Apple: it’s déjà vu, all over again
A couple of IDC graphs published today illustrate how Apple, the world’s most valuable company, is repeating history: its products may redefine markets and enjoy huge initial success, but it then stands by and watches as its competitors then take over the very markets it helped revolutionize.
The first graph offers a picture of the development of the tablet market from the launch of the iPad in 2010, up to the last quarter of 2014. The tablet market was largely testimonial until the arrival of the iPad, with only a few manufacturers producing a couple of models each, and which hadn’t proved much of a hit with the public. Following the launch of the iPad, Apple has been able to sell more than two hundred million units, but the trend is clear in the graph: steadily downward, with just a few peaks corresponding to new launches. Now, after four generations of iPad, three iPad Minis, and two iPad Airs, Apples global share of the tablet market is less than 30 percent.
The second IDC graph charts the smartphone market since 2010: a duopoly once Blackberry and Windows Phone dropped out, but a very unequal duopoly in which Apple’s iOS has just a 14.8 percent share to the Android systems’ 81.5 percent. And lest we forget, it was Apple that redefined the smartphone market following the launch of the iPhone in 2007, and it’s Apple, once again, that has given way to domination of that market by its competitors.
This is just what happened to Apple after the launch of the personal computer in the 1980s: the Macintosh was a fantastic success that pretty much redefined the concept of the personal computer, but that was then swept aside as multiple manufacturers developed products based on an open system. Sure, Apple has held on to a bigger margin than the majority of its competitors, and is earning money where others are losing it, but the strategy of constantly having to look for markets to reinvent, only to see other companies dominate them after a few years, leaving Apple with the crumbs, comes at a high cost, even if it does force the company to be in a perpetual state of reinvention.
Apple’s definition of innovation is complex: on the one hand it has never invented anything; all its ideas have come from already existing models. But on the other hand, it has become a company able to redefine the benchmark for products that others then try to copy. But for those copiers to then take over the market says much about Apple’s inability to understand the concept of collective innovation. At the same time, it must be said that this inability is relative when we’re talking about a company the value of which has grown continually over the last decade, and is now worth 750 billion dollars, the most valuable on the planet.
(En español, aquí)
