In yet another Daring Fireball-inspired tract, Charlie Wood asks why Apple appears to escape the "innovator’s dilemma" presented in Clayton Christensen’s eponymous work. The idea is a follow-on from Christensen’s earlier depiction of ‘disruptive technology-cum-innovations’ and how they evolve within a market (similar to Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions). Once the disruptive paradigm has established a beachhead, its progenitor often overdoes its development and in turn loses out to second-tier players that leapfrog it by adopting the innovation at a ‘good enough’ level, undercutting the market leader. Yet Apple, at least in its current incarnation, seems to avoid that pitfall.

Moonwatcher: Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

Wood argues that this is in due to Apple distinguishing itself by design, which appeals to taste and is harder to usurp than a typical feature matrix. This certainly helps explain why, for example, the iPod has utterly eclipsed any imitators (which add features at the expense of usability) and why the iPhone was able to dominate mindshare so quickly in an established smartphone segment (which has always buried functionality behind clunky interfaces).

However, another straightforward business answer is that Apple acts to undercut itself rather than leaving that to a competitor. For example, when the iPod Mini was the bestselling flash-based music player, they discontinued it and introduced the Nano, which reconsidered the Mini in both design and features rather than just making minor changes. With the iPhone less than a year old, already intense speculation mounts about a likely successor with enhancements like 3G wireless, effectively hamstringing competition which may already have 3G-capable handsets. To re-iterate: even the rumor of a future iPhone feature is somehow perceived (at least in the breathless press coverage) as superior to other brands already in the field.

Perhaps even more apt than Wood’s own rationalization is the observation made in a comment by Martin Pilkington that:

"the problem with most companies once they become larger is

a) they become more bureaucratic
b) everyone starts to protect their own territory
c) marketing takes over or they ignore marketing"

This you may recognize as a business-specific case of systemantics, where the business effectively ends up at war with itself in unconscious internecine competition for resources. He also adds the specific point—which has also been espoused by Steve Jobs in interviews about the Apple design philosophy—that they do not add features to products merely to reach feature parity in reaction to competition, or through typical focus group artificiality, but through something more akin to user cases. That is, they imagine how people want to use a device, and then build a feature to make that possible in as intuitive a way as possible. As far back as 1998 (when their resurgent success was much less assured), Jobs told BusinessWeek that:

"It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them."

Is there a better shorthand for product innovation than ‘thinking of what people want before they knew they wanted it’?