Apple watching.

  By Gonzalo López Martí / LMMIAMI.COM

• From an orthodox marketing POV, Apple, the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, has proven to be a pretty erratic ship with little rhyme or reason in its product portfolio and its targeting inclinations.
• Catering on and off to an array of splurgers, lazy &/or clueless users, snobs, penny pinchers, showoffs, hipsters, nouveax riches, wannabes and data hoarders.
• It has forged alliances with various entities:
• -Bill Gates
• -AT&T
• -hundreds of thousands of app developers
• -hundreds of thousands of musicians
• -Foxconn, the ginormous manufacturer that actually makes what Cupertino designs
• Why is it so successful?
• What is its secret sauce?
• Let’s see.
• I’m old enough to remember when Apple was a struggling company with less than 4% share of the desktop computer market.
• The good old 90s.
• It was supposed to be the choice of creative types.
• Truth is, ease of use was its differential.
• It was the choice of lazy, slow learners.
• Disguised as creative types.
• Like yours truly.
• And school children.
• Apple used to have a clever -or desperate, if you will- student discount policy to attract new users at an early age.
• But the student thingy was just a footnote in the big overall scheme of sales.
• Mind you, the hardware was and is superior.
• At least from the outside.
• Pleasing to the naked eye.
• But it’s no giveaway.
• Never was.
• We paid through the nose for it.
• Up to the last cent.
• We still do.
• Steve Jobs always made a point of shipping stuff that looked sturdier, nicer to the touch and better designed than most cheap Windows clones populating the category back then.
• Or so he said.
• With Apple, for the most part, you get what you pay for.
• Through its history it has made a point of being quite forthcoming in this respect.
• A healthy standalone in Silicon Valley, where most products are free because we users are the product.
• Problem is, Steve’s refusal to license its hardware and operating system to third party manufacturers pushed a myriad companies to swarm towards Microsoft, whose Windows operating system ultimately controlled the market.
• Control with a capital C.
• Windows had a whopping 95% market share at the time.
• Their recipe was simple: allow everyone to make hardware and software.
• Let’s all make money.
• Being an arrogant greedy glutton ultimately paints you into a corner.
• Even if you try and disguise it as quality control.
• I can’t stress it enough: it is NOT true that Apple was the choice of creative types.
• Apple was the choice of clueless &/or pretentious snobs willing to pay top dollar to be “different”.
• Real nerds have always preferred Windows.
• There’s more available hardware, way more software, there’s more user control and way more operational power in the Windows desktop ecosystem.
• In short: Apple locked & priced itself out of the desktop category.
• Still does.
• Today you can buy a perfectly good Dell laptop running touch screen Windows 8 for less than 500 bucks.
• The cheapest Apple notebook costs $ 999.
• No touch screen.
• Absolutely bare bones.
• Hence, Windows in it various forms still controls over 90% of the desktop & laptop market.
• Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Steve Jobs and his groupies.
• The guy had cojones, vision, leadership.
• My point is, he became really successful when he learned to look beyond the maze of his towering ego.
• Possibly when he had a taste of his own conspiratorial ways and was fired from the very company he’d founded.
• Don’t believe the urban myth about Steve Jobs & Bill Gates being rivals.
• Remember, before the mobile age, when desktop computing reigned supreme, Apple was but a dimming blip on Microsoft’s radar.
• Far from a threat.
• At some point, Microsoft became so big and powerful that it needed a serious, credible rival to fend off bad rap.
• And anti-trust laws.
• Cut to Steve Jobs’ comeback to the corridors of the Cupertino HQs.
• It is not a secret that Mr. Gates nudge was key to help ease Steve back into the helm.
• Yes, Bill Gates helped Steve Jobs and Apple come back from the brink of irrelevance and bankruptcy to create a credible rival that would defuse Microsoft’s image as a ravenous monopoly.
• Not only that, Bill Gates covertly owns a massive amount of Apple stock (or so the conspiracy theory goes).
• Yes, when you buy an Apple product, Bill & Melinda make a nice profit too.
• So.
• Bill tosses Steve a lifesaver.
• The iMac is born.
• The iMac was the first truly successful and massive Apple product.
• A cute, colorful retrofuturistic desktop contraption that sold like candy with the invaluable help of Microsoft Office AND a pretty competitive price.
• According to Apple folklore, a pet project of designer Jony Ive.
• iTunes?
• 99 cents per song.
• A brilliant pricing strategy.
• Cheap enough to deter millions of music fans from downloading pirated music.    
• Revolutionary?
• Well.
• Methinks it was more about good ol’ dollars and cents.
• Yes, Apple has been successful ONLY when it opened up to the world and made affordable products.
• Affordable luxury, if you will.
• Deals with real value for consumers.
• Cut to the iPhone.
• Make no mistake: when it was launched, it was a big question mark.
• AT&T sold it with an unlimited data plan, which was pretty mandatory because the iPhone was and is a notorious hoarder of OTA bandwidth (OTA is telco lingo for Over The Air).
• When the iPhone came out it was the only way to get an unlimited data plan at a fairly affordable flat rate.
• Moreover, flat rate unlimited data plans did not exist before the first iPhone (as far as I can recall).
• What I’m saying here is: AT&T was critical to turn the iPhone into the success it is today.
• Unlimited data for the masses.
• AT&T pretty much subsidized it and helped it put Blackberry, which was quite austere in its data consumption, out of business.
• It was essentially an upsale.
• It was McDonalds (AT&T) oversizing your soft drink.
• A dubious deal.
• Possibly a Trojan horse.
• But we’ll leave this conspiracy theory for another rant.
• So.
• In this racket we love to believe in bullet proof strategy.
• We want to be fed with single-minded explanations.
• A slogan.
• A silver bullet.
• A catchphrase.
• A bumper sticker.
• Our brains are wired that way.
• So here it is: when Apple tried to go it alone, it failed.
• It became truly big & successful when it put its ego aside and opened up to alliances with one or more external entities to go to market with competitively priced deals (competitive or its perception thereof).