Apple is one of the most innovative companies around the world (which makes me very attracted as I like to study innovative companies and the processes they use to stimulate employee innovation effort). But, not that far to the history – Apple was the company, which was ready to go ruined.

Apple is the example of the company, who found its niche on the market and it is able to produce large profits from its loyal customer. Honestly, we as Apple users are really the part of the ghetto, which has difficulties to communicate with the rest of external world, but we accept it as the part of our lives. As we believe, we use better and simpler solutions to provide the rest of the world with the results of our work.

Apple was the company, which had a chance to be IBM about 20 years ago. But the strategy of Apple was different. As IBM introduced “open standard”, which allowed to the lot of external competitors to introduce their own clones to the market, Apple’s solution was not open and Apple was the only company to sell Apple-compliant computers. When Apple started to license its solution to the external vendors, it was too late and it brought disappointment to both parties – Apple and the external vendors. Do you remember Apple clones in 90s of 20th century, which were assembled in Taiwan?

Apple cancelled the policy of providing licenses and returned to the computers, which are not compliant with the rest of world, but they are able to communicate with them. Sometimes, it is easier to connect a Mac computer to the existing network than adding a new Windows based PC as Apple really cares about networking with the rest of the external world.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple its ability to introduce products, which are innovative and their design is cute, clean and builds emotions. You love them or you hate them. Also, building on the NextStep, new operating system was born – Mac OS X. With difficulties, but finally, Mac OS X has taken over the Mac OS 9, which is till favorite operating system for some people.

Finally, the company celebrated a huge success with its most beloved product – iPod. Looking at iPod I start to be really worried – as the company has limited resources (which Apple definitely has compared to Microsoft), iPod stays the same for a very long period of time. The sales volumes are really great, but what about the future? When iPod is a product, which is generating huge cash flow, there should be a visible effort to make improvements in the product. But – Apple just adds some hard disc space and that is all for the last year. Oh, I forgot about the colors at iPod Nano.

Right now, Apple tries to bring a new “iPod story” to the market – Apple TV and iPhone. But, without caring of current loyal customers, it can be a huge sad story for the company. It is not easy to repeat “iPod Story” and Apple wants to repeat that, but Microsoft is not a sleeping beauty and its Zune will be upgraded soon as Microsoft sees a huge potential on the market. And when Microsoft wants to reach excellent results then Microsoft invests large amounts of money into that effort to win the market share.

Apple should carefully watch the nice example – Sony was a leader on the market with PlayStation 2, but it will be tough to repeat the success story with PlayStation 3 as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was first to the market and the “new-generation-games” are available mainly just for Xbox 360.

Dear Apple, take care and you will win again. When you do not take care about your main products, you will loose your markets.

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