Apple's products don't seem like good counterexamples to me. Apple is promoting the iPad as a different kind of iPod Touch. The thing sits right next to the To

Apple's products don't seem like good counterexamples to me. Apple is promoting the iPad as a different kind of iPod Touch. The thing sits right next to the Touch in stores and on web pages. It runs all the same software. It even looks like a giant iPhone. The "magical" and "revolutionary" adjectives are different, but differentiation is an essential part of the strategy: You can't just clone the product with an existing market, you have to improve upon it somehow. On the one hand, promoting the iPod as a "better MP3 player" would have been a losing strategy because "MP3 players" were not an existing market worth entering. The number of people using MP3 players ten years ago was tiny compared to the number of music buyers. And on the other hand, iPods were aimed pretty directly at the market for existing portable music players, which was much larger. The slogan was "a thousand songs in your pocket", and the iconic image was a pair of white headphones snaking out of that pocket. I don't think people missed the fact that the iPod was a Walkman, only better. Apple could, instead, have played up the fact that the iPod was a tiny computer that played games, or a tiny portable hard drive that let you tote documents around, but in fact these aspects were very muted, because they distracted from the story that the iPod was a super-Walkman. Apple's actually really good at playing the existing-market-only-different game. The iPod was a different kind of Walkman; the iMac was a different kind of Windows PC; the iPhone was a kind of phone and a kind of iPod; the iPod Touch was a kind of iPhone and a kind of iPod; the iPad is a kind of iPod Touch. It seems evident that Apple could have launched the iPad ten years ago as a new product, and failed. In fact, that seems evident because it actually happened: The Newton came out, it was a new kind of product at the time, and it died horribly. So instead of repeating that mistake, Apple bootstrapped the iPad market, one tweak of an existing market at a time. The biggest "failure" (or, in Apple terms, "hobby") in the current Apple product line is the Apple TV, and a big reason it's failed so far is that nobody knows what kind of thing it is. (It isn't even "a kind of TiVo", for all the good that would do.)