Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple - IT/Computer Science Assignment Help

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Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple 
Think different. 
On March 15, 2012, the day before its new iPad became available, Apple’s share price reached US$600 for the first time in its history—signaling solid financial strength and future growth prospects  as world economies, and businesses, continued to recover from the worst recession since the Great  Depression. With a market capitalization of about US$ 550 billion and annual sales exceeding $100 billion, Apple was worth nearly three times the industrial giant General Electric, exceeded the value  of Sony Corporation by a factor of 25, and became the most valuable publicly traded company in the  world. All the more amazingly, a scant 12 years earlier, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the  company’s share price had hovered around $5 and the future was uncertain at best. Jobs, after all,  had already been fired from the firm he co-founded almost a decade earlier, and he was coming back  when the company was nearly written off. Even so, through that difficult period, the core  commitment to product design and development had stayed alive. 
Since being founded in 1976, Apple has been considered a leading designer and integrator of  computer hardware and software. By 2012, it had fundamentally changed the computer, music,  mobile telephone, and retail industries through its sleek products, innovative stores, and new  business models. Moreover, the iPad tablet computer accelerated the transformation of the  publishing business. Apple stores had some of the highest revenues per square foot in the retail  sector. Its applications (App) store had achieved one billion downloads only nine months after launch  (in 2007) and reached 25 billion by March 2012. Surprisingly, Apple’s radical innovations also came  with consistency. Anyone who used the Apple II in 1978 and then picked up an iPhone three decades  later would find a familiar object. Somehow the new device was the same as the old one: different,  but the same. 
Apple’s success was not just the result of clever strategic moves or an innate sense of market  timing. It came from a deep commitment to understanding how people used computing devices and  a desire to develop “insanely great products.” The iPod famously arose from the all-pervasive love of  music within the firm. At the same time, this enthusiasm remarkably matched the needs, abilities,  and dreams of millions of customers. And, for all these new markets that were conquered, Apple  kept its eyes on the core computer business. 
As Apple ventured into new businesses and faced an ever-increasing number of fierce  competitors, the roots of its success puzzled many industry experts and technology pundits. The  company often defied conventional business logic and was not afraid to experiment outside its core  markets. It built retail stores when competitors were moving to direct sales and distribution models,  and its products were rarely first to market. There was, however, a surprising consistency in the way  the company worked. Simply put, the “Apple Way” was a set of principles with a deep commitment  to great products and services at its core: design thinking, clear development strategy and execution,  its CEO as chief innovator, and the rational courage to conduct bold business experiments. 

Design Thinking 
Those of us on the [original] Macintosh team were really excited about what we were doing. The result was  that people saw a Mac and fell in love with it. There was an emotional connection . . . that I think came from  the heart and soul of the design team. 
Bill Atkinson,1 Member of Apple Macintosh Development Team 
It was not evident that falling in love with computers was something that made sense at the time when these were machines for data processing and automation. Moreover, in the mid-1970s, when  Apple entered the scene, computer equipment was typically housed in discrete locations within  company headquarters and government facilities, guarded and used only by specialists. The notion  of personal computers as a tool for individual work was unimaginable. Corporations and  governmental agencies controlled how work functioned and, by extension, influenced the creation of tools that were to be deployed to control it. The business processes and systems that evolved were  eventually captured in enterprise software, with its emphasis on automating tasks.  
To Steve Jobs and the original cadre of Apple developers, however, the goal was to design a  computer that both supported and fostered individual work. Moreover, they reasoned, potential  customers would have to fall in love with computers if they were to master the machine’s apparent  complexity and spend a lot of money to do so. People would have to see how this tool would benefit  them and want that benefit for themselves. Apple’s products would target people with this appeal. 
From the beginning, Apple addressed individual users (“the rest of us”), believing that products that  were intended to be useful to people would in fact so be. For that to happen, the level of complexity  needed to be reduced dramatically. 
Simplicity in Design and Use 
Helping people “love” their equipment and the experience of using it animated—and continues to  motivate—how Apple products were and are designed today. Cordell Ratzlaff, a major architect of  the Mac OS X operating system (circa 1990), noted: 
We did the design first. We focused on what we thought people would need and want, and  
how they would interact with their computer. We made sure we got that right, and then we  went and figured out how to achieve it technically. In a lot of cases when we came up with a  design that we knew really worked for people, we didn’t know how we were going to build it. 
We had a design target, and we worked with engineering to reach it. We ended up doing a lot  of things that we initially thought were impossible, or would take a long time to do. It was  great because we were applying a lot of creativity and ingenuity on the design side and then  2 
From the beginning, Apple products were conceived of as being highly interactive. To that end,  said Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, who spearheaded the iPod’s development (late 1990s), “So much of what we do is worry about the smallest of details . . . [while] I  don’t think all the people using the product notice or care in a conscious way about every little detail,  I do think in the aggregate it’s really important, and it contributes to why people like the product.”3 
Worrying about the smallest detail, which includes even the packaging of Apple products, has  helped realize co-founder Steve Jobs’ design sensibility: that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Distinct from organizations whose notion of “detail” is often conflated with “features,” Apple  products are often noteworthy for what they do not contain. Years ago, the slot for inserting diskettes  was eliminated from Mac computers (you would have to add an external device); reviewers criticized  Apple for its arrogance and omission of must-have features. Other companies soon followed Apple’s  lead, however, and external devices were quickly developed to plug into ports that Apple products  contained. In other words, when the smallest detail is scrutinized, it’s possible to discover what can  be lived without—and what can be developed elsewhere. Here’s how Paul Mercer, whose Pixo 
[T]he iPod is very simple-minded it really doesn’t do much other than let you navigate  
your music. That tells you two things [first] that the simplification that went into the design  was very well thought through, and, second, that the capability to build it is not  commoditized. The fact that nobody has been able to duplicate the capabilities means that  the building blocks may be difficult to come by, and that the design sense, to create a simple  and easy-to-adopt solution, does not exist in most product development organizations  worldwide.4 
This “design sense” was evident in the iPod Mini, which actually reduced the amount of music that  could be played but took advantage of new hard drive technology. “The mini was designed with  exactly the same philosophy [as the original iPod]”, explained Ive: 
We were trying to take advantage of and exploit the fact that it was a smaller drive and  
really understand the difference. We made one model taking an approach [similar to the original], using that design vocabulary and form factor, and it was just completely wrong. 
Then we started to explore very different materials and approaches. We realized we could  make this in aluminum. Unlike with stainless steel, you could blast it and then anodize it— 
which is a form of dyeing—and then you could do color in an unusual way.5 
Thus the Mini, with a quarter fewer songs that could be played yet with a mere $50 price  “reduction” from the original iPod—but it came in colors!—became, against near universal wisdom, a  wildly popular product that was both an extension of the original and a unique item purchased for its  own sake. Apple’s ability to draw upon exactly the same philosophy but adapt it to new technologies  and different materials was equally evident in the Nano and Shuffle, which even further reduced the  amount of music that could be played, as well as the size of the product. These, too, took off. The idea  was that people would want a “portfolio” of iPods—and so they did. Moreover, an entire industry  sprang up to surround the iPod, with accessories, “stations,” and links to other devices. 

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