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by unalone
6143 days ago
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Their goal is profit via market share, not innovation for the sake of innovation. Apple's goal is making good products. If they wanted shitloads of cash, they could have sold out at any time in the last decade. Instead, they try to make things that people will love. If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate, have no doubts. However, they might not innovate in all ways at once, meaning they might not focus on annihilating all their weaknesses. If they've got a competitor, suddenly there's incentive to beat their rivals in every way possible, and the resulting products are even better. |
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I immediately thought of MS Word when this sub-topic came up. Since establishing its dominance in, let's say 1997 or so, few features have come along that have truly changed the way that users word process (the last one for me was JIT spell checking). But MS has been adding more and more features in an attempt to continue innovating.
There's a Word monoculture and there's innovation of a sort. I think the interesting point that you make is that it's unfocused innovation that seems to be either incremental or aimed at preempting possible minor complaints, rather than exploring new ways for users to create documents. Not that I'm critiquing MS specifically of this—I think this may be a general symptom of monopoly (and I wonder if the same would hold for Apple).