There's a disagreement in the platform war, as well as on Wall Street, and it goes something like this: "Apple is no longer innovating. It's moving slowly and has fallen behind its more agile and innovative competitors."
Apple's success has to do with marketing and not its technology, while its fastest competitors are now leaving it behind.
“Apple has an innovation problem,” according to Forbes.
“Samsung is innovating faster than Apple,” according to Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray.
“Why doesn't Apple innovate?” asks CEO.com.
Apple haters feel good reading the above. Unfortunately for them, the arguments used fail the test of logic and facts. And we explain why.
Vision doesn't mean trying everything to see what will work.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a good example of a product that you would consider more innovative than Apple's iPhone 5.
The S4 has “Smart Pause,” “Air Gesture,” dual-camera mode, a health and fitness tracker, “smart scroll,” and something called Sound and Shot to add sound to photos.
Additionally, it has a much larger screen, NFC support, a camera with a higher pixel density, and a more advanced chipset than the iPhone 5.
Does any of the above mean that Samsung is more innovative?
No. “Smart Pause” and “Air Gesture” will be used by very few people, while the rest will either ignore them completely or turn them off. They take away the user from direct control and are likely to annoy most people. We haven’t heard anyone love these features. It seems like Samsung put them on the device just so it can say it’s more advanced than the competition.
The dual-camera mode, the health and fitness tracker, and the “smart scroll” are features that have been available on the iPhone through the App Store and various apps for a long time. And having them built into the device doesn’t make either the company or the device any more innovative.
The “Sound and Shot” feature is something that anyone can find in a free app that no one uses and is not going to make any impression on the world, like Vine did, for example.
We don't think there's anyone who believes that Apple doesn't have the technological capability to make the iPhone bigger or add NFC support. Of course it can. It's just that it's chosen not to do so yet. So does the fact that it decided to make a device that people with smaller hands can use make it any less innovative? Does the fact that it didn't include NFC, when the market isn't ready for such a technology, make it any less innovative?
And finally, everyone expected it to have a newer chipset because it's a newer device. And as always, newer devices have newer chipsets. The S4 came out six months after the iPhone 5.
When a new iPhone is released and benchmark tests are conducted, they always perform much better than the competition.
Apple's strategy is to release a device with features that everyone will use, and whatever extras they want, anyone can download from the App Store. Whether or not anyone agrees with this strategy doesn't make Apple any less innovative than Samsung, which releases 100 devices with 100 features that no one will use.
The so-called “innovative companies” are Apple's biggest fans.
The people who say Apple doesn't innovate are usually the same people who say Google and Samsung respectively innovate.
Yes, both Google and Samsung are two very good companies with a good history of innovation.
But innovation is not the end of the road. It is a means to an end. The goal of innovation is to continually create better products with better design and more usability.
Somewhere here it is worth noting that both Google and Samsung engineers and designers are huge fans of the design and usability offered by Apple devices.
For example, in every Google meeting, its engineers, designers, and executives use Apple laptops.
And this is not because Apple products are more or less innovative, but because Apple products are very good products.
An internal Samsung memo that surfaced during a lawsuit between the company and Apple showed Samsung's admiration for Apple's design. The memo featured the iPhone's screen side by side with that of the Galaxy, demonstrating Apple's design superiority over Samsung.
At the time, some observers said that Samsung copied Apple. But that's not true. What is true is how much Samsung was impressed by Apple's design.
Apple follows a vision and tries to perfect it.
Many companies believe that innovation is about throwing all the technology you have into a product. But is that really innovation?
Apple's approach has been the same for years and is very easy to understand. This is how you develop a product:
1. Finds the part of an experience that is missing and corrects it.
2. It waits for the market to be ready for something new and then offers a series of new products that offer simplicity, appearance and great usability.
3. It designs and gives the product features that will satisfy the majority of consumers.
4. It patents and uniquely designs new things that create a new market on their own, something that other companies have a hard time doing.
5. It continues to release multiple generations of the same product trying to perfect the original version.
This is more or less the process Apple uses on the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and iMac, and it will most likely follow the same on the rumored “iWatch” and “iTV”.
Two years after a product is first released, everyone says Apple is innovating, after those two years, while they're trying to perfect that product, everyone says Apple stopped innovating. And then they release a new product and suddenly Apple is innovative again.
Ultimately, how someone rates Apple as innovative has nothing to do with innovation at all, but with how often it releases a new product.
Dimitrios Georgoulas @ GreekAppleNews
