50 years after it was founded in a garage, has the most innovative technology company lost its way?
San Francisco, Wednesday,
Has The Apple brand stopped being a brand for "doing" and become a brand for "consuming"? Has Apple stopped thinking different? After all, it's been 20 years since the company dropped its famous slogan in favor of a bland company mission to "bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons and consumers."
Graphic Designer Peter-John Comber, author of 'The Forces of Collaborative Creativity' certainly thinks that: "The world's most valuable company has morphed from 'Think Different' to 'Don't think about it'." Writing critically of Tim Cook, Steve Job's successor as Apple CEO, in his online blog, Coombes explains:
"The image of the hardware + software Apple brand was that of an enabler for creative people. The power that Apple has delivered to ordinary people, not just corporations, to create music, images, films, apps and anything else the 'crazy ones' can imagine has been truly revolutionary. The opening video of the Apple event was a clever homage to this spirit and Apple's heritage. But the future that Cook has steered Apple into is hardware + software + services."
Far from Apple as the cheeky outsider with crazy ideas, the corporation has become involved in intellectual property disputes and accused of suppressing innovation.
Today, criticism of Apple includes allegations of unethical business practices such as anti-competitive behavior, dubious tax dodges, the use of sweatshop labor and even collaboration with US surveillance programs. The first charge stuck too, in 2016, with Apple told to pay €469m after a jury in the US said its iTunes software used a company called SmartFlash's patented inventions without permission. Meanwhile, the company's metamorphosis accelerated when, late last year, "Apple began its great transhumance to abandon Intel for the green pastures of Apple Silicon chips", as 01net put it. The French online site that specializes in new technology added that this was a "strategic choice that ended up making Steve Job's company a semiconductor giant…"
Two years ago, writing for Forbes, entrepreneur Greg Petro recalled Steve Jobs' warning that Apple might be tempted to follow in the footsteps of Xerox and IBM if the company "got away from the innovation that made them so successful in the first place". For Petro, the truth of the matter was that:
"At its core, Apple's woes go far beyond their ability to sell their flagship smartphones. The company's challenges surround one simple fact: Apple is not innovative anymore…"
And that matters, Petro says, because simply:
"Without innovation, Apple will no longer be".
Apple's Missed Opportunities
• Huawei's Mate XS, Motorola's Razr and Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold beat Apple to have the first folding phones.
• Now Apple is in a race to patent the idea of a touchscreen keyboard for its laptops instead of a physical one…
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