Break the mold - From Business

If anybody has bought a computer lately, my best guess is, you would not have found much difference between the various brands on the shelf except for the 50 or 100 bucks on the price or the slight difference in design which generally escapes the price conscious eyes.

The personal computer and the laptop market since the mid 90's has increasingly become commoditized with price being the governing criteria in the Wintel space for any form of market leadership. The HP's, Acers, Dell's of the world mostly compete on price and this has led to industry migration (from the west to cheaper Taiwan and China), consolidation (big mergers such as HP - Compaq) to outright selloff (IBM moving out of the segment all together).

This price leadership mentality is strangely followed by all the players (not one could resist the temptation). Though this has had the benefit of bringing the computer to the masses it has been enormously detrimental to the financial health of the manufacturers, with all of them now working on wafer thin margins and plans to enter the services space, with its higher margins, so as to survive.

In this market Apple stands out as a beacon of hope and also a lesson to others. If you were Apple your business case would not have made much cheer in the investment community. You are in a commodity market, which is dominated by Wintel (approx 90% market share), the major operating system Windows (again a 90% market) does not sleeps too well with your hardware and you yourself proclaim that Apple software is recommended as it runs best with our hardware. 

Yes you have taken great pains to make your productivity suite compatible with Microsoft Office, but still you are way far from striking it big.

So how is it then that Apple is able to sell the same configuration as others at 3X the cost of its competitors. 

Differentiation, that is the keyword in this case. Instead of blindly following the market and getting involved in the price cut race, Apple has been able to think differently, break out of the mold and follow a path of greater prosperity.

Apple has focussed its energies on a couple of factors to set itself apart and then done a great job of marketing, through hype, secrecy and rumor to hammer in these points into the customers psyche. 

The first of these differentiators is the user experience of its machines. Right from the word go the rich GUI experience, the excellent visual display etc. all of it sets the product apart. This is the reason why whenever they launch a product or any of their promotional material, photos  and its sharing are an integral part. This is a downstream advantage, or the user level advantage they highlight, which stems from their upstream investment in superior display technology.

The other serious area of focus has been to make the experience as natural for the end user as possible. This is where their ground breaking work in multi-touch comes in. Their designers, instead of treading the beaten path, have started right from the scratch on this aspect and come up with more natural ways of doing things on the computer. That is why moving around the page on an Apple Macbook or Mac mouse is a breeze, if you want to scroll the page down just put two fingers and do it, if left then that's the way your fingers go and so on. This is in huge contrast to its competitors where one has to use the scroll bar to move left or right or the Lenovo (erstwhile IBM) finger killing trackpoint.

Apple has created an around itself an image of innovation in design which is not only user friendly but environment friendly with a line of products which have the least impact on the environment, all aspects which its target audience appreciates and is ready to pay extra for.

Apple is a classic case in point where a company is able to not only survive but thrive on a not so price conscious, but quality and innovation seeking segment of the market, where it is able to raise its products to cult value status by focussing and excelling on certain product features, marketing it well and backing it up with great after sales support.

And yes that very few viruses are written for the Mac OS definitely helps.