Music, Technology, Art, Economy

Stimuli from Ethan Bauley...




View Ethan Bauley's profile on LinkedIn

My draft presentation on Business Model Design for Web Services
The opinions published here are mine and not my employer's.

Jun 11
Permalink
“ For Apple, the advantages of bringing PA Semi in-house are many. In particular, it will afford the company to innovate in a way going forward that will differentiate its handheld products from a growing array of competitive devices that will be left to rely on technologies available to the broader industry. It will also allow the company, which is synonymous with secrecy, to keep a tighter lid on its intellectual property and future product plans.
—

AppleInsider | Steve Jobs: it’s time we design our own iPhone and iPod chips

Okay, so I beat the “openness/collaboration” drum as loudly as anyone, but yet this makes plenty of sense to me.  There’s a few reasons:

- Everyone loves the Bill Joy truism “There are many more intelligent people outside your firm than within it.”  This is true for 99.9% of businesses, but I’d argue that Apple has figured out a way to attract and retain talent so much better than other companies that the returns to open collaboration are smaller for them than, say, a moribund company like VZ or Motorola.

- Apple is not only competing against evil monoliths, it’s reinventing their value chains.  Secrecy is a major advantage here.  They’re pulling the wool over people’s eyes (see: iPod v. Edgar Bronfman)

- They can strategy/open up later (as they have done with iPhone SDK’s, etc)

Comments (View)