Consider some competitors. Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the basic software used on the hardware owned by most people, enabling the company to extract what is basically a head tax. Google has a near-monopoly in the digital library business, which enables it to do very well with advertising that monetizes eyeballs. But Apple has an absolute monopoly on the asset that is the most difficult for competitors to copy: cool.
Paul Saffo, research director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., says emphatically, “Hipness is the only asset that matters.” Mr. Jobs had not been able to leverage it in traditional computers because technology in crucial areas had not matured enough to make cool affordably practical on a mass scale. To the extent that cool is based on exclusion of the uncool, Apple was too hip for its own long-term health.
With the introduction of the iPod in 2001, however, Mr. Jobs offered a product that combined cool with inexpensive, truly personal computing that fits in a pocket. Thanks to technological progress, Mr. Jobs now has at his disposal ridiculously cheap processing and memory, which render meaningless the distinction between computer and peripheral. To paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the peripheral is the computer.
Moore’s law helps Apple’s industrial design and user-focused software deliver on its initial promise.
The iPod does a very few things but does them well. The Mini is an extension of that: it’s not a complete computer, but a slot-in replacement for something else.
Now playing: Badge by Cream from the album “20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Cream”