September 13th, 2012
We’ve got two totally divergent views on gadget design and roll-out in America right now. On the one hand is Amazon, which updates its devices on an irregular schedule, keeps changes to the product line almost completely in the dark, downplays each release, and never, ever, talks about how many of them it’s sold.
So far as I can tell, the Amazon Way is designed with the following strategic goal: Entice more customers to purchase a device right now by eliminating the fear that the next-generation device is both near and superior. They’re willing to sacrifice aggressive subsequent upgrade sales in the name of getting customers into their ecosystem.
Apple is almost the exact opposite. Yesterday’s iPhone 5 was another largely iterative improvement on the existing iPhone: Faster chipset, larger screen, updated form, new connector. No one needed any of these changes right now; they could have easily been rolled into some other generation of the phone. (Much as the 4s was really just the phone that the 4 should have been at launch.) The only reason there’s an iPhone 5 is that people will buy the thing. It’s a demand-based product, not an innovation-based product.
Nothing wrong with that–nearly all products are demand-based. The difference is in the way Apple rolls it out. Every iGadget is The Most Amazing Invention Ever.
Now, Apple has lots of reasons to run their business this way. For starters, it’s working really, really well. For another, unlike Amazon, their ecosystem is already built and they can sacrifice marginal adopters for the business of repeat buyers.
But at some point, you have wonder a boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic might set in.
-
Boy who cried wolf, or “It’s not you, it’s me. Really”?
-
…we’re waiting.
When is your Dark Knight Rises reconsideration going up? Don’t leave us hanging, homes.
Jason O. September 13, 2012 at 11:41 pm
Or as the incomparable GS_Elevator twitter feed suggests: The iphone5 upside is priced in, and fuck the China play: China mobile’s 700 million accounts are all peasants with prepaids…