Innovation crisis facing Apple.

You know this man? Obviously Yes, if you know even a bit about Apple. This is Steve Jobs. This man has made what Apple is today.

Although the name of company “Apple” remained same but its strategy has changed for worse under Tim Cook. And this shift in strategy tells us that Apple won’t be able to grow faster as it could under Steve Jobs.

Tim Cook is replacing Apple’s strategy of innovating its way to success with a strategy of milking a dying product.

Old Strategy:

Jobs targeted a large existing market and invented a product that consumers liked much better than the ones incumbents were offering. Jobs did this with MP3 players (iPod), cell phones (the iPhone), and tablets (the iPad). This is actual innovation.

New Strategy:

Under Tim Cook, Apple has milked an extraordinary amount of growth from iPhones. This product is 12 years old and hence dying but Tim is doing nothing innovative and milking growth from dying product which is not at all reliable solution for long-term survival of the company.

Signs that show Apple has lost the innovative way to success

• Apple’s iPhone success attracted rivals. And those rivals are now ahead of Apple which is trying to play catchup.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Apple announced that it would develop an iPhone with three rear-facing cameras.

But that’s not innovation — Apple is just trying to catch up to rivals.

Atsushi Osanai, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo told the Journal:

What we want from Apple is something that makes us emotional, even unconsciously—say, truly beautiful and sophisticated design that we can’t resist. Beefing up functional value, like expanding camera features, isn’t attractive because everyone else is doing the exact same thing.

• Providing Apple Music to Amazon Echo devices and let users control playback using Alexa[1]. Samsung has convinced Apple to write an iTunes TV app based on Samsung’s Tizen operating system[2]. And Sony’s new TVs run on Android — enabling Siri to control Google software[3]. These examples clearly shows that Apple is losing its hold and just making itself flexible to sell its products and services.
• Apple is not able to maintain its high price point. People are not willing to buy Apple devices at their MRP. So, retailers have to do several price cuts to sell Apple devices. Like in China(which is Apple’s biggest market), its retailer Suning had to do 17% price cut to sell iPhone XR.