4 ms·
Just standard trolling about how Apple's success is transitory, without merit, and due to people finding them "cool" for no rational reason.
by Bud 11y ago
Just standard trolling about how Apple's success is transitory, without merit, and due to people finding them "cool" for no rational reason.
- tosseraccount 11y ago(I'll bite) Consider this : http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec (finviz: a heatmap visualization of the stock market ) Note that Apple is in "Consumer Goods", not "Technology". At least one market analyst thinks their competitors are Proctor & Gamble and Coca Cola.
- avn2109 11y agoPeople say Apple is a tech company or a toys for millenials company, but I claim that fundamentally Apple is a user experience company (maybe the only one). They dominate because Steve Jobs realized what business they're in, and none of their competitors have. This is like when the railroads' lunch was eaten by the tractor trailer because the railroads thought they were rail companies, when in fact they were transportation companies. Samsung and all the other competitors think they're in the device business, but they're not. They're in the UX business. It helps to have Steve Jobs, who was actually a user experience zealot and in a normal org would have been the CUXO, masquerading as a CEO. As an example, think of the difference between being an Apple vs. Samsung customer, all the way through the value chain. Shopping in that beautiful airy Apple store, experiencing those matte textures and ingenious packaging while unboxing your new devices, the industrial design wizardry that constructed a machine with such amazing fit and finish and tight panel gaps and textures, software that (sometimes, mostly) just works. Jobs was a strong enough leader to make a bunch of mostly-orthogonal disciplines (e.g. manufacturing, industrial design, software engineering, packaging design) subservient to the company's ultimate objective, which is UX. It doesn't hurt that Apple tends to execute best-in-class on each of these axes, but that's tactics not strategy. The big question for the future is whether Tim Cook understands this. It's left as an exercise for the reader whether the Apple watch is a product made by a UX company or by a company intent on duplicating the financial success of the ipad and iphone by cargo-culting the "create new device class" methods that worked before.
- tosseraccount 11y agoThe whole apple worship thing is kind of creepy to me. Sorry. (edit: go ahead fanboys, I got lots of karma for next time. go ahead and down vote my previous threads while your at it.)
- avn2109 11y agoGP here: Don't get me wrong, I would rather see out-of-the-box Linux win in the laptop market and I strongly dislike walled gardens (mobile and otherwise) on philosophical grounds. But that doesn't stop me from hypothesizing about why Apple is making a boatload of money.
- curiousjorge 11y ago>(edit: go ahead fanboys, I got lots of karma for next time. go ahead and down vote my previous threads while your at it.) now that is creepy. I'm not even an Apple user but it doesn't mean I can't analyze and form my own opinions. So your argument here is moot that there's a massive conspiracy of Apple lovers downvoting your comment. I certainly am not a fan of Apple but you gotta give credit where it's due, it's headed to be the first trillion dollar company this year or the next so I pay attention. And I can't downvote anyone since I'm a mere peasant with under 300 karma points.
- curiousjorge 11y agoI think this is a very good insight. UX is a huge differentiator. In the early to mid years of Android, Apple had no real competition. Although I have some qualms about Material UI designs (why does it lag when I press ON and OFF? why does it look and feel like dreamy cotton candy world?), the UX has gotten considerably good on the Android due to faster and cheaper phones. However, I do agree that Jobs absolutely nailed it with UX and focus on that area (much like how luxury car brands focus on the little things). My answer to your exercise is that Tim Cook indeed tried to duplicate the same formula to a new device. Some problems are that there is such a small screen real estate, the UX would need a different approach. Another is market fit for the demographic that are into luxury. Would wearing the apple watch make you look cheap and "techie" or send other unintentional messages about you? The people who wear watch these days seems to be those that wants to flaunt their 100k Rolex or older generation. I remember people stopped wearing watches when cell phones displayed time, (I never wore one, I relied on my internal clock), an entire generation might have never wore a watch before, could the apple watch end up like the iPad where people first buy it out of curiosity and nobody bothers with it afterwards? Who knows but Apple will have enough cash to screw up several times now (if they do reach trillion dollar market cap). If Tim does make the Apple Watch a success, it would be huge for Apple. You just convinced your loyal iPhone buyer they need a watch now too. Experience and lessons gained with Apple Watch could lead to more wearables, maybe we'll see Tim do his take on the Google Glasses.
- curiousjorge 11y agoa bit off topic but in my security analysis course long time ago, I remember a professor telling a story of a hedge fund that blew up because they relied excessively on such viz heatmaps and other fancy graphics to base their trading theories. It's pretty but it doesn't really show the underlying intrinsic core business. Like the other commenter replied, apple realized early UX is key to establishing luxury brand whereas the rest thought it was about having faster and better hardware for cheap and innovated their way out of existence (motorola, nokia).
- tosseraccount 11y agoI'm sorry that viz maps caused a hedge fund to fail. Good reason to stick to index funds.
- curiousjorge 11y agowhy would you be sorry? I'm just illustrating the pitfalls of relying excessively on visualization diagrams and graphs to form unsound insights. Index outperforms vast majority of money managers but that's a whole other topic.
- cmsj 11y agoOn an infinite timescale, that analysis will be correct ;)