Innovation hurts to Apple? – The paper

Christopher Mims on WSJ launches a provocation: the strong point of Cupertino are incremental improvements, look for the “new iPhone” is useless and perhaps even harmful

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For years, at least since 2011, the year of the death of Steve Jobs, to the last recent period of declining sales, the mantra of every analyst against Apple has always been the same: we must innovate . Find the next “big thing”, the new iPhone, revolutionize the market once again. Embark on new projects and unexplored, make bold bets, because only innovating with a tech company breakneck can maintain its lead in this ruthless world. Today Apple opens in San Francisco its Worldwide Developers Conference, the conference for developers where they usually are presented the new software side, and expectations are again, as usual, pretty high.

For years, much of the disappointment of some analysts in respect of the management of CEO Tim Cook was caused by exactly this: unmet expectations. Apple is not building the next big thing. But according to Christopher Mims, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, if Apple fails to build the new Big Thing is not only not a problem, on the contrary: it is a fortune. Not only the conventional belief that Apple should “create a whole new product line” or “revealing something that has never been done before”, “beating its competitors in innovation”, “is a terrible idea.”

rELATED Earn, share, delete. The clash between technological power and was disguised as ethical hackers The EU war against Google and the fear of the revolutionary ideas Tim Cook globetrotter to banish the ghost of the crisis of Apple in his column provocatively anti innovation (” push Apple to innovate does not build on its strengths “, is the title of the article), no Mims only goes against the clichés that Apple, in order to prosper, must make a revolution every two to three years, but in some sense betrays one of the golden rules of the world of technology. Yet Mims makes its observations and expands some rather popular on Apple’s way of innovating. “Apple is an expert in offering a more refined version of accessible products and services that rivals have offered for years.” Before Steve Jobs presented the iPod, mp3 players existed for some time. The same goes for the iPad or Apple Music. The last product presented by Tim Cook, the iPad Pro with optional keyboard, reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface, a tablet that has among its own strengths an optional keyboard.

The fact, Mims writes, it is that Apple’s strong point is the size of its ecosystem and the purchasing power of its customers. Although its products are not new, the company amasses 90 percent of the profits of the entire smartphone market. The great thing about Apple, in short, is not doing revolutionary things. And ‘do the same things the other but making them better, and earn more by exploiting the enormous magnitude of the ecosystem that created. Mims speaks of “incrementalism”, definitely the most underrated quality of the Cupertino company.

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