Apple Case Study

Apple’s eventual success was due to their early wholehearted embrace of the strategy of disruptive innovation. Apple’s original vision was to make a friendlier, more accessible personal computer with a GUI that any person could figure out, essentially their strategy was to reduce barriers to using a product while introducing barriers to switching products. This led to them creating a closed system that didn’t allow for any sort of successful ecosystem. On the contrary, Microsoft was beginning to have ecosystem success with their Microsoft Office suite and proprietary software, despite having an unfriendly GUI. Upon his successful return to Apple, the first things Jobs did were to switch from a closed source OS to an open source UNIX-based OS, which allowed much greater access for third party software developers, cut down the amount of product offerings to one per sector, and reinvent the visuals of these products. This balance of easy to use and hard to leave was further developed through Jobs’ hiring of Jony Ive, whose design philosophy was to “make technology as intuitive as possible,” which showed in Ive’s revolutionary designs. Jobs’ idea of a successful closed system would be enacted and monetized successfully by Tim Cook years later, but it took trial and error to discover the best way to retain customers into an ecosystem.

Apple’s biggest successes came from when they either created or refined/shaped a budding industry. These achievements were not due to immense R&D, as Steve Jobs noted and how the modern innovation-less Apple with a huge R&D budget has shown, but rather through consistently thinking differently. Apple needs to follow Jobs’ maxim of ‘waiting for the next big thing,’ while not getting bogged down by its astronomical corporate size when it attempts to execute its next breakthrough.

Jobs’ simple philosophy led to Apple wins including the creation of the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Macbook. An additional huge win added during Cooks’ time was the creation of Apple Pay, another product that may come to define an entire nascent industry. All of these creations led to Apple having over a $3 trillion market cap, and were driven by a focus on disruptive, revolutionary, shaping thinking, from the top on down. Cook’s tenure has seen Apple grow enormously profitable, yet have very little innovation with very few new products; iPhone features often lag years behind when they are introduced to android devices. To avoid becoming the IBM of the present, Apple must stop their tech giant policy of stock buybacks and dividends, and instead fully focus on recreating a disruptive culture focused on innovation.