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There's a book I read long ago, whose title I've forgotten, that argued all companies compete along five axes: Price, Quality, Experience, Access and Service.
by Gibbon 16y ago
There's a book I read long ago, whose title I've forgotten, that argued all companies compete along five axes: Price, Quality, Experience, Access and Service.
Every company dominates one axis, excels at another and is at par with the rest.
One might argue that Apple dominates in the experience category and is above average in service with everything else more or less at par with the competition.
But they certainly don't sell experience.. they sell computers, mmkay?
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoThey definitely sell experience. The average user mostly wants[1] (1) email, (2) Facebook, (3) iTunes, (4) web surfing, and they don't really care about how the box on their desk gets their emails, whether it's open source or closed source, locked down or modifiable, or even if it's electronic or just really fast carrier pigeons. Like the article said, the average user wants toast, not a toaster. [1] - it's starting to look like we can add internet video to this list.
- oemera 16y agoWait. Never saw a developer with a Mac? I surely know more developers who own a Mac than any web-facebook-itunes-email guys. Talk to some Rails developers, I will bet my nuts that none of the experts, ninjas, you name it are developing on a Mac.
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoI said "the average user", not "all Mac users". It's the same thing with PCs - the 90% of people who aren't experts or ninjas or developers are web-itunes-facebook-email people. You may not know many of them, but that's a result of your professional and social circles. Apple doesn't sell millions of computers every quarter to Rails developers, it sells them to 90%-ers. Sure, some developers buy them, but they're not the main market.
- alxp 16y agoDon't underestimate the influence of developers and the tech elite jumping on a usable desktop Unix in the early 2000s. The first places I ever saw more than one or two Mac laptops in one room were developer meetups. And you know each of those influence purchasing decisions of their families and friends as a trusted source. If OS X didn't have Unix underneath I would need three hands to count the number of people I would not have told to buy a Mac because I wasn't using one and loving it at the time.
- ZachPruckowski 16y agoYeah, I'm not saying high-end tech-savvy users never did anything for Apple (I bought my Macs for largely the reasons you describe), but when Apple makes commercials, they're not advertising "the most usable Unix-compatible OS in the world", they're advertising "it makes web and media and lifestyle stuff really easy".
- epochwolf 16y ago> Talk to some Rails developers, I will bet my nuts that none of the experts, ninjas, you name it are developing on a Mac. I use a Mac with OSX to do rails development. I don't want to stroke by own ego here but I'll be having those nuts. :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- oemera 16y agoOh typo! Sorry I wanted to say that 99% of rails developer are developing on a Mac and those not just web, facebook, email guys.
- j-g-faustus 16y agoApple selling "experience" is more and more true. See this chart: http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/19/60-percent-of-apples-%20sales-are-from-products-that-did-not-exist-three-years-ago/ http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/19/60-percent-of-apples-%20sal... Looks like >60% of Apple's revenue comes from iPhone/iPad/iPod/iTunes. Although you could argue that a modern cellphone is technically a computer, I'm pretty sure that in the minds of most people it's a "SMS and email and web browsing appliance" rather than a computer.