Is Apple Ripe?
7/12/2005Where can Apple go from here? How does a company keep innovating in a world of global supply, competition and consolidation?
Technology has had a long and heady run over the last twenty years or so. Bubble or bust, it has remained the focus of the modern world. Computers are now everywhere and used by everyone, even small children. Even before the Patriot Act, computer technology was ubiquitous, now it is an essential component of Homeland Paranoia. There is talk of including chips on the hang-tags found on consumer goods, and they are already being used on disposable printer cartridges. In the next fascist state, tattooing numbers on people's wrist will be third-world tyranny, the modern authoritarian state will use imbedded microchips. The security of computers has become a full-time occupation for many, just like for every other government installation. Science fiction is becoming reality, along with retina scans and face recognition software.
During a vacation a few years ago, while joking with my brother and his family, we came up with the idea for an Oivlisnoc. (Consilvio backward) This new invention would be attached to fresh fruit and would indicate when it was ripe enough to eat. Imagine the profitability of a company that derived revenue from every piece of fruit eaten! Big Bucks. [Insert maniacal laughter] What a story of marketplace saturation that would be for that one company. As long as you can convince people to not think for themselves, then you can supply a product that can think for them, which is what the computer has become. It reminds me of that great Groucho Marx line, "Who you gonna believe, us, or your own two eyes?" Big Brother on the telescreen issues the message, and the masses stare in rapt obedience. Is it MacWorld, a press conference, or mindless world?
Apple is both an innovator and a marketing phenomenon. It seems almost impossible to separate one from the other, but as the computer industry matures, it is clear that they must be understood separately. What is left for Apple to innovate? If the innovator of the industry is reduced to incremental improvements, then that means that the entire industry is too. I remember my Performa 6300 was touted as a multi-media machine, but it never lived up to its hype. But that was then, and this is now. Now we have Tiger, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, Safari, Final Cut Pro, GarageBand, Mail, iPod, iPod Mini and iPod Shuffle, Mac Mini, iMac, eMac, G5 Towers, and flat panel displays. WOW! What an amazing line up! And the list could be longer in Quicktime. But from here on out, everything will just be incremental improvements. Playing "good guys and bad guys" with sticks in the backyard has come indoors. The next video game will be the same as the last video game, the big screen movie experience is now a surround sound system in your living room and the Average Joe is the eclectic director. (I guess that makes us all the eclectic critic, too.)
But we must ask ourselves, what is a computer? Does it help us to think or does it think for us? My first "real" experience with computers was as a client of a Vax mainframe. That was a computer that filled a room. I suspect the PowerBook I am typing on has as much processing power as it did. We are at the point where a music player is the size of a pack of gum. What is left to innovate, besides our own thinking? The changing generations of iPods with different click-wheels, etc., is all minor stuff. Does the form factor change become a wrist watch? Big deal. So what?
The innovation was the iPod, not the evolution from the Walkman. The new combination of computer, portability and content is what makes iPod and iTunes a success. Now the computer is a real digital hub. The Cube has been reborn as the MacMini, and is compatible with PC peripherals, an example of combination, not innovation. From a marketing perspective, Apple has finally attained ubiquitous status. Marketplace saturation will steadily grow. But, I am not talking about growing the marketshare, my question is, "What is left to innovate?" What are the new separate elements to be combined? Telephones and satellites and music? That is an incremental change, too, not an innovation.
Looking at the computer-marketplace as a whole, the two major components are killer applications and killer hardware. Perhaps we should also ask, what are the killer applications? There are not that many. In a wood-shop, a chisel is as valuable today as it was five thousand years ago. The computer is a modern chisel, and what is fashioned from it depends on the skill of the hand that yields it. The ability to communicate is the essence of all killer applications, that is what makes the hardware so desirable and necessary. Content is king. From the designs on an ancient urn to the graphics images designed on a computer, the artist/engineer manufactures a vision and then shares it with the world.
