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’? 

Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation

GigaOM extracts his interview with the McKinsey Quarterly into 9 lessons. While all make for interesting insights into creative teambuilding, perhaps the most universal is morale as multiplier:

“If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value.”

Although occasionally given mention, it’s still uncommon to hear morale recognized so starkly as a driver of value. Compare, for example, the divergent way in which Wal-Mart and CostCo treat their employees. ‘Cost’ as measured strictly on the balance sheet does not factor in lost productivity due to malaise or innate rebellion resulting from poor employee morale.

The availability of interdisciplinary learning via Pixar University also offers an antidote to the two previous articles’ recognition of skill calcification. One interesting aside about the company offering Krav Maga as a class alongside storytelling and improvisation is that, in contrast to most other fighting styles, KM is built much more around principles instead of techniques. Students are trained for real-world contingencies, and great emphasis is placed on conditioning the student to react instictively against an attack and escape versus get caught in a traditional ‘battle’ as found in other styles. Thus, Krav Maga could be seen as much as psychological adaptation as physical defense.

Finally, the influence of Steve Jobs is evident in the overall layout of the campus, such as a central atrium to maximize crossover contact between functional teams as they visit the cafeteria or even the bathrooms. One other example of cross-disciplinary inspiration comes from today’s Fortune story “Apple and Eve” about the role of chief Apple designer Jonathan Ive in affirming the character of Eve from the upcoming Pixar film Wall-E. What caught my attention more than even the premise of a character based on Apple projected into the 28th century is the limits placed on Ive’s involvement:

“Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

Whether this reticence was at Ive’s own initiative or reinforced by the looming ire of Jobs and lawyers et al., it reminds me of how straitjacketed corporate culture can become—’corporate’ here referring to almost any size company whose investments of intellectual property and shareholder value demand these precautions of silence and measured response. Even the tiny startup Epiphyte in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon has to employ elaborate security to protect their corporate interests.

David Weiss: Metacognitive Miscalibration

He goes on to characterize several cases of the miscalibration of confidence and thinking. “Wicked Problems” could be considered as similar to those physics problems you first struggled to complete in high school, which helpfully neglected messy factors like air resistance at the expense of effective accuracy. As you add in all of the variables required by the actual underlying complexity, the problem eventually collapses. The “Desire to Learn” dovetails with the previously linked Raganwald predicament, where a sense of sufficient knowledge forestalls efforts to deepen understanding. “Personal Pride” evokes the admonition common in entrepreneurship and venture capital to “fail quickly” and not let fear of failure paralyze you.

Finally, the “Well Intended Deception” describes a situation more specific to software programming where levels of abstraction can hide deeper problems—sometimes an emphasis on simplicity through inheriting framework code results in an offset in opacity. The upfront ease of using pre-made tools and resources can be undone by the lack of transparency into what’s really going on when you need to dig into the details. This is a balancing act, as it’s often more efficient to build on proven platforms and add just distinguishing features as custom effort. Thus a new product like Pixelmator, even with only one designer and one developer, can usurp some of the mighty Adobe Photoshop’s turf by building on established open-source and Apple-provided APIs. The parallel in videogame development is whether to build one’s own engine, a la Id Software, or license a middleware product like the Unreal Engine. The former gains full optimization and customization options at the cost of major additional engineering effort; the latter can focus on just a specific game’s logic rather than the underlying plumbing, but remain fundamentally limited by the licensed engine’s capabilities.

This ‘buy or build’ decision ripples through most manufacturing processes. Despite its long history of ‘Not Invented Here‘ myopia, Apple has lately shown a great deal of maturity in this area, with the move to Intel processors freeing up engineering to focus on new products like the iPhone and Apple TV; yet their recent purchase of P.A. Semi also shows that they intend to maintain a toehold at the lower levels of chip design.