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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I going to stick my oar in...(I haven't had enough rocks thrown at me lately...)
Apple's talent has always been at taken an exist product/niche, which was relatively small, and with relatively clunky products, and creating an elegant, smooth product/interface for it. And charging a premium price for the resulting product.
It usually took years for competition to create a similar product, and reduce Apple's product to a niche product among the cognoscenti. It has happened over and over. (The only product where Apple maintained a major lead is the iPod, due to being there "fustest with the mostest" with iTunes. But even there, the competition offered a compelling price/performance ratio.)
So the real question about Apple's current lack of product is...what is out there that needs a "spiffing up" to become a mainstream product? The only thing I can think of would be a streaming media player (a spiffed up Roku) But is the marketplace going to pay, say $400, for a replacement of a product that costs $80-$100 currently? Or is there some other product you can think of to be "spiffed up"? That's Apple's future. And it has been since 1982...
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Perhaps, but then again, you could say the same about 99.9999 percent of the companies out there (well, except the elegant, smooth part of it). Most products are a refinement of some pre-existing product. I'm having a hard time thinking of a product in recent history that was genuinely new.
Before the iPod, iPhone and iPad all came out, people were having trouble imagining how Apple would make money on the rumored product or what would make that product a winner. That doesn't mean that Apple's next product is going to be a winner, lord knows they have had some real turkeys, but keep in mind that Jobs really wasn't the guy who came up with all those products. He just had a pretty good track record for picking products that were winners and then making sure that the final product was elegant and smooth, i.e. something that enough people would be willing to pay a premium for.
We forget that the iPod wasn't an instant success, it didn't really take off until the iTunes store became a reality. When the iPhone first came out, there was a pretty big revolt against the web apps model. It took Apple some 6 months to cave on opening up the iPhone to developers. I would say that the other thing that Jobs was good at was recognizing when they had screwed up and moving to correct the error. Not many companies will do that.