[creshal]

A big part of Apple's "winning formula" is taking their giant piles of money and negotiating exclusive contracts for whatever is scheduled to be the most advanced semiconductor node next year.

Anyone else literally cannot compete, they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise, so they'll have to wait until the exclusivity agreement expires.

[simbolit]

> they don't have billions in pocket change they don't know how to spend otherwise

your parent comment's example is literally Google, world-class experts at burning money on developers producing a million dead-end products and abandoning them a year later.

if Google would get some sensible leadership, focus on a few core products, and stick with them for a decade, they'd have just as much money to spend. But "focus" and "Google" seem to have become opposites.

My point: the 'winning formula' of Apple is laser-sharp focus: have a few products, do them as well as anyone else or better, and only introduce a new product if it is mature-ish and very profitable. (We'll see how the vision headset fits in here)

[creshal]

> My point: the 'winning formula' of Apple is laser-sharp focus: have a few products, do them as well as anyone else or better, and only introduce a new product if it is mature-ish and very profitable. (We'll see how the vision headset fits in here)

They also aimed at markets that are ripe for disruption, because of weak competition: The MP3 player market before the iPod, the PDA-with-a-SIM-card market before the iPhone, etc. pp. all could be reasonably disrupted by just delivering a reasonably (but not even best-in-class, specs wise) product with better UX (not hard, in the cases mentioned) and massive marketing. You can't do that in a heavily competitive market that's already full of these products. VR headsets are probably closer to the "ripe for disruption" end of the spectrum, and I think the Vision will probably do well. But I doubt the "Apple Car" plans that have been floating around for 10 years now will ever lead to anything.

[nottorp]

> You can't do that in a heavily competitive market that's already full of these products.

What heavily competitive market, the mobile phone duopoly?

Google has half the market, they are not the poor incumbent that doesn't have enough money to be disruptive.

[coldtea]

Well, they got into that position starting from a near bankrupt company, which couldn't negotiate anything exclusive, and which was for a long time at the mercy of Motorola and the Intel.

So it's something they took advantage of after they grew (well, which company at their scale wouldn't ask for the best wholesale deals?), but not what made them big in the first place.

[creshal]

What made them big in the first place were the iPod/iTunes/iPhone and the ludicrous revenues from the App Store.

The iPod's only notable hardware that wasn't just a random off the shelf part was the click wheel, the chips were all off-the-shelf (until old iPhone chips counted as that), and iPhones didn't get custom chips until the 4.

So I guess the other part of the winning formula is "use market dominance in one sector to subsidize expansion into the next". I guess that's indeed one area where Google could reasonably try to be less inept, but I think all the institutional inertia makes that impossible by now. They'll go the DEC route of just drowning in their own internal problems until someone buys them up.

[coldtea]

>What made them big in the first place were the iPod/iTunes/iPhone and the ludicrous revenues from the App Store.

The iPod/iPhone yes, but "in the first place" the App Store was insignificant (the remenues at 2010 was < 2 billion dollars worldwide, so Apple's take was less than $600 million).

For comparison the iPod had that profit already in 2004, and around 3 billion in 2010 (when the iPhone had already started replacing it).

So, the App Store was hardly ludicrous revenue for its first 3-4 years, in fact less than 10% of Apple's revenue. The iTunes store even less so.

It's the iPod and then iPhone that made Apple's dominance. The big store profit came later (and the iTunes/Music profit never was that big).

[cmiller1]

The most notable hardware of the original iPods were they took a gamble during design on soon to be released high capacity 1.8 inch hard drives. Before that MP3 players were either low capacity flash based like the Rio (I remember having one with just 64MB!) or monstrous discman sized devices running 2.5 or 3.5 inch platters like the Nomad.

[daaaaaaan]

Weren't they the first product to ship the small form Toshiba hard drives?

[HatchedLake721]

Sorry, but this sounds the same as the cheap “you just got lucky” to someone who worked day and night through sweat and blood to achieve something.