I usually tolerate spam from Apple - it's white and colorful at the same time. But today I got an email that had please-please-buy-me writ all over. The subject line said, "We spoke too soon." I clicked to see Apple showing off a prize from J.D. Power and Associates, a company best known for blessing new automobiles. Ahem. Ahem.
As a quick-and-dirty survey, I checked traffic sources for this blog. Here's how it looks:
There you go. More people are on Macs than Windows. Apple is edging to become a producer of mass consumer products used by everyone. What must be happening here?
When we obsess about something, we become that obsession. Apple is more outwardly focused now than it ever has. It used to be about ignoring customers and thinking differently from within company walls. Now the focus is less on the inside but more about grabbing market share and protecting its turf. In its pressure to meet Wall Street's expectations, the company needs an ever increasing growth curve. While there must surely be a healthy pipeline of products, it needs a churn at a piping hot frequency - not just version changes. The only alternative for Apple is to find ways to sell more and more. That's what it's doing, gradually trading exclusivity for quicker bucks.
Samsung, Microsoft and others are getting hipper - diluting Apple's difference. We are now officially in the tooth-paste phase of computing products, a state of mind-blur where every product is only as interesting as the other. Differentiation is marginal - not real. And an iPhone becomes just a smart little phone. There's a worm lurking in Apple. Steve must be squirming...somewhere.
