Daniel Eran Dilger, Apple Insider, steps through a series of cases where Apple was seriously behind, then overtook the competition. A few examples:
2007: A year prior to Peak iPod, Microsoft announced its own Zune to much fanfare as the “iPod-killer,” just as pundits began imagining in parallel that phones playing MP3s would kill Apple’s iPod empire. Everything seemed so dire for Apple. Zune could do wireless WiFi sync and MP3-playing feature phones appeared to cost much less than an iPod!
However, that year Apple introduced iPhone. Steve Jobs described it as “a widescreen iPod” in addition to a phone and “breakthrough internet device”. Zune staggered along like a zombie until it was terminated while basic phones playing MP3s were blown away by Apple’s “iPod phone” with a real web browser.
And:
2011: Google floated another feature Apple lacked for several years: Near Field Communications, or NFC, used in Google Wallet contactless payments. Google was supposed to rule in this arena, but Wallet failed to ever gain much traction, despite efforts to build out NFC payment infrastructure. Apple didn’t have NFC because it was so behind.
What Apple did instead was rapidly introduce Bluetooth 4 (starting with iPhone 4s) and build out a platform of near-proximity wireless integration between iOS devices, Macs and Apple Watch that was later branded as Continuity. Prior to launching Apple Pay, the company also lined up the dots for Touch ID, building security right into the design of its products.
Apple didn’t introduce Apple Pay until 2014, at least three years behind Wallet. However, the effort Apple put into building foundational support, and its prescience in supporting the much faster Bluetooth 4 rather than NFC for nearby connectivity, launched Apple far ahead of Google in both support for modern Bluetooth and in NFC payments, despite (or perhaps, because of) not being first to rush a loose payment concept to market.
Lots, lots more here. Terrific job, Daniel.
Another great one by DED. Funny how it gets them riled up — lots of first-time posters (and some usual haters) that come out of the woodwork to tell DED how wrong he is. Wonder why that is…
What is it about Apple success that makes people so…mad? It’s like they have a personal vested interested in ensuring Apple fails. Neurosis?
An older example of this was CD burning. When it showed up, they also introduced DVD burning ahead of everyone else (so early they had to sell the blank DVDs for a while too). And had much easier tools to perform the tasks.
Apple may come late to a party, but when they do, they come strong.
I don’t think it is correct to say Apple was behind in most of these cases. It seems clear Apple was perfectly capable of implementing these technologies at the same time as their competition, but decided against it. Unlike many competitors, Apple hasn’t been driven by checklists of features, it has been driven by user experiences. If Apple couldn’t craft a viable user experience around a technology, it didn’t see a need to include it. I think the takeaway is that user experiences trump feature lists.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s very obvious when a feature is added just to check an item off a list. Apple puts more priority than most on getting the experience right for the user. As a developer, I’ve had to explain to non-developers that it takes more time and effort to do it right and make a good UX than it does to do a bad job.
I’m sure that Apple could have introduced something like Apple Pay 2-3 years sooner, but it probably would have had more steps involved and been too complicated to make people want use it. As it stands now, it’s my preferred way to pay and I’m disappointed when I can’t use it in a store. I’m glad Apple took the time to get it right. That goes for all of their products.
Holy convoluted prose. Thought I was reading a Tom’s Hardware article.
Apple’s been smeared for decades by writers who claim to be advocating for the consumer, but often ignore consumer needs. Those smears became as much a part of the national folklore long before the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone.
Many angry people mostly seem to be from the camp that values commoditization over original thinking. They don’t appear to value genuinely good design work until it’s been imitated—poorly—by a company that they feel more comfortable supporting. The dissociative thinking resembles religious orthodoxy.
Also, it’s nice to see how Dilger’s prose has settled down a bit from the somewhat more contentious days of Roughly Drafted.
The one thing I remember from the Zune days was this, quite frankly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJ3Y495HP8
I take ‘behind’ to mean ‘behind in releasing a feature in the market’.
On Apple Pay specifically, they also did something else that was smart – they released it just as the law in the US changed so that retailers who didn’t use a secure method of CC capture (NFC or chip) would shoulder the fraud burden that previously the CC companies had taken on. That spurred a lot of retailers to update their POS terminals and if you’re doing a terminal with chip capabilities it seems it’s easy to get one that does NFC too. When Google was trying to get Wallet going, far fewer POS terminals worked with NFC since the retailer had no incentive to invest in new ones.
It just goes to show that in most cases the technology is the easy part, its the operational organization that ends up making or breaking the feature.
Apple Pay is such a classic example of Apple disruption. It wasn’t just the strategic infrastructure Apple built leading into Apple Pay that made it so much more impactful than Google Wallet. It was user experience where Apple outplayed the competition by a wide margin.
They made the process of paying with your phone EASIER than a CC, safer, and invisible. It didn’t require unlocking your phone, opening an app, entering a “Pay” screen, etc. You simply pointed your phone at the terminal, the phone automatically wakes up and launches Apple Pay, and then scan your finger to confirm payment. Unbelievably simple it seems so obvious in hindsight.
But it involved careful software design/engineering, tight integration into the OS, and highly sophisticated antenna design built into the top of the phone chassis, to make the entire thing work so seamlessly. Classic example of something ONLY being possible through Apples vertical integration of hardware and software.
Now that the puzzle has been assembled in its ENTIRETY, of course it’s easy for the competitors to re-architect their systems and clone the Apple Pay experience. Which is exactly what Google did, rebranded it, and even stole the branding as well. But to get to that point, it required an organization set up like Apple to solve the entire picture spanning multiple disciplines.
Apples real genius has been their ability to identify problems, and develop well-thought solutions. The way they identify problems lacking good solutions is by sitting back and watching the careless companies racing to be “FIRST.”