20070630

I'm jealous of Apple

I hate to admit it, but it's true. I'm seriously jealous of the Apple iPod group. For years now, they have successfully launched great, innovative, breakthrough products. And they seem to do this all while making it look incredibly easy. As a consumer product designer myself, I can appreciate just how difficult it actually is to create a good product, let alone a product that ends up being called "breakthrough" or "innovative". I'm jealous, envious, and a little pissed.

What I can't figure out is, why it seems no other company can duplicate this success. What is it? They don't have major market share (at least they did not until they launched the iPod), they don't have tons of money (there are plenty of large companies with money), and they don't appear to pay their employees in excess of what other companies pay.

Yet they are able to continually, repeatedly, turn out great products. Further, there are people beating down their doors just begging to work for them for what appears to me to be merely standard wages in a town (Cupertino, CA) that is anything but cheap to live in.

So why am I jealous? Because EVERYBODY wants to be a pivotal part of a winning team. Don't they? They must, right?? At least I know I do. And right now, these guys are the poster-boys for winning in consumer electronics. We should all do everything we can to copy their success. I mean it. Simply duplicate what they do. I can't figure out why more iPod "clones" are not out there already...seems if you can't beat-em, copy-em would work here, no?

For whatever reason, seems this type of chemistry is not something that can be simply copied...too bad. For the rest of us.