Apple has shown that a Blue Ocean Strategy makes sense:
Focus on the market and user. How does the user interact with your product or service? Find out what hasn’t been met and how things can be improved. There is definitely a way to improve on things, since nothing is perfect. Dyson made vacuum cleaners a tech-gadget with its futuristic design and disposing with flimsy one-use filters.
Don’t fight the market, move the market boundaries. Create the necessary foundations to define the boundaries of the new marketplace. Apple did this by creating iTunes and the Apps Store, making it affordable to people to buy songs and easy to access from all iDevices. It created a new ecosystem where new customers can thrive, and retained.
Build on your strengths and hide your flaws. Apple focused on user-experience where it could make a difference rather than showing off its technical specification. In the iPad 2, it didn’t tell people how much RAM it had but told them it was lighter and thinner – things that were more important for portability in tablets.
This is where the Blue Ocean begins to turn a little murky – blood in the water from skirmishes between laptop companies, Android and Windows-based tablet makers. However, iPad has so far demonstrated that it can navigate around these battles because it is not a product, it is part of a broad collection of products and services that no single competitor seems to be able to match. Even in these seemingly competitive scuffles, the iPad is slowly but surely replacing the traditional modes of computing and moving users into Apple’s clear Blue Ocean space.
The competitive sea is getting more crowded for iPhone. Apple still has an edge, in that it built that sea. However, the sheer convenience of using all its products together also creates very real switching costs — the 250 million people now using Apple’s iCloud are going to think twice (or three or four times) before buying a smartphone, tablet, or computer from anybody else.
Apple made the iPod with a great circular touch-sensitive dial to make the user interface more satisfying to use rather than to press on buttons and dials. The iPhone was the first great touch screen phone and cracked open a market. The screen rotation on the iPad and the tap, scroll, pinch and swipe – the multi-touch function, continue to set it part as genuine value innovations.
Apple’s strategy is really about finding Blue Oceans, markets that come into existence as Apple defines them. The company has repeatedly given customers something that felt entirely new, that solved their problems in a way no existing product did.
Of course, Apple’s market position is currently under threat with commentators saying it has lost its creative mojo. I wouldn’t be so sure that Apple has lost its way, but what I am pretty sure about is that Apple’s future success will be built on continuing its Blue Ocean strategic thinking.
The language of strategy is more informative about Apple’s predicament than most of the chatter one hears about whether the company is still cool or Tim Cook really has what it takes. And as it fights back, take a look at this: