzero wrote: post #64
eulerphi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-defining what is a well-defined english word using hipster-startup-hack-bias is contrived and self-fulfilling. The phone caused disruption in the world, done, done, and done. Now quit trying to fit the word disrupt into every conversation. Products create a rift, or they don't. Products are worth their value, or they're not. There's no magical "disrupt" criteria to satisfy the startup hivemind rubric.

Personally I'd consider a fairly major book written by a harvard professor to be a bit more than a "hipster-startup-hack-bias re-definition." In the study of technology management, the term "disruptive innovation" has become a term of art that encapsulates a complex set of concepts into a single term. It's no more a "re-definition" that using the term "material impact" in regards to corporate finance.

Harvard professor or not, he simply coined a term to refer to a new technology deprecating an old one, so much that it becomes the new market that companies compete in. Yes, the iPhone did that. Where's the debate -- it's a fact that everything became 'touch' since then. The term 'disruptive' just cheapens the discussion and brings it to a baseline level of 'startup culture' drudgery. The term is used so often around here that it's become something of a pseudo-intellectual discussion starter.

Re: Competing with a Mac

#70

Post by sien »

jryle70 wrote: post #67
sien wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength. Most people are not fussed if they buy an HP, Sony, Compaq, ASUS, Acer, MSI or whatever for a PC. Android buyers can happily switch between a dozen manufacturers as well. The point is for general purpose computing full stack was common but is now exceptional. If it was a great advantage surely there would be more full stack companies around.

You seemed to imply that SGI, Sun, etc are gone because they were full stack. I just offered counterexamples of non full stack companies that are also gone. There are simply no evidence that full stack is inherently bad, or vice versa. It's all specific to individual companies. > Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength Or more precisely, that's a benefit of hardware commodity. From the busin…

There is evidence that full stack is hard to keep going. In general computing devices there are only 2 companies left doing it that matter. IBM & Apple.

The non-full stack companies that are gone have been replaced.

The full stack ones have been replaced by combinations of non full stack companies.

New non-full stack companies come in and get big. What new full stack company that matters that has been started in the past decade?

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