Apple is on top of the world, and from that vantage point, it’s hard to see how the company could be anything other than the market leader and pioneer that it has been of late.
I’m not saying its decline and downfall are imminent, but those (like me) who remember the dark days of the 1990s know that success is never guaranteed.
Either way, a company as large and dominant as Apple is unlikely to vanish into oblivion. But as the business grows and matures, its nature undeniably changes.
These changes are not unprecedented. Over the past few decades, mainstream tech companies have followed the same pattern. They dominated the world by producing what everyone needed (whether it was a product of Material or a crucial element of Software) and now appear to have finally evolved into a new form, where they focus less on delivering a key product and more on the service they provide.
Take care of business
At the risk of digging up something that is ancient history, there was a time when the undisputed market leader in computing was IBM. It may be hard to imagine, given the company’s current situation, but it employed hundreds of salespeople in suits and ties to sell the world’s biggest companies on the concept of computers.
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From its earliest days, Apple saw itself as the antithesis of IBM, unrelated to tradition or buttoned-up corporate ideology, but as pirates and rebels, perhaps summed up in the famous photo of the co- founder Steve Jobs making a peculiar hand gesture in front of one of the company’s monolithic buildings.
When Apple began its adventures, IBM was the dominant force in the computer market, the only one to beat. It was just everywhere. And yet, he was defeated, at least in this area.
But because the company had evolved over several decades, acquiring different businesses and creating a variety of companies, its loss in the IT market did not end up being an existential crisis for the company.
Instead, it managed to pivot to focus on business services and has continued to succeed to this day, even though its name no longer holds the strength it once did.
Switch to Microsoft
This brings us to Microsoft: another company that was, at one time, the biggest player in computing. Microsoft was of course hugely successful in the 1990s, at the height of the after Office productivity software and Windows operating system.
And, like IBM, it was Apple’s greatest enemy at the time, as Mac and Windows fought an endless battle for dominance in the personal computer market.
But the company missed the mark in the mobile computing revolution and, again, like IBM before it, had to change course to focus more on services.
Microsoft is everyone’s best friend today. In the past few weeks alone, the company has announced partnerships with Amazon (to enable sending Word documents to the new Kindle Scribe), Meta (bringing Teams and Microsoft 365 to Quest VR devices), and even Apple (bringing Apple Music to Xbox and iCloud Photos support on Microsoft devices).
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This is an exciting development for a company that continues to control key elements of our everyday technology experience, from consumer applications like Word and Excel to underlying technologies like Azure.
But Microsoft has realized that it can’t take it for granted that it’s going to be the big fish forever, and that sometimes it’s better to become an indispensable part of the landscape.
success as a service
How does this all relate to Apple? There has recently been talk of the company starting to ramp up its advertising business, with the ability to run ads on Apple TV+ and elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem.
This comes several years after their first attempt at creating an ad system, iAd, failed miserably.
While this move may seem unusual for Apple, the reasoning behind it is simple: the company has seen what happened to some of its biggest rivals. Just because you’re on top right now doesn’t mean you always will be; it is better to control one’s own evolution than to force it.
That’s why the company has become so service-oriented over the past decade. Yes, iPhone still accounts for about half of the company’s revenue (according to the latest quarterly report), but Services accounts for about 25%, which could soon overtake its remaining three categories (Mac, iPad, and iPhone). portable) together.
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Although Apple has yet to embrace Microsoft’s “best friend of all” strategy, it’s not hard to see that it has made progress in this direction: Apple Music and Apple TV+ are already available on a host of platforms, including some of the company’s biggest competitors. . AirPlay has been licensed to third-party speakers and TVs. It’s even collaborated with big rivals on standards like the Matter technology framework for the smart home.
It all has to do with whether the company is protecting itself against a future in which the iPhone ceases to be the hugely influential product it is now (a pretty long certainty, though it’s impossible to know when) or if Apple’s next big thing, however, doesn’t materialize.
Apple may one day find itself sitting in the old tech house, reminiscing about the days with Microsoft and IBM, but the company is determined to do so as late as possible.
Original article published on igamesnews.com.