by Sharan NairEstimated reading time: 3 minute(s)
There is just no room for complacency
About a fifth of Apple’s ecosystem thinks they will never ever leave family, which is pretty impressive considering how much innovation is going on with its competitors, and their ever-burgeoning range of products and services. What’s more, iOS fans are more willing to shell out the necessary moolah to enjoy the perks of Apple’s ecosystem as compared to the Android community, which sees more volume but way more movement in its fanbase.
Speaking of community, the integration that Apple-heads enjoy stretches across a plethora of devices like the Mac, Apple TV, iPod, and the iPad. iCloud brings about the possibility of allowing consumers to have content shuffling across devices. Airplay, on the other hand, allows content to be shared over WiFI, across mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad. But while this can all be easily achieved with Apple products, inconvenience erupts when content wants to get across to competitor platforms.
It isn’t exactly very easy to negate this inconvenience neither, what with switching costs to contend with when one plans to change products and services. These costs come in many a form, via mobile carriers who lock consumers down in two-year contracts with the travesty of early termination charges, which makes sure they don’t switch over every time some intriguing new product comes along and strikes their fancy.
Besides the strategies everyone on the outside already knows about, there are some still waiting to be shed light on.
Focused targets
The pitfalls of having overly generic goals and targets are that, when problems and challenges come around, it won’t exactly be that that easy to identify the specific solutions for them. If they are spelt out in finer detail i.e freedom of access, freedom of information, and freedom of energy, then challenges can be handled even in real-time because one is leveraging off the disruptions happening in technology.
No lack of experiments
Apple has never been one to shy away from experiments, and they have failed a ridiculous number of times, but of course, they’re not documented as much as the successes. A general rule of thumb with big and ever-evolving companies is the 7-2-1 rule. Broken down: one experiment will be on a big scale but will be relatively safe. Two of them will carry slightly more risk and will be on a medium scale, while the remaining seven will hail from high risk and negligible cost. What most people aren’t aware of is that these experiments take up 20% of employees’ time in a bid to extend past one’s current line of business.
Learning from mistakes
Most of the tech giants, like Apple, don’t sit around and wait for calamity to strike. They believe in prevention over cure, which is a basic tenet that ties up all of those who breathe success in any industry. You’ve probably heard of companies like Uber offering a cool sum of $10,000 for you to hack its software, Google putting up $100,000 if anyone could hack the Chromebook, and in some cases, even notable individuals like John McAfee (cybersecurity legend) offering to hack an iPhone for free in a bid to broker peace between federal law enforcement in the United States and Apple.
Just keeping up with the times really.
Traditional strategic planning won’t exactly cut it in this day and age where markets are turbulent and competition finds itself becoming increasingly ambiguous. What is required at the heart of it all is agility, a lack of complacency (that stems from humility), and plenty of trial and error.
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