
Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products” - sant0sk1
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/
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iigs
I contend that concept products correlate highly with companies that have a
high cash/agility ratio.

GM and Ford, despite their dire financial situation, have such low agility
that they pass this test. Toyota had some Scion car at the last Seattle auto
show that was shaped like a bank vault. WTF. Attaboy guys -- you just let your
guard down and gave the signal that the Koreans (Kia and Hyundai) have an
entry into that segment.

Microsoft is flush with cash but won't make the hard choice -- cut the anchor
to the desktop OS and productivity software business to transition into
whatever their next fortune would be. Windows Mobile exists to sell Windows NT
licenses. MS Surface is a UI device for some corporate middleware thing that
is currently shown on 15" CRTs in cubicles across the world? This must be what
it's like to paint yourself into a corner.

I can't say too much about Nokia because I don't think I even know one person
who owns a Nokia phone anymore, and I certainly can't think of anyone who owns
a Nokia Smartphone. My perception is that they basically make trusty but
crusty candybar phones for people who learned a phone UI in 1997 and don't
want to change.

Ultimately I think it's inevitable. GM, Ford, MS, Nokia and now Toyota are all
huge behemoths in their markets. They have the blessings of huge volumes, but
the curse of not having a focused market direction (other than "yes").

Apple has the luxury of a small enough and well enough tended market
definition (premium phones + audio players + consumer PCs) that they can tell
a story with the release of each product. The sheer volume of MS or GM
products makes that impossible. Perhaps concept products are (an impotent)
attempt to simulate the same thing for companies that can't.

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gcv
I think the author still has a lot of work to do to defend his case. BMW
doesn't hesitate to make concept cars (see, e.g.,
<http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1890/69/>), but it has brisk sales and an
enviable brand cachet. It's tempting to find some one variable which differs
between successful companies and unsuccessful ones, and then spin it, but I
think that, in reality, no one variable explains things so neatly.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It's not about _successful_ vs _unsuccessful_ \-- obviously nobody can argue
that Microsoft is unsuccessful. It's about _innovative_ and _non-innovative_.

Relative to Apple, BMW is a terrible example of an innovative company, nor do
they need to be innovative to succeed: The automotive industry hasn't seen a
dramatically different product design, comparable to the difference between an
iPhone and a flip phone, since well before World War II [1]. Progress in
automobiles has been all about slow, gradual evolution for fifty or sixty
years. Even the new hybrid cars are incredibly conventional (they're designed
to be nigh-indistinguishable from other cars) and are based on incremental
improvements to technologies that are decades old (electric cars, for example,
date back to the mid-to-late 1800s).

The most interesting recent BMW product (that I know of, anyway) has been the
Mini Cooper, a vehicle whose major selling point is that it closely resembles
a famous design _from 1959_. The equivalent Apple product would be the
"iENIAC".

[1] That is, there hasn't been a dramatically different design that _went
anywhere_. Even if you discount all the wacky concept cars that can't actually
be manufactured, plenty of folks have tried to change the industry with real
products: the Segway, the Corbin Sparrow, etc, etc.

~~~
akd
Mercedes Benz SLK revived the concept of the hardtop convertible, and now
almost every convertible make is shifting to a hardtop. The difference between
a hardtop convertible and a soft top is basically the difference between a
iPhone and a Nokia N95 (comparison to a regular phone is a strawman).

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enra
I agree. I'm getting tired of Nokia's concept phones, while their real phones
haven't changed a bit in 10years. Probably the hype is even worse here in
Finland.

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fiaz
Is it just me or did the G4 cube seem like a "concept" product? Or perhaps
even the Anniversary Mac...?

