A company now must own its own operating system and build its own hardware, but not to make computers easy to use. Instead, it must make innovative consumer devices that get upgraded with new models as if they rode (and created) fashion trends. The company must then own a retail channel that sends consumers back again and again to its products. That’s how much Apple has changed the terms of battle. To stand any chance of surviving, let alone winning!
Nobody in the sector is very well-equipped to compete with Apple on these terms. Putting together hardware and software teams that would rank in the industry’s top 10 at a single company isn’t exactly easy. Apple has been working in this direction for a decade. Further, tech companies aren’t accustomed to running retail stores of either the glass and stainless steel or virtual type.
But Hewlett-Packard’s planned purchase of Palm, Google’s attempt to make its own cell phones, Microsoft’s perhaps mythical tablet and just about everybody’s attempt to build an applications store are all testimony to the industry-wide conviction that the old model had reached a dead end and that Apple’s iPod and iPhone finally killed it
Information gathered from MSN Money.
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