Apple -- Survival of the fittest

Macintosh --> Ipods, Iphone, Macbook Air :

Apple, the creator of Ipods, Iphones and Macbooks, is a very good example of fight back. The success story of Apple Inc., an American MNC was not a cake walk.

In early 80's, Macintosh was so famous among PC users. Macintosh had a very good user interface and there were no other computer manufacturers providing PCs with Graphical User Interface. Many people often abuse Microsoft for stealing the idea of GUI and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). The success story took a turn after few years.

People were buying Macintosh and Apple was spending money on the researchers to give creative products to the consumers. But what the researchers lacked was the inputs from the customers and application developers. As a result, Apple became a closed communicator and they were very confident about whatever they were doing. During this process, Apple's researchers even neglected the evolution of WWW and they created products, which didn't meet the customer's expectations.

Inspite of being a great technology company, Apple Inc., lost its glory because they didn't bother about "Customer Demand". There were lot of articles talking about the worst scenario of Apple Inc., in 1996.

Everybody started suggesting (sarcastic) ways to save Apple [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html].

In 1997, Steve Jobs was re-recruited as interim CEO of Apple, everybody said he is not the right person to turn back Apple. Lot of people expected that Apple will die soon [http://www.scripting.com/davenet/1997/07/08/TheSureRoadtoBankruptcy.html]. There were rumors that Steve Jobs want his company NEXT to be number one by killing Apple Inc.,.

Steve Jobs never bothered about the rumors and he was back with a bang. In 1998, with the release of iMac, they had given the customers a totally different experience.

In my view there are three major factors for any company/product's success:

1) Creativity & Technology :- With the use of technology and creativity, companies always create new products which a novice user never think about. Apple did the same thing with the introduction of iMac and OS X. They gave the feeling to the customers that its the ultimate experience they can ever have.

IPod and Iphone are couple of other examples, because there were mp3 players and phones in existence previously, but Apple did them in a different way, the way customer love to use it.

2) Marketing :- Reaching the right people at the right time, will fetch many customers in less time. But Apple's marketing strategy looks totally different. They have customers in almost all the age groups. Anybody who likes to listen music will prefer Ipod to anyother player. Its the reacheability and usability of the product, which made it famous.

3) Timing :- As everybody knew TTM has great impact on the sales and the market share. Even the product could be totally different, but once the company announces the product, then there will be lot of other competitors, who will try to tap the market first.
Apple made it bigtime into MP3 and Video Ipods market before everybody else.

Is Apple a customer focused company :-

The main goal of starting with a brief history of Apple's products, is to show how a company can go into from almost bankruptcy position to Number 1 position.

1) No Company is a charity organization and stockholders want to see profits. Whatever time the R&D department spends in research activities, ultimately the outcome should beat the competitor's product and also should meet customer's expectation. In the best scenario, the company should be providing products/services which the customer never expect.

2) When the company has the latest product with good marketing strategy, then they have the market ready for them.

So the company (here Apple) is customer focused and also it is able to meet the stockholders expectations, infact they beat the expectations on the product quality and usability.

Product development :-

After facing lot of problems with PC manufacturing, Apple stopped developing chips and they started buying them from other vendors. But Apple is very strict about their requirements for those chips, which go into their products.

Personally I have experience in working with the design of Wi-Fi chips, which go into the Apple's Airport Extreme and Apple's Macbook Pro. Apple never compromises in selecting the chip vendors for their chips and most of the time the Software development for those chips happen at Apple.

Bluetooth in Ipod : What I heard about not having bluetooth in the earlier generation Iphone's is because, they couldn't fit in the bluetooth chip, with the battery they were using. Bluetooth in general accounts for lot of power consumption and for IPhone, battery life is of utmost importance. So they didn't want to compromise the basic funcationality of a mobile for getting the extra features.

Problems with the Iphones :-

Even after taking extreme care in selecting the chip vendors, there are always possibilities of malfunctioning of chips because of miscellaneous issues. The best solution would be taking back those Iphones and replace the corresponding chip and sell it as the "refurbished product". That is what Apple doing now.

Coming to the spare parts for the MacbookPro or MacbookAir, whenever a company manufactures a new product in the technology industry, they won't generally have any spares, because they expect absolute success rate. Apple is very confident about their Quality Assurance practices.

Another reason for not having spare parts in the store is, because of offshoring of assembly units. Thats why in most of the cases to assure the best customer support service, Apple replaces the troubled piece with the new one/refurbished one.

Marketing Strategy :-

Apple own all the retail stores and they never compromised with the product. In this situation its very for them to sell the product. Apple allowed people to walk-in to their store and there is a big welcome for the customers or window-shoppers. They have gaming consoles in their stores for children. Always they have lot of samples for display for the customers and they generally don't restrict anybody for using them longtime.

So everybody will get feel for the product and definitely if the product is good, even if it is little expensive than other products, people prefer to buy Apple's products.

The customer service in the store is very well managed. The sales persons in the store don't get any commission for the products they sell and they are very passionate about Apple's products.

This gives the opportunity to the sales person talking to the novice customers too. When one get utmost importance and they get a very good product, he/she will buy that product.

In my opinion, Apple has figured out what customers want and what they are comfortable with. They found out all possible ways to fill up the gaps and harnessed the convergence of Mp3 player, camera and phone. There are many alternatives for Iphone/Ipod are available in the market, but with the established customer relationship, everybody wants to be with Apple.

This story again proves the survival of the fittest.

------------------------ THE END -------------------------------