What Should Apple Do Next?

From Businessweek:

Jobs' game plan for Apple has been apparent since he took back the reins of the embattled Cupertino (Calif.) company in 1997. Products, from the original iMac, which was launched in 1998, to the iPod, have focused on relentlessly reducing complexity, honing the brand's image for clean, simple design.

What's more, additional products—from a new Apple operating system to media devices and computers—all fell into a well-designed ecosystem for a seamless user experience. Jobs also encouraged socializing so users could easily share music, movies, or videos. Executives asking themselves how their company might create a product as successful as the iPod are barking up the wrong tree. A better question, according to designers and innovation consultants, is: "What would Apple do?"

The key, explains Yves Béhar, founder of fuseproject and a winner of a Gold IDEA/BusinessWeek design award, is that "Apple conceives its products as a symbiosis of hardware, software, and user experience." Under Jobs' leadership, he says, Apple has cultivated a corporate culture that inculcates this holistic type of thinking throughout the organization. One result: the so-called iPod ecosystem that includes not only the sophisticated hardware and technology inside the industrial design, but also the iTunes software and user interface, the online music store, and more generally the Mac operating system. "The joke around our offices is that everyone at Apple is a designer because they all think in this way," adds Béhar.

Jesse James Garrett, president of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco firm specializing in user experience design, says: "Apple really excels at taking aspects of our daily lives that we find frustrating and overly complicated and proving they don't have to be as complex as we've always assumed." The company's track record of doing this successfully contributes to the "enormous amount of goodwill for the brand," he adds before suggesting someone should apply the Cupertino-based company's logic to mass public transportation.