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Overview
Apple has revolutionized the portable entertainment industry through its leading innovation. Coventional wisdom says its strategy is wrong, yet it keeps turning out great products. They way Apple has dominated the MP3 player market is by overcoming obstacles that get in the way of their production system. If the engineers don't like the design, they have to find a way to accomodate it because Steve Jobs and his design experts think it can be done.
In reference to integration, Tony Fadell, vice president of engineering observes, "The product now is the iTunes Music Store and iTunes and the iPod and the software that goes on the iPod. A lot of companies don't really have control, or they can't really work in a collaborative way to truly make a system. We're really about a system." In years past, Apple has focused on its system by developing its own hardware and its own software. Due to their reluctancy to sell these two components and two seperate bundles, Apple's system has allowed Microsoft to takeover the PC sector in previous years but now Apple is coming back with full force.
In our group, we have chosen to include 5 factors that we all agree have had a significant impact on Apple's success: sustainability, integration, deign, user friendliness, and compatability.
The iPod was originally realeased in October of 2001. The windows compatible version was introdced in October of 2003. Apple's stock price reflects this compatability change as it allowed Apple to take a larger chunk of the market share. Furthermore, Apple's stock price continues to increase due to their ability to sell more and more iPods thoughout each quarter.
iPod sales are still going strong. It will be interesting to see if Apple will be able to sustain this kind of growth because as one can see by the graph, growth seems to be plateuing. Apple's world-reknown innovation will have to figure out what to do next on order to retain their domination of the industry.
