Howard Oakley
When times are hard, success in business comes through innovation, not just change. To survive, companies must not repeat past mistakes.
One of the most delightful but annoying human traits is our apparent pleasure in repeating common mistakes. One autumn evening, when I was tucking into a chilli at a Little Chef along the A303, my colleague shook the tomato sauce bottle with vigour. Although we all joke about the top flying off and its colourful consequences, following an ominous pop from across the table, I looked up to see him covered, as if an extra in Hostel. We keep repeating these foolish errors: walking into lamp-posts while concentrating on GPS instead of visual navigation, performing major system updates without first backing up, and so on.
This year has shown, once again, that the pooled minds of our greatest companies and institutions conspire to repeat even greater mistakes. Banks reward employees for taking risks rather than mitigating them, politicians – not long ago proclaiming an end to boom and bust – see green shoots of recovery when they are in fact weeds along the road of recession, and weather forecasters leave us wanting a fine evening for a barbecue, let alone a whole summer.
iPhone and iPod competitors queue for entry to the Last Chance Saloon, their designers clearly never having grasped why the original products have succeeded. Amazon makes the Kindle as unattractive a deal as possible for European Mac users, while competitor Sony restates its complete lack of insight into the Mac market. As Intel Macs go 64-bit with Snow Leopard, Adobe’s disjointed development cycle leaves Creative Suite stumbling along in 32-bit mode for another year or two.
When times are hard, success comes through innovation, not mere change, nor the repetition of mistakes. Of course, Apple hasn’t always innovated right: the Lisa was brilliant but flawed, the Newton a meteor that burned up before its time, and many features in the Mac OS have rankled until they were dropped or fixed. Few firms have generated such sustained interest in, and speculation surrounding, their next step. It’s only through a culture of innovation that Apple has attained de facto market leadership, and the moment that its fire ceases to burn in the cubicles of Cupertino, Apple will be doomed to enter the grand corporate care home.
Successful innovation in technology isn’t a matter of mere invention, but discovering how to build on invention to make it accessible to prospective purchasers. It’s about design for humans – where much of Apple’s greatest innovation has been – and helping them do new and exciting things easily. Those firms that have come to believe that innovation has anything to do with haggling over patents, marketing mystique or bleeding captive markets dry have truly lost the plot and risk going the way of the SCO Group, moribund in the wake of its futile litigation against IBM, Linux and Novell. Just as politicians do best when they heed the old caution against negative campaigning, businesses do best when they manufacture, sell and support.
In terms of those last basic business imperatives, Apple has had a very good, perhaps excellent, year. With its every move speculated on in countless blogs and newsfeeds, it may at times have felt like a rollercoaster ride. With even the BBC running headlines about a fatal flaw in Snow Leopard, once we learned the facts all shrank back into proportion. If anyone has been shaking sauce bottles in Infinite Loop – the street encircling Apple’s headquarter buildings, surely an inspiration to the late and great Douglas Adams – then they checked that the top was screwed on first.
