Announcing a new 5by5 podcast: High Density.
In the first episode I interview Glenn Fleishman and talk about what it takes to be on Jeopardy (and how to win.) We also go on a journey into the lore and charm of The Economist and the curious state of modern journalism.
A review of RIM's latest service pricing surprise; what do maps cost and what are they worth and the way to think about Google as a business.
via 5by5 | The Critical Path #68: On Very Large Scale Integrated Companies.
On Samsung's use of Capital, Value Chain Evolution and Below the Surface. Why would you read the balance sheet of a tech company, the difference between R&D and capital spending, how to prevent suppliers becoming competitors and what are the economics of systems and application software in a device-centric model. Finally, why you shouldn't confuse obscurity with secrecy.
via 5by5 | The Critical Path #67: Manufacturing Flying Cars.
Podcast #Theory · 429 comments
[The following is a post written by James Allworth.
James is the co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?. He has worked as a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School, at Apple, and Booz & Company. It follows and builds on a discussion we had on the 56th Critical Path podcast.
You can connect directly with James on Twitter at @jamesallworth -ed]
A lot of ink has been spilled in the wake of the recent Apple Samsung patent disputes, and the legal wars see no sign of abating any time soon. The rise of Samsung's phone business has been meteoric, and Apple is right to be concerned. But the real threat that Samsung poses to Apple has very little to do with the copying (or not) of Apple's designs. The lawsuits have simply been a convenient (if expensive and risky) way to attempt to quash a threat that is of Apple's own making. While there's no doubt that Google has played a key role in Samsung's success by handing out a free mobile operating system to pretty much anyone who wants to build one — it is actually Apple, more than any other company, that is responsible for Samsung's present success.
How? By outsourcing as much work to Samsung as they have. And it's impossible not to wonder whether Tim Cook's announcement yesterday on bringing back Apple's manufacturing to the USA is the beginnings of an attempt to rectify the problem.
But first, I want to establish why copying is actually less of a threat to Apple than you might think. Daring Fireball's John Gruber wrote last year on what he termed "The New Apple Advantage". Like most people who appreciate Apple and its products, the starting point for Gruber's appreciation of Apple is its design — he says as much in the article. But the realization that Gruber has in the article on Apple's true competitive advantage is what's really interesting:
So let’s be lazy for a second here, and attribute all of Apple’s success over the past 15 years to two men: Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. We’ll give Jobs the credit for the adjectives beautiful, elegant, innovative, and fun. We’ll give Cook the credit for the adjectives affordable, reliable, available, and profitable. Jobs designs them, Cook makes them and sells them.
It’s the Jobs side of the equation that Apple’s rivals — phone, tablet, laptop, whatever — are able to copy. Thus the patents and the lawsuits. Design is copyable. But the Cook side of things — Apple’s economy of scale advantage — cannot be copied by any company with a complex product lineup. How could Dell, for example, possibly copy Apple’s operations when they currently classify “Design & Performance” and “Thin & Powerful” as separate laptop categories?
This realization sort of snuck up on me. I’ve always been interested in Apple’s products because of their superior design; the business side of the company was never of as much interest. But at this point, it seems clear to me that however superior Apple’s design is, it’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage. It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through.
(emphasis mine)
The argument is beautifully made. The design part of Apple's equation is to their ability to redefine new industries as they did with the iPhone. Whether they go after the TV market next, or something else, it's this integrated design component that will be crucial to their initial success. But compared to the business side of Apple, design actually generates much less sustained strategic advantage in any one product category, once performance in that category becomes "good enough". The tech industry has always revolved around copying. Once folks work out how it's done, everyone piles on. And at that point, it becomes much less about design than it does about how you operate your business.
It is the last part of the Gruber quote that really drives things home. "It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through". He's right — it's very hard for a competitor to outright replicate what Apple has achieved without going through all the same steps. But it got me thinking of a concept — and a related story — that I learned from someone I was fortunate enough to have as a teacher: Clayton Christensen. Perhaps a competitor didn't have to copy Apple.
What happens if Apple had already taught them?
