Very interesting comments. A lot of companies file patents and do R&D left and right, often hit on a great new development, but spend a lot of money on research that doesn't go directly into the product line. Sun, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other companies have had lots of back-room projects that may or may not have paid off.
If Apple focuses their research more tightly, is it because Steve and Apple are better at spotting the practical areas to look for innovations, are they smarter at making products based on their research, or or are they just lucky?
Apple's success is no fluke. Of the myriad products that Apple's design team made under the leadership of Jony Ive, only one has been a significant failure... the G4 Cube... and look how promptly they killed that project.
I have a co-worker who was a former product engineer at Apple. He described their product development roadmap as a calculated series of steps whereby they'd develop a small "feeler" product based on existing research into the marketplace, and gather feedback on other various functions and features available or desired, and then use the "feeler" product to gather hard data.
"iPhone" is such a product... It's a tactical step in a much larger strategy which is actually pretty carefully calculated. It has become increasingly clear from various analysts' research and Apple's own, that consumers are increasingly accessing the internet from mobile devices. The long and short of it is that they've developed a Mobile Mac business unit and filed several patents associated with various features that seem to be extrapolations or extensions of what they're testing with the "iPhone"... the degree of iPhone's success will drive how much attention they focus on this division. But because they take small steps and deploy relatively narrow product lines, they're not spread too thin and have some excess capital to lose without incurring heaps of short-term debt.
By the time iPhone was announced, it became clear to myself, my colleague who worked at Apple, and a number of others, that Apple is already thinking 2-3 years ahead and testing prototypes for the next big thing... a multitouch portable. I hesitate to say computer because the focus of this newer class of devices, ranging from phones to PDA's to PocketPC's is more aligned with communication and data interchange than it is with computing, in the traditional sense.
They saw the writing on the wall and developed iTunes/iPod... not really luck when you consider that I, an outsider, wrote a research paper on internet music distribution in 1996... plenty of lead time to know it was inevitable well before the 2-3 years from concept to product for iPod.
The key difference, I think, is that other companies often get mired in reading the feedback as desires for a specific feature. If people use tiny keyboards on PDAs, some manufacturers falsely assume this data means that people like tiny keyboards. No, what they like is tactile feedback.
Apple's approach is, in contrast, not to merely incorporate a feature that seems to be helping competitors sell products today but to identify whether or not the tiny keyboard is always going to be the best means of input... tactile or not, and what the tradeoffs would be in order to introduce an input device of a higher order. This requires understanding not just what people think they want, but what their behaviors tell us about how they use technology and what they'd like to do with it in the future. In other words, if Apple THINKS they have a cool idea... their first inclination is to test it with a "feeler" product to understand how people will use it, not just how they might, and how that feature should function in order to be useful. Once they know the answers, then broader deployment of a range of products begins.