Hindsight being 20-20, foresight by Apple as they developed hardware was limited. They were late to the party not just with the ability to burn music CD's but also with the ability to use lots of typefaces. Being wiser today, they have finally delivered the nuts and bolts that a multi-media experience required. The computer revolution is complete. Of course, Apple has accomplished it in part by cannibalizing the inventions of others and then branding them as their own. Like the arrival of DOS at Microsoft, not all genius is homegrown within a ruling royal family. The marketplace demand for innovation and profit demands acquisition predation from every corporation. Sometimes corporations acquire technology, other times they acquire the customers of their own distributors. It is the only way to keep the stock price steady or rising.
It seems to me that the next frontier for Apple is not incremental technological achievements but in the content of what is delivered. The unmasking of history, and the exposure of centuries of crimes will be impossible to refute. The choice we all face really is between tyranny and liberty, just like the 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh. IBM has been gobbled up by the rising Chinese empire and Apple is ascending in the marketplace. But these new empires will surely fall, too. The monopoly on information and technology has been democratized, and no one will be able to stop this wave without a holocaust of global proportions. The efficiency of Empire demands the ability to communicate, from Roman roads to the Pony Express. Yet, it is the ability to communicate that weakens the Empire, too. Lies cannot convince ones eyes all the time and every time. Advertising and propaganda are every empire's indictment, like old Nazi film footage.
Today the world is run by ivy league graduates from fifty years ago. Is it really still necessary to attend Harvard to get a Harvard education? Classes can be recorded and streamed on the web. Teachers can be teaching long after they are dead, and learning can be done in remote locations with little cost. The democratization of knowledge is possible, if we are willing to think and act with transparency. Much of the "Old Guard" are the "Good 'ol Boys." The Empire's lust for power, wealth and control will be their undoing. New content can replace old propaganda.
If we have the courage to "Think Different" we can truly revolutionize the world, rather than rebuilding a new technological fascism. Every teenager now has a blog, but why not make the genius of our age available for the generations to follow? This is "artificial intelligence" with a real practical purpose. Rather than seeing intellectual property as capital, we should see it as an opportunity.
The goal of Apple from the beginning was to make an insanely great box. Clearly they have succeeded. But there were two geniuses behind Apple. One was Steve Jobs, and the other was Steve Wozniak. Woz left the corporate world to focus on teaching. He isn't exactly a "sit in a classroom, obey and learn" dictatorial type of teacher. He is more free-thinking than that. Corporate Apple, however, is evolving into an autocratic toady of the status quo with its DRM and protection of the music manufacturing monopoly. They guard their marketplace announcements as if it were a matter of life and death and elbow other developers and resellers with their proprietary software and Apple stores. They are anchored to the consumer culture and mindless waste that the Big Brother teledemon demands. The double-think of "think different" and "act the same" is now strikingly obvious. Apple has innovated technologically, but not philosophically. The marketplace economics of "success" do not allow it.
The time is ripe at Apple for a role by Steve Wozniak. The Apple needs a teacher. Apple should be buying back its shares and becoming a private company again. Then it can do what it wants to do, rather than being just another corporate whore for Wall Street's ponzi schemes. Either that, or Apple should sell out, because the Mothership has reached its innovative height. The computer is now a commodity, just like the automobile. The models will change but the basic design will remain the same.
The Oivlisnoc indicates that the Apple is ripe. If it continues too long without a fundamental change in its operating philosophy, it may well get rotten, leaving the ants perpetually enslaved to the grasshoppers, and computer users in A Bugs Life assembly line. Steve Wozniak was exiled like Flick, who was right all along. "Ants don't serve grasshoppers. It's you who need us," said Flick. Steve Jobs as head of the hive knows this. He is a storyteller, too, just like Woz. The rhythm of history is that today's heresy is tomorrow's commonsense, and what is commonsense quickly becomes stagnation. Let the bugs teach the computers how to operate, and innovation will be re-seeded.