In trying to gauge and estimate market forces, I find that people often fail to recognize the importance of corporate values, and just how strongly they affect the outcome of various ongoing industry battles: Android vs. iPhone vs. Nokia, Apple vs. Flash, etc., are all far better understood when viewed from a company values standpoint. You see, a corporation is like an individual human being in the sense that it has core values — top priority issues that matter the most to its top brass, and therefore (hopefully) also to its very last employee. As a side-note, companies that fail to convey such values to their employees usually fail at the outset, and are not part of this discussion.
You might assume that in every major corporation, those values are identical: Making money. I think that’s absolutely not the case. Sure, revenues and profitability are key, but ultimately it depends on what matters most to the company’s leaders, and surprisingly enough, money isn’t always it. Take Steve Jobs, for instance. It seems rather clear to me that he doesn’t spend his days pondering what he can do to generate more revenue for Apple. He spends them thinking how he can make Apple “win the game”, deliver superior user-experiences, etc.
This is critically important because it helps us understand what drives the various decisions made by these companies. Take Google, for example. Clearly Google is a engineering-driven company, with an emphasis on technological innovations and openness. This hugely impacts their various product decisions, and is evident when looking at Android, for example. Android is open in a way that only makes sense to someone who places openness as a value. Unfortunately, openness and user experience often conflicts, which is why Apple tends to design their products to be as open as they need to be, but no more. That is why Apple’s products tend to be pretty closed.
The reason for the phenomenal success Apple has seen in recent years is just how amazingly focused it’s been, and just how right its values turned out to be. Apple focuses on user experience, and pretty much on nothing else. That has allowed them to produce, overall, vastly superior products compared to their competitors. It has also driven them to create smaller, focused product lines with clear differentiation.
For instance, Lenovo currently offers over 13 unique laptop product lines, each with its own configuration options. By comparison, Apple offers three such laptop product lines. They choose to compromise flexibility in favor of simplicity, thereby simplifying the customer’s selection process and ensuring a more enjoyable shopping experience.
When looking at Apple’s competitors, I see strong focus on revenue generation through massive technological investment, the creation of vast product lines to suit any type of customer, and investment in endless feature lists, in the belief that features ultimately sell products. This is how Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, LG, and countless other companies seem to think about their business. The reason why Apple is growing so much faster than all of these companies, is that their values just seem to make more sense.
Another example: Looking at the average Windows laptop, I find it mind boggling that Microsoft still allows their hardware partners (Lenovo, Dell, HP, and the others) to install all of their redundant software on top of Windows 7. A separate WiFi management tool, display settings tool, various control panel applets, product advertisements, you name it. Windows 7 includes excellent tools for managing all of these features, why on earth does Microsoft allow their partners to damage their customer’s user experience for their own selfish interests? Surely Microsoft is powerful enough to force (or incentivize) them to sell their hardware with plain vanilla Windows systems?
The reason, once again, is values. Microsoft is thinking of business relationships and politics, and placing that consideration ahead of user experience. It’s even possible that they might not see it as a compromise, but rather as a natural arrangement with their hardware partners. Apple takes the other extreme, completely hiding the existence of their various partners in their products (notice the lack of any kind of Intel sticker on Intel Macs, for example), because it typically makes the products simpler to use and nicer to look at.
My theory? Companies will continue to have a challenging uphill battle against Apple, until they realize that they need to rethink their core values, and place a far greater emphasis on user experience, placing it before other considerations such as feature lists, huge product lines to accommodate all tastes, and yes, even revenues.
