Simple can be hard in the sense that you have to say no to lots of things. From a cultural standpoint inside a big company, sometimes it's difficult to focus and narrow things down to a few products that you will develop extremely well. If you look at Apple, the product portfolio only consists of about 20 or 30 products. That's small compared to other companies that have hundreds or thousands of products. But if you look at revenue, Apple is much bigger than some of these other companies.
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iTunes is a good example. At first it was all about music and people got that. And over time Apple has been able to layer on different pieces. And now it's a digital playground with movie and TV show downloads, podcasts, video rentals, etc. If you started that on day one, the consumer would have said, "Holy smokes. This is too complicated." Apple takes a very methodical approach and features and elements are added step by step, so that consumers aren't trying to drink from the fire hose.
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iTunes is a good example. At first it was all about music and people got that. And over time Apple has been able to layer on different pieces. And now it's a digital playground with movie and TV show downloads, podcasts, video rentals, etc. If you started that on day one, the consumer would have said, "Holy smokes. This is too complicated." Apple takes a very methodical approach and features and elements are added step by step, so that consumers aren't trying to drink from the fire hose.
Apple is particularly good at managing consumer learning cycle. And they always go for vertical (salient) differentiation, rather than horizontal (price).
-- I wish blogger had a sketch tool, so that I could easily describe the strategy on a 4q diagram.
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