A simple lesson from Apple
There are a lot of things I don’t like about Apple.
I don’t like Apple’s litigious approach to everything it deems even close to stepping on its turf. I don’t like its ongoing efforts to lock users into products such as iTunes and locking out all competition. I also don’t like the way Apple is increasingly controlling the way users view the Internet and how it is abusing that power to tell publishers what they can and can’t publish. There are many other reasons to dislike Apple, but you get the idea.
I am also painfully aware that my moral-high-ground objections to Apple are not shared. With pre-orders for the iPhone 4 topping 600 000 in one day clearly there aren’t a lot of consumers with similar feelings about Apple.
Which brings me to my point: Despite everything that Apple does wrong (in my eyes, obviously) there are a few things that Apple does exceptionally well and there are lessons to be learned.
Obviously there is the innovation. Actually it’s not so much innovation as good design. Mobile phones are not new, nor are tablet devices, nor digital music players. But what Apple brings to the party, apart from a big presentation with a polo necked emperor, is a truckload of very little. The iPod doesn’t have more buttons than anyone else. It has one, effectively. The iPhone doesn’t have a button for every feature, just enough to do exactly what you need to do. The same is true for everything else that Apple produces: The right number of features to make it useful without overwhelming users.
Sometimes this actually means that Apple products are under-performers in comparison with the competition, despite their premium price tag. The first iPhone for example didn’t offer copy and paste and didn’t even include multimedia messaging. Nobody else in the mobile phone market would dare put out a phone without these capabilities, and yet not only did Apple fans snap up the phone but they eulogised the fact that the iPhone wasn’t like other phones.
Aside from good design, but not divorced from it, Apple’s success is the ability to focus on just a few features and make them work well. So well that everyone else wants to copy them.
Compare this with Microsoft or Linux.
Windows is everywhere but there aren’t many people that would queue overnight in the cold to be the first customer the day a new Windows release was made.
Similarly, Linux runs on every imaginable platform. If it has a processor and needs an operating system, Linux is your choice. But how many people would fork out between R1 500 and R3 000 (the price of an iPhone) for a copy of Linux that they had never actually seen work? Sure, a lot would download a copy for free, but pay good money? I doubt it.
It’s something that everyone in the tech industry can learn from. It doesn’t matter how many features your product has, or how many colours it is available in, or how many pixels it is capable of producing. If it doesn’t do what is advertised in the simplest, most obvious way possible then it’s probably not going to be a hit with users.
Technology gets better all the time. There is always more that can be crammed into a mobile phone, tablet PC or laptop. But sometimes cramming it all in doesn’t make as much sense as we would think. Instead it just overwhelms users as they sidestep features they don’t understand and struggle to find the ones they do.
I still don’t like Apple, but I do think that they manage to tread the fine line between too much and too little.
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