Sep 022012
 

Why the iPhone matters: 8 questions for Horace Dediu” is a short but interesting interview with Horace Dediu about the impact of iPhone during these 5 years after its first launch.

I recommend reading the interview to see how Apple has changed the business model of smartphones during a short period of 5 years and how the company has applied the idea of integration to produce more powerful products with interesting features and services.

Here I quote one of the eight questions of the interview which also mentions to the Nokia’s main mistake:

In that same interview, you said that Nokia’s mistake was that “they did not think the basis of competition would change. They thought they were too big to fail. They did not challenge the core business model of hardware-first and try to find an internal disruptive business.” How would you apply these insights to Apple?

Apple changed the basis of competition from hardware as the primary value consumers paid for to a combination of hardware, software and services. Being competitive changed from having good hardware to having good hardware, good software and services — made usable through integration.

Apple has expanded its business model to include services such as iTunes, Siri and iCloud. It can remain disruptive as long as it improves along a dimension which is not good enough. What has been less than “good enough” has been the experience and that was made better through integration. Over time this becomes good enough, and so the company needs to add services (which are [currently] not good enough). Services can include solving deeper customer needs like companionship, assistance, discovery and social bonding.

 Posted by at 12:43 am

 Leave a Reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)