Everyone is in a hype about the iPhone Launch - we already see the pictures of people queuing in front of the Apple stores in order to be the first to receive their brand new iPhone. While all the hype is about the phone itself and whether it is good or not I want to take a step back and look at the big picture of this iPhone launch.

Everything started with the iPhone announcement on January 9th 2007 at the Macworld. Everyone remembers the great show that Steve Jobs gave us, and the horrible show we got to see from Cingular CEO Stan Sigman. (A wrap-up about their presentation style can be found at the Presentation Zen)

Check out Steve Jobs’ presentation:

And here is Stan Sigman’s presentation (starts at 4:50):

Then the expected hype set in which resulted in an amazing coverage of the iPhone as can be seen by this analysis from Valleywag. They performed an analysis about mentions of “iPhone” in the news which can be seen in the chart below (iPhone news mentions are shown in Black).

Reasons for this incredible hype are that:

• Everyone was speculating about the iPhone but Apple kept quiet
• The final product has blown away everyone and set expectations tremendously high
• Everyone was speculating whether Apple has set expectations too high with the iPhone
• and of course: because it’s Apple

From looking at this, here comes my….
Lesson 1:

Keep quiet until the latest possible moment then make the best product presentation you can. If someone questions whether your product can live up to its expectations - keep quiet.

PC World summarizes the iPhone Hype and The Washington Post analyzes what might happen if the iPhone can not live up to its expectations. The following picture shows clearly how high Apple has set the expectations with the iPhone. This is a collection of various “user-created” designs what the iPhone might look like. And we know the story: Apple has excelled these expectations with the iPhone’s technology and design.

Nobody knows how closely Apple was following these designs but you can be sure that if Steve Jobs ever saw one of these, he would have said: “Nice, but not enough”.

Which brings me to…

Lesson 2:

Listen to your customers expectations not just to meet their expectations but to exceed their expectations.

In one of my previous posts I was asking the polemic question if Apple is really that innovative and the key insight is that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether innovation comes strictly from within your organization or whether it is the result of “assembling” technology and knowledge to deliver a great product. The article that I was citing in the previous article was from Businessweek: Lessons from Apple.

An article in the International Herald Tribune titled “Who really makes the iPod” nails it why Apple earns $80 on each iPod. “Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.” And you can be sure it is the same story with the iPhone.

Therefore my ….

Lesson 3:

Focus on a few things you are really good at and let others do the rest.

These are the lessons that I take away from looking at the iPhone launch. Did I miss anything? Then go ahead and leave a comment!

If you are interested in learning more about Apple and the concept of open innovation I recommend the following books:

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….and is Steve Jobs really such a great CEO? When we talk about about innovation we should first of all talk about “Closed Innovation” and “Open Innovation”.

Closed Innovation describes an paradigm where innovation should only come from a firm’s R&D. This has been the dominating strategy in companies like AT&T, IBM and Xerox in the 20th century. Some of these companies have made the transition to “Open Innovation”, those that didn’t are gone. So what exactly is Open Innovation then?

Open Innovation is a paradigm in which companies ask themselves two questions:

1. How can I profitably use others ideas in our business?
2. How can I profitably allow others to use our ideas in their business?

With this approach you accept that there are smart people (and innovative companies) out there as well and you change your innovation management process to answer the two question above. One of the best examples for Open Innovation is Cisco. Just look at the list of companies they have acquired in the last 17 years.

Apple: Not invented here, but very welcome

But let’s look at Apple now - and especially at one article in The Economist. Titled “Lessons From Apple” the key message of the article is that the main reason for Apple’s innovations is the use of strategies that support the Open Innovation paradigm.

What the article say about the iPod:

The idea for the iPod, for example, was originally dreamt up by a consultant whom Apple hired to run the project. It was assembled by combining off-the-shelf parts with in-house ingredients such as its distinctive, easily used system of controls.

And about the iTunes:

And it was designed to work closely with Apple’s iTunes jukebox software, which was also bought in and then overhauled and improved.

The article concludes:

Apple is, in short, an orchestrator and integrator of technologies, unafraid to bring in ideas from outside but always adding its own twists.

An addition to this is the discussion about the iPhone. Remember there is already a multi-touch phone on the market. The Prada Phone.

But does being an orchestrator also mean, that you are an innovative company? What do you think?

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Shaun Smith from “The Perfect Customer Experience” blog argues that “We can all avoid making this mistake [of not delivering a perfect customer experience]– treating customers as if they are all the same … or worse yet, treating them all as if they were you.” (See full post).

So I am asking myself what is the reason that an organization (and it’s employees) are treating their customers as if they were you? The reason is a certain mindset within the organization which could be summarized as:

• We know better than our customers what is good for them
• Our organization is so great/innovative/creative that our customers just have to love us
• If they don’t want our products or services, they simply don’t get it

So what it takes to deliver a perfect customer experience is humbleness. I don’t mean cringingness - what I am talking about is the presence of a mindest within the organization that first of all the customer is always right.

But is the customer really always right? YES HE IS! Because the customers’ perception is reality.

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Steven D. Levitt, author at the Freakonomics blog, writes about what he calls Outrageously Good Customer Service. His story is a great example of a company which is

• using information about its customers to determine the most important, highly valuable customers
• deploying dedicated employees whose task is to “monitor” these high value customers
• actively working to deliver a remarable customer experience by ensuring that their product or service offering is delivered in the best possible way

 

Here are Steve’s experiences:

Number 1:
Halfheartedly, I approached the counter and said that I had a seat on this plane, but it was probably long gone. The woman behind the gate, Carlene Boyd, replied, “Is your name Steve Levitt?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I thought you might show up. So I saved your seat until the last second. Here it is, feel free to board.” I didn’t think to ask her why she thought I would show up so late. But that one simple act was enough to make me loyal to American Airlines until the end of time.

Number 2:
As I sat down to a dinner of fast food Chinese, my cell phone rang. The caller was a United Airlines employee named Michael. (Sorry, Michael, I can’t recall your last name.) He said, “I see that you’re at the airport and your flight is delayed a few hours. A seat opened up on an earlier flight, so I grabbed it for you in case you wanted it. It leaves in forty minutes, so you’ll have to hurry.”

His conclusion:
I have no illusions as to why American and United are nice to me: I travel way too much and they are the major airlines serving Chicago. I am a good customer. Still, compared to all the other things that airlines can do — serve warm nuts, show good movies, give a few inches of legroom — I would trade it all for a few more instances in which the airline does something out of the ordinary to get me home faster to see my wife and kids.

And this is exactly the point of remarkable experiences: doing something out of the ordinary makes your customers perform better (being at home with your kids earlier) and they will most probably come back next time they need your service.

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The hype around the iPhone that reached its peaked in the beginning of this year cooled down a little bit in the last weeks. But with the launch date coming closer Apple is turning up the volume of their PR machinery.

In order to prepare the masses for the launch they published a few ads on their web-site, the low quality version can be seen below.

Now I can’t help and feel that Apple is setting expections seriously high for the iPhone. Using the mobile phone looks just too smooth to be true (even though consumers are aware that advertisements are staged). Then again - I suppose the marketing guys at Apple know what they are doing and are aware of the consequences, if the real iPhone won’t deliver the promised usability.

Judge for yourself, here are the videos:

[Read more]

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