Apple's success during the last several years was enormous. 14 billion dollars they earned in 2005. But what caused the enormous Apple hype?
Apple's Products: iPhone, iPod and the Macbook
First of all, Apple's products show some very distinctive characteristics which are typical of the company:
- simple design
- simple user interface
- high quality components
- coherent hardware and software
Everybody who has ever seen an iPhone or an iPod certainly agrees with the simple design; there aren't many buttons and different parts which can be opened and exchanged, it's just one piece of technology made to be used as it is. The simple user interface is a very clear point, too. For instance, on an iPhone, there aren't different submenus or different ways of displaying the menu, it's just nice as it is and can't be changed.
The high quality components aren't necessarily meant to provide the newest functionalities or the highest available capacities. They do what they should do, in a decent way, and nothing more. Consequently, an iPhone may only have a 2 mega pixel camera and there may not be any user-definable preferences for taking photos, but every time you need to take a picture, the camera is there, and it just works.
The coherent hardware and software are part of this technique: Apple invests much of the development time into the fine-tuning. Instead of getting the newest available components, they chose those which are tested and adapt them to work seamlessly one with another, both in the hardware category and the software.
Apple's Marketing
One major aspect of Apple's success is their marketing strategy. Together with their omnipresent and minimalistic and thus pleasant ads on television or in the streets, the high brand recognition is an important factor when it comes to finding new customers.
Apple's Attitude: At the Crossing of the Machine and the Customer
The leading slogan of Apple is the simplicity of their products. Their brand is very coherent because everything they produce works and is simple, there are no exceptions to this one rule. As the former CEO Steve Jobs once put it: "Our goal is to stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities." Apple's way of working is to adapt high technology to simple user interfaces.
A very special way of acting of the company is its product line strategy. While most major companies produce different products with sometimes negligible differences in their respective specifications, Apple invests all its efforts into the development of a few really good products, thus making the best of one single device and giving the customer the possibility of choosing rapidly without the need of a thorough documentation about the differences between two devices out of the same product line.
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