What Should Apple Do Next?
On Jan. 15, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs will bound onto the stage of the Macworld Conference & Expo to give his annual keynote address. Jobs typically uses the venue to set the company’s agenda for the coming year and reveal new products and services that — in terms of buzz at least — might well outshine the countless gizmos introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show recently held in Las Vegas.
Jobs devotees and Apple aficionados — not to mention competitors — have come to expect a lot from these performances. And with good reason. With a keen sense of theater, Jobs has used the forum as a platform to launch some of the company’s biggest products and make key strategic announcements, including the tectonic switch to Intel (INTC) processors that rocked the computer industry in 2006, as well as, of course, the unveiling of last year’s tech phenom, the iPhone.
But to get a glimpse of what might lie beyond this year’s keynote, BusinessWeek asked an eclectic group of analysts, designers, innovators, educators, and marketing experts for their opinions on what products, services, and experiences Apple might set its sights on next. Predictably, suggestions ran the gamut from the highly improbable — a ride on the Apple subway anyone? — to all but forgone conclusions, i.e. ber-thin notebooks. [For a complete list, see the slide show.]
Innovation Playbook But there’s a serious lesson to be learned from the prognostications, fantastic or otherwise. For example, the degree to which asking “what if” reveals key elements in Apple’s innovation playbook. Jobs’ game plan for Apple has been apparent since he took back the reins of the embattled Cupertino [Calif.] company in 1997. Products, from the original iMac, which was launched in 1998, to the iPod, have focused on relentlessly reducing complexity, honing the brand’s image for clean, simple design.
What’s more, additional products — from a new Apple operating system to media devices and computers — all fell into a well-designed ecosystem for a seamless user experience. Jobs also encouraged socializing so users could easily share music, movies, or videos. Executives asking themselves how their company might create a product as successful as the iPod are barking up the wrong tree. A better question, according to designers and innovation consultants, is: “What would Apple do?”
The key, explains Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject and a winner of a Gold IDEA/BusinessWeek design award, is that “Apple conceives its products as a symbiosis of hardware, software, and user experience.” Under Jobs’ leadership, he says, Apple has cultivated a corporate culture that inculcates this holistic type of thinking throughout the organization. One result: the so-called iPod ecosystem that includes not only the sophisticated hardware and technology inside the industrial design, but also the iTunes software and user interface, the online music store, and more generally the Mac operating system. “The joke around our offices is that everyone at Apple is a designer because they all think in this way,” adds Behar.
Jesse James Garrett, president of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco firm specializing in user experience design, says: “Apple really excels at taking aspects of our daily lives that we find frustrating and overly complicated and proving they don’t have to be as complex as we’ve always assumed.” The company’s track record of doing this successfully contributes to the “enormous amount of goodwill for the brand,” he adds before suggesting someone should apply the Cupertino-based company’s logic to mass public transportation.
Simple and Social That trademark simplicity, notes Chris Conley, a professor of design at the Illinois Institute of Technology and partner at the innovation firm Gravity Tank, is achieved through design that “captures 80% of the functionality with 20% of the interface.” In other words, great utility with a minimum of complexity. Conley suggests Apple use this strategy to create a suite of personal finance software to help consumers tackle savings, budgets, and even investing. Just as the iLife suite provides consumers with an easy way to manage multimedia and the Final Cut Studio package affords professional designers the means to produce and manage their work, a money package could simplify an area many find bafflingly complex.
Of course, many of the Mac faithful simply long to see the Apple logo slapped on a wider range of consumer electronics devices, including ever smaller computers, touch-screen-enabled tablets, video cameras, and multimedia-infused living rooms. Despite competition, almost all of these are probable, according to Geoff Vuleta, CEO of the New York-based innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212, because Apple “knows how to swoop in late and slash the nonsense out of a product.” Indeed, when Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, it was by no means the first digital music player on the market. Instead, its elegant industrial design was one daisy in a chain of astute marketing and savvy services such as the iTunes application, now a gateway for everything from purchasing movies to managing ringtones for the iPhone.
Then there’s the social side of things. The company’s retail outlets are routinely full of activity, but a number of those canvassed thought the company could do more to capitalize on the buzz. Victor Ermoli, dean of the School of Design at Savannah College of Art & Design, suggested Apple foster socializing between shoppers by encouraging them to hang out as they shopped. And Bruce Claxton, senior director of design integration at Motorola (MOT), envisioned a line of accessories that would allow users to share the content of portable media devices like the iPod wirelessly through speakers and televisions. “Apple is in a position to create communities by emphasizing the social aspects of its products,” he says, proposing they design a portable projector to plug into the iPod that could display films or images on walls.
Room for Improvement Not all looked at Apple through rose-tinted spectacles. The company has taken flack over the years for its use of environmentally harmful materials in some of its computers. In May, 2007, Jobs penned an open letter to environmentalists detailing improvements, but concerns remain. In December, 2007, Greenpeace rated Apple six out of 10 on its green electronics scale, an improvement from years past but still well below the higher scores snagged by Sony (SNE), Dell (DELL), Lenovo (LNVGY), and Toshiba (TOSBF), among others.
Tadeo Toulis, creative director for the Seattle-based industrial design firm Teague would like to see Apple more fully grab the green mantle. In other words, says Toulis, Apple should pioneer rather than react by addressing sustainability well before new products are even designed. “The green issue is a cognitive break from the positive feelings about Apple,” says Toulis. “They’ve proven that where they go others follow, which is why it would be great to see them embrace green.”
For some, Apple’s simplicity does not go far enough. John Maeda, president-elect of the Rhode Island School of Design and a devoted Mac fan, says iTunes has gotten bloated and overly complex with age.
“I’m an expert’s expert and there are some things I can’t do,” says Maeda. He suggests Apple break up and distribute iTunes’ functionality into a group of distinct applications. He also envisions Apple simplifying the user interface and making it possible to sync digital devices such as the iPhone without having to open the iTunes application. “It’s prolific,” he says. “But it’s also become like a really bloated Swiss Army knife.”
And yet, even the most outlandish Apple wish list reinforces the company’s stellar reputation for elegant, easy-to-use products and services. Which is exactly why asking what might be next is an effective way of peeking into Apple’s method of innovation.
For more, see BusinessWeek’s slide show.