Why Apple Is Still Tasty

I'm a big fan of Apple and trying to get my first MacBook. Picture is from www.apple.com.cn.

Nothing can be a better news in such a turbulent economical winter than the Apple's fiscal 2009 first quarter, which registered record revenue and quarterly net profit. Business Week has the full story.

 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2009/tc20090121_101972.htm

When everything is down, only excluding one, it is always likely to be considered as a miracle. Especially, the IT company is in a glutted and declining consumer electronic market, competing with other competitive giants. Many people, just like me, are likely to be curious about the question: why Apple is still tasty?

Someone perhaps attributes it to innovation. It's sound but seems unconvinced. By now, Apple has only published two cell phones, while Nokia, the market leader, pushed out tens of new products every year. Every market Apple engages in is mature and it is easy to find substitutes for its products, while Intel, the chip giant, dominates its market with monopolizedly technological advantage. 

However, Nokia and Intel are both going down due to the declining purchase power while Apple is still growing up. By putting Jobs' health on the frontpages frequently, American newspapers and magazines have expressed their answers about the core competitivity of Apple: it's Jobs. 

Thanks to Jobs' unbelievable creativity and vision, Apple is always able to bring out the directional philosophy of industry ,which manages to excite consumers, before its rivals. 35, 000 Apple's wicked-smart employees are resposible  to transform the philosophy to real products, which create the demand, not simply satisfy the demand. For examle, before iPhone was born, we all only knew the input tool of a cell phone is either keyboard or handwriting pen used to touch the screen, but Jobs told us that the best is exactly our fingers.

Apple's innovation is not the simple product innovation, but the philosophy innovation featured by the objective of excitng the consumers, which is the scarcest among the Chinese companies.  I once asked an executive of a big home applicances provider, "well, except the improvement of performance index, are there more that can excite the consumers?" He had hesitated for a while,  and then responded, "what we concerns most is the speed of our growth."

The answer is virtually universal. Nowadays, most Chinese companies have paid much more attention to innovation. However, the majority aims for reducing the product cost, such as localization or imitation of foreign products. This kind of innovation really has a quick effect to facilitate the cost reduction and the market expansion and is still fundamental according to Chinese current technological level and position of global industrial chain.

But if philosophy innovation companies like Apple could not be born in China,  we should be clinched at the low position of globalizationally industrial chain, forever.