It's not about successful vs unsuccessful -- obviously nobody can argue that Microsoft is unsuccessful. It's about innovative and non-innovative. Relative to A

It's not about successful vs unsuccessful -- obviously nobody can argue that Microsoft is unsuccessful. It's about innovative and non-innovative. Relative to Apple, BMW is a terrible example of an innovative company, nor do they need to be innovative to succeed: The automotive industry hasn't seen a dramatically different product design, comparable to the difference between an iPhone and a flip phone, since well before World War II [1]. Progress in automobiles has been all about slow, gradual evolution for fifty or sixty years. Even the new hybrid cars are incredibly conventional (they're designed to be nigh-indistinguishable from other cars) and are based on incremental improvements to technologies that are decades old (electric cars, for example, date back to the mid-to-late 1800s). The most interesting recent BMW product (that I know of, anyway) has been the Mini Cooper, a vehicle whose major selling point is that it closely resembles a famous design from 1959. The equivalent Apple product would be the "iENIAC". [1] That is, there hasn't been a dramatically different design that went anywhere. Even if you discount all the wacky concept cars that can't actually be manufactured, plenty of folks have tried to change the industry with real products: the Segway, the Corbin Sparrow, etc, etc.