Over on The Daily Lark, Andy takes a look at this Guardian piece on how Apple launches products and weighs in on why/how Apple launches products, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. In general I agree with him when he says:
As a consumer company, surprises work for Apple. Shock and awe offsets the need for Proctor and Gamble-like media buys, Use that approach where your customers are businesses of any size and you are likely to get slapped around. First, they actually plan technology deployments. Second, they look to a broad range of influencers throughout the purchase cycle - if you don’t have them lined-up, you don’t sell.
But his final point strikes me as off. He notes (bold mine):
There is a third and more important point that applies to all markets. Apple’s approach works only if you aren’t interested in any kind of conversation with the market. I’d rather see a conversation with the market take place at every stage of a product’s evolution.
Let's be clear, Apple has a huge conversation going on with the market. Enormous. They get more feedback and input from their users than just about any company in the world. They get it via their genius bars, their help sections at apple.com, from the blogs about them etc. and so on. Now maybe you could argue they don't feed/participate in that conversation in a very transparent way, but the conversation is going on. I have a high degree of confidence that Apple is both listening to and responding to the voices they hear -- they just don't do it in a traditional way.
Then Andy says:
At the end of the day, Apple’s approach works because they are the only player in their hyper-proprietary market.
Not to be an Apple apologist, but they are not the only player in their market. Or maybe they are the only player in the market if you only want to buy an Apple product, but I'm pretty sure that Toshiba competes with the Air, that RIM competes with the iPhone, that Microsoft competes with Apple. Because forgotten in some of the mystique around Apple is that they actually do release an OS every once in a while. And guess what: it's generally not front page news, because for the same reasons that Andy describes, Apple has an ecosystem to feed, and makes the (wise) choice not too surprise people too much.
The usual caveat applies: my client is Microsoft.