This isn’t a tip thing (and it’s not the post with the lady I wrote of previously, but she’ll be coming soon!). This is just something I’d given some thought to, and likely the closest thing to the universally accepted style of “blog” posts... you know, the whole ranty-I’m-so-right-why-is-the-internet-always-so-wrong or gads-I-need-page-hits-let-me-post-something-patently-insane-so-others-who-can’t-stand-the-insipid-wrongness-of-the-internet-will-visit-me-to-tell-me-I’m-wrong-and-increase-my-pageviews! However, with a lack of ads and comments, I guess it fails to meet crucial parts of both of the above. So, maybe not a true example of what’s universally accepted, but if I can fake my way onto a starcruiser bound for the just-beyond-outer reaches of space, I reckon I can fake this.

My thought is simply that Apple understands, probably more than many other manufacturers of just about anything, that customers have options. Now, on the surface, that would appear to be false to some degree. Apple is known for providing far fewer options than their competition across the board, whether it’s computers, digital music players or phones. That’s not the way I’m thinking of options, though.

When your average company sets out to design something, they do it with an eye towards owning the lion’s share of a market right off the bat. How do you ensure this happens? You make your product everything to everyone. If there’s anything that anyone can think of that someone out in the wild world would want from this type of device, put it in. It means that marketing can have a nice large bullet point list to place on the object’s packaging (along with a comparison chart) leaving less room that they actually have to design for, so it makes life easier for them as well. By contrast, Apple knows that, in the end, all the fiddly dingles you put on your product will work better if they work together. Apple won’t put a Scorpion and a Tarantula in their box, in other words. This leads them to the decision of leaving things out that other companies include just ‘cause “device (a) must have option (b) in order to sell well”.

Maybe it’s from experience, but Apple realizes that you don’t need to be number one to make a profit. You can be  the last in the pack and still sell enough of your widgets to keep your company in business. I know if I had a Gadgetmabob that I made a dollar profit on, I wouldn’t need to sell millions of them and own the Gadgetmabob business to be sustainable. Heck, 80,000 a year would suit me juuuuust fine.

Which brings us back to options. There’s a core understanding that there’s a wide variety of products out there, and Apple’s only one of them. In other words, consumers have options. Apple doesn’t want to be the option, they want to be one of the many options that suits an audience that’s large enough to keep them in business. As a result, Apple isn’t pressured to include certain time honored features because someone else will take up the slack and cater to that person. If MMS is of tantamount importance, someone else will sell that person a phone. If price is of high concern, someone else will offer that person web services. If they need a TV media device that plays DiVX, someone else can sell it to them. If they need to play .ogg files on their portable device, someone will step up to the plate to fulfill their need... Apple doesn’t need to.

Does this mean that Apple is ignoring large numbers of customers? Yup, that’s exactly what it means. The groups mentioned above and more would not be well served by any Apple product. However, Apple is still selling to large numbers of customers. The reason is simple. They’ve scoped out a swath of consumers that want what they are offering and not only have the money but also the desire to spend it. This is a very large number of consumers and new ones are being added all the time. This consumer resource isn’t inexhaustible, but it is vast enough to sustain them for years (again, not counting new consumers that are added to the count). If they can keep this crowd happy, then they can stay in business and, having sold to them once, they know what kind of device/service they’re looking for and will likely sell to them again.

Some consumers may never own an Apple product and still others may feel a strange compulsion to buy a product then complain about what it can’t do. This latter group ends up helping Apple’s bottom line and, whether they want to believe it or not, are upholding Apple’s decision not to include the feature they are complaining that it should include. Because, if you can sell something to someone who knows they don’t want it, then you’re doing a darn fine job of something!