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With the iPad available for pre-order from today and to start shipping on April 3rd, the tech industry has been all a-whirl since the recent unveiling of the gadget. The iPad is a new device that falls conveniently between an iPhone and a netbook. Many compare the iPad to a gigantic iPhone. What’s most different about it is it’ll directly compete with eBook devices like the Amazon Kindle, while allowing users to surf the Internet, check email, and enjoy apps just like an iPhone, but far fewer. The iPad may sound like a fantastic development on the company’s part, but some iFan’s are worried that Apple is taking too big of a bite into consumer freedom.
Monopoly is not a new concept in business. The marketplace has embraced many meager companies that eventually grew to become gigantic, greedy, loathsome monsters – making a way for a model more customer-focused and just and innovative to take a bite out of their market share.
Some would say an example of this would be Microsoft which, for all its benefits, spawned the inevitable underdog Apple. There was a time when over 90% of home computers ran off of a Microsoft operating system. But with the advent of Apple and others, Microsoft found its giant status challenged.
Lessons to be Learned
Instead of learning from Microsoft, Apple now seems to be running the risk of becoming the very same thing it opposed in the beginning.
With its new iPad, Apple restricts users from downloading any program that doesn’t come through its own market place. This will prompt freedom junkies to wait for a copycat device to come along, one with fewer restrictions at a lesser price.
Apple’s early business model is a definite plan for any small to medium-size business to follow. Where the business model derails is the precise moment when the powers that be at Apple decided to monopolize the marketplace and decimate its competition by imposing strict rules on its use.
When you deny today’s consumer customization choices and control, you diminish your brand’s likability. Consumers may use your service, but begrudgingly – anxiously awaiting for the next big thing that “gets” their needs. Cross consumers one good time and the loyalty you thought they had for you can become a thing of the past.
Over the years, Apple’s consumer community has wholehearted embraced its convenient applications and innovative technology. If Apple hopes to keep its core customer, it’ll have to remember that consistent delivery of those core concepts is crucial.
With the new iPad, Apple seems to have turned its back on a few key basics. It has shockingly imposed customization barriers when previously, they wrote the book on how to win hearts and minds by powering their market with plenty of the “I” factor, a universe of answers to WIFM (What’s In It For Me?).
Apple has taken a step back in time with its strategic platform for the iPad, and it’s a time warp that Apple loyalists find dizzying. For many, the new iPad has debuted as an apple lacking color. With the power of choice removed in the extent to which you can customize it, iFans feel like they’re being asked to buy something akin to a black and white TV.
What’s the Moral of This Apple Case Study?
The goal for any small or medium sized business should be to fill a void in the marketplace. Accompanying this should be impeccable customer service, an eye for detail, and consistent delivery of what’s deemed valuable about what you sell.
Then, once you’re hovering at the apex of your business circle or niche, stay true to the values that got you there. Insist on consistency from yourself. You know what your loyal customers have come to expect. Giving them anything less, even once, is risky business.
Remember, the next little company is always right around the corner, just waiting to pick up your slack, and your profits.
What’s your thought on this? Leave your comments below.
My thought is that someone should proof this story.
Not sure which group of fans you are talking about — I think you are lumping all Mac users in with iPhone users and that may be a big mistake. Mac addicts (I am one of them) stay with Mac because it is simply the greatest thing since sliced bread and orders of magnitude better than the alternatives that MS and Bill have been able to put up against it.
iPhone users are not one and the same — the iPhone from what I have heard (no, I don't have one, refuse to go back to AT&T lack of service) has a radically different user base in that they are there because no one else is better.
I believe that Apple with the iPad is attempting, and may or may not succeed, to do the same thing with the tablet market. We'll see what happens after launch and user experiences start to influence the market.
Apple is not the new Microsoft so much as it is the new AT&T (ironic?)
I'm not talking about the new AT&T but the old “Bell System” pre-1984 AT&T.
Back then AT&T exercised full control and monopoly over the the telephones and everything related to them.
They owned ALL the phone lines, phones, exchanges, and switches. You had to rent your phone from the phone company, and you were not allowed to touch the phone lines in your own house! You couldn't plug or unplug anything from the lines unless you had their permission.
Compare this to Apple who owns the device, the platform, the operating system, the marketplace, the apps.
Apple's user agreement and terms are about as restrictive as Ma Bell's control over your phone!
The companies software, development tools, api's, and its mobile hardware have endless terms and clauses to give them full control of their products top to bottom.
This brings up a part of Apple that makes them unlike Microsoft: Apple is a consumer device design company, Microsoft is a software company. Even the Mac platform is a consumer device. You can install Windows or Windows Mobile on any platform you can get it running on, and there are many options for developing software on both those platform. There also is no restriction on writing apps for either platforms. If you're developing for Mac OS X, or any of the iPhone OS based devices you have only one realistic choice, to use Xcode and all of the components of the Apple toolchain.
Apple also practices the anti-competitive tactic known as “refusal to deal” where it grants exclusivity contracts and locks out competitors. They choose what carriers are allowed, who can submit apps, and the licensing of the FairPlay DRM. Similar practices were used by Bell to keep out any other companies from delivering services using AT&T's lines.
Apple is more of a monopoly of restriction whereas Microsoft is more of a monopoly of acquisition where they get in their position by buying competitors and using that as their leverage.
Disclaimer: I am running Debian GNU/Linux on a MacBook Pro, my favorite programing language is C#, and my phone is a BlackBerry.
The points in this article regarding consumer freedom are all valid and make a lot of sense.
Adding the angle of (some) software developers: How much sense does it make to totally depend on a single source of distribution, with an agreement that allows whimsical rejection?
Google “EFF Apple Agreement” and see what we mean.
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