Apple is the anti-Parc

For those who don’t know, Xerox Parc was Xerox’s formidible R&D center. Until 2002, when it was spun off, Parc did the basic research that created such ubiquitous technological innovations as bitmap graphics, GUI (featuring windows and icons), WYSIWYG editing, ethernet, InterPress (a pre PostScript resolution-independent graphical page-description language) and laser printing. The problem at Parc wasn’t developing viable technological innovations… it was monetizing them.

Apple, on the other hand, is all about monetizing technological innovations, just not their own… and they always have been. 25 years ago Apple released the first Macintosh, and became one of the firms to gain commercial success with a Xerox Parc innovation, the GUI interface. Apple still doesn’t have any significant muscle in basic R&D. What they do have is significant power in design, marketing, and business and the ability to make all the right connections to synthesize the right thing for the market at the right time.

Apple’s super power, I would argue, is introducing new technology to us in easily adoptable pieces–not first but best. Is this the ideal mix for a modern consumer electronics company? Seemingly, so.

5 years ago, who would have imagined that we would now make daily use of accelerometers and magnetometers, or orientation, light, and proximity sensors? It took years of many other companies trying and failing to get interaction with these technologies right, and although Apple continue to claim “no user research,” the world has been their testbed, and observations of how people have used (and not used) these technologies have clearly influenced their design.

Apple is adept at packaging technology in adoptable products that consumers not only understand, but desire. This is their true key to success. I’m looking forward to what comes next…

References

Apple Buys Swedish Facial Recognition Company Polar Rose

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things