Apple ex-evangelist Kawasaki pans, praises Jobs Apple fanboys may have religious fervor, but so too does its ex–chief evangelist Guy Kawasaki, who reckons that Apple's continued existence is evidence that there must be a God. Keynoting at The Founder Conference in Mountain View, California, just up the road from Apple's HQ, Kawasaki laid into his former employer, joking …
"not $188 of parts, but a dream, promises of what you can do". Yeah, duh!
You walk into a car showroom to ask for about $1500 of sheet metal plus bits and bobs?
Go to a website thinking you're spending 2ct/h on electricity?
So mentioning function over building blocks is this "enchanting" thing? Colour me unenthused.
As a technology company they are only 'above average' ... but they are the greatest marketing company ever!
Yes, they have changed the direction of the market (with the iPhone for example), but again, touch screen phones were NOT NEW (neither were ipods): technology-wise they did not really contribute much with the exception maybe of the user experience from a UI perspective. BUT they made them COOL and DESIREABLE where everybody else had failed to ignite interest. And the COOL and DESIREABLE meant that the market could turn e.g.
- Price points previously prohibitive to their competitors using say capacitive instead of resistive technology (selling only 'technology') for a better user experience was breached
- user expectations of long battery life were altered in exchange for the DREAM
- the DREAM made users accept less features (a race that is now starting again in smartphones!)
I think I may have found the reason why people seem to believe in a deity when it comes to Apples success. If you believe in a free market society, a company like Apple would have failed decades ago.
The point is that there is no free market. Markets are constrained by market research which tries to find out what people will buy by finding out what they already bought. So new products will never come to the market.
If there was a free market, we would stop bothering copying iOS/Android/WP7/Blackberry over and over again, we would have a more professional smartphone segment of phones running usable systems based on desktop OSes. Mobile devices you can actually _do_ something with.
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