| Friday, March 11, 2005 |
11:14 - This is an arm, drawn by nobody; it is worth nothing
http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_12/b3925608.htm
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Heh. Well, this BusinessWeek article (via Damien Del Russo) almost gets it right:
"Designed by Apple in Cupertino."
The words are printed in such small type on the back of Apple's (AAPL ) tiny new iPod Shuffle MP3 player that you have to squint to read them. But they speak volumes about why Apple is standing so far out from the crowd these days. At a time when rivals are outsourcing as much design as possible to cut costs, Apple remains at its core a product company -- one that would never give up control of how those products are created.
Well, yeah, except that Apple products all say "Designed by Apple in California", not Cupertino. But I guess he had to squint.
The rest of the article, though, is pretty solid. It remains to be determined whether Apple is just so weird and exceptional that it doesn't have to follow the trends that direct everyone else (their business model centers on an infinitely inelastic faithful customer base who'll buy the products Apple makes regardless of price considerations—no price hike or feature redesign would ever make one consider buying a Dell), or whether it's a living and breathing illustration of a nervous industry that doesn't have to be outsourcing all its design and tech support or putting purple blinky lights on everything to get it to sell. But at least one ingredient of the secret sauce has to be this idea that just as all your gear comes in a single factory-controlled box (enabling such technologies as ColorSync, which just aren't feasible on the commodity PC platform), all the thinking that goes into creating the box itself is all under one roof, right in our backyards. It's as much psychological as it is practical, but one can hardly deny its success.
(It also ought to help explain to some brow-furrowed outsiders the aggression with which Apple pursues rumor leakers. Once you realize the importance—to Apple and to the Mac community—of the showmanship and suspense and secrecy that is every bit a part of the whole design package as is the little "Designed by Apple in Cuperfornia" label, it ought to follow that that secrecy is something that Apple has to defend every bit as vigorously as it does the design itself. The showmanship is the product, and it can't be allowed to be compromised any more than blueprints for the the plastic boxes or the bits on their hard drives can.)
Of course, some companies know success when they see it, and the trend they choose to follow is Apple's own. (Via J Greely, who has a tale of shuffle joy to share.) Heh... remember when Creative's CEO called the iPod shuffle "worse than the cheapest Chinese player"? Somehow I don't think this is quite what he had in mind...
UPDATE: Seems Judge Kleinberg has given Apple the mantle of law in shutting down leakers; though not, as Chris points out, by agreeing with Apple that bloggers or rumor-site operators are not "real journalists". Which is a good thing, as Apple's argument to that effect would imply that journalists are a "blessed class" that have certain legal protections the rest of us don't—and I really don't think we want to be edging toward that kind of society. So Apple's won here, but not very prettily.
In fact, since this decision effectively rules that "blogging is journalism", this case might well become something of a landmark...
A great deal more analysis along these lines is provided by Jeff Harrell.
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Brian Tiemann
