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How Apple Got Everything Right (for now)

Is Apple successful because it’s so contrarian? Or is it because it’s purposefully creating a cult?

The Jehova’s witnesses might be more devoted to their Man (whoever that is) than Catholics to theirs. Yet they will never be mainstream. Their appeal is largely limited to people with certain mental dispositions.

Just how sick is Apple?

Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, “More than anywhere else I’ve worked before or since, there’s a lot of concern about being fired.”

But Jobs’ employees remain devoted. That’s because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God. – article from Wired

Your call.

Apple defies the “open enterprise” concept favored by me and most on my blogroll:

In today’s open source transparent co-creation business culture, Apple is the antithesis. Apple is opaque. Apple favors closed platforms. Apple doesn’t actively solicit feedback from its fans. Yet, the company succeeds. – John Moore (from Brand Autopsy)

But take a look at Microsoft that also used to like closed platforms (theirs) and how it opens up to its (and its customers) many benefits.

It works for Apple because it is really good at vertical integration and produces some really cool designs. But unlike Tom O’Reilly, I don’t think the future belongs to “three-tiered systems – that blend hardware, installed software, and proprietary Web applications” – just as consoles haven’t replaced PC gaming and the network still isn’t the computer, whether Sun admits it or not.

And as soon as real competition to iTunes rises up, so much for Apple’s monopoly in the music distribution business.

Cults work. They do, for certain time and within a clearly defined ecosystem, to which the outside world builds immunity over time. Love alone won’t help Apple uphold its strategical position in the long term. Especially since the company is a one-man show. Cults live and die with their leaders.

If you want to know what Apple would look like after Jobs, just remember what it looked between Jobs’s two terms. Opening up might not necessarily help it, but staying opaque and secretive and paranoid certainly won’t.

April 9, 2008 | Filed Under CRM 

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