Christensen first wrote about the dangers of outsourcing in The Innovator's Solution, explaining how seeking to maximize efficiency by employing third party vendors to do the "low value-add" work for you can be a lethal strategy. In the Solution, Christensen and Michael Raynor gave the example of two fictional corporations—"Component Corporation" and "Texas Computer Corporation". I had the good fortune to work with Clay on his most recent book, How Will You Measure Your Life?, and we recount a similar story; only without any of the players being disguised. The story is that of Asus and Dell, and how by outsourcing its work—starting with just basic circuit boards—Dell equipped a competitor:
Asus came to Dell and said, “We’ve done a good job fabricating these motherboards for you. Why don’t you let us assemble the whole computer for you, too? Assembling those products is not what’s made you successful. We can take all the remaining manufacturing assets off your balance sheet, and we can do it all for 20 percent less.”
The Dell analysts realized that this, too, was a win- win...
That process continued as Dell outsourced the management of its supply chain, and then the design of its computers themselves. Dell essentially outsourced everything inside its personal-computer business—everything except its brand— to Asus. Dell’s Return on Net Assets became very high, as it had very few assets left in the consumer part of its business.
Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers. In this Greek-tragedy tale, Asus had taken everything it had learned from Dell and applied it for itself. It started at the simplest of activities in the value chain, then, decision by decision, every time that Dell outsourced the next lowest-value-adding of the remaining activities in its business, Asus added a higher value-adding activity to its business.
There are two sides to this story: the part that relates to Dell, and the part that relates to Asus. Dell, in its quest to maximize its financial efficiency, continued to outsource way beyond manufacturing components and assembly. They outsourced a long way up the value chain. But there's also the side of the story that relates to Asus — a small components manufacturer that was, in effect, nursed to success by Dell. The extent of the schooling delivered by Dell to Asus was pretty profound, given how far up the value chain Dell outsourced its operations.
But here's a question: at what point did Dell seal its fate? When was it that Dell had outsourced enough that Asus, with a desire to simply get out of the low-value work, could have made it all the way to the point that it did? I'm beginning to wonder whether just component development and assembly was enough. In the case of Samsung, it seems that everything else they needed to learn, they did by entering the emerging market, which Apple has largely left alone.
Now, it's obvious that there are some very clear differences between the decisions that Apple have made in terms of outsourcing, and the decisions Dell have made. Dell outsourced its business all the way up to the design of its products. In many respects, Apple is doing the opposite — going so far as to even bring chip design in house. Horace has done some fantastic work detailing the extensive amount of investment Apple has made in its supply chain and it's clear that they've spent a lot of money investing in equipment used in production.
But there's also no denying that Apple has begun to rely extensively on a network of suppliers across Asia.
It's when you start putting the two arguments together that you realize that Apple may have a more serious problem on its hands. I want to again recount the final two lines of Gruber's argument:
It’s their business and operations strength — the Cook side of the equation — that is furthest ahead of their competition, and the more sustainable advantage. It cannot be copied without going through the same sort of decade-long process that Apple went through.
He's right — generating that scale requires a long gestation period — one that Apple went through. And it can't be copied without significant time and effort on the part of a competitor. But there's one big implicit assumption here — that suppliers won't turn around and start developing their own offering. Because when Apple went through this transformative process, where the design whittled down the broad range of offerings to just a few, and they generated the scale on the business side that accompanied that — they weren't actually the only one to go through that process. Apple's partners — their suppliers — went through it with them. And they've got very big, and very good at what they do. Samsung, obviously, is among those partners.
Now, the response I often hear to this line of reasoning is: Apple hasn't outsourced anywhere near as much as Dell has. How are the situations analogous? But I think it's actually the wrong question. Instead, the question is: has Apple already outsourced too much?
For all intents and purposes, we're at a level of maturity in the smartphone market where I believe design — particularly on the hardware side — has largely become commoditised. Performance is now "good enough". Whereas it was not so long ago that consumers sat on the edge of their seats to find out what the new iPhone had to offer ("please, fix the battery life", or "please, make it faster") the recent release of the iPhone 5 seemed not to generate the same intense reaction. Now, I'm not saying it won't sell well — in fact, it will probably become the best selling phone of all time — but people aren't making these decisions based on huge design differences between the devices. The basis of competition has shifted. HTC recently learned this the hard way when it introduced the One X — a phone that, to the critics, at least, was considered the best Android phone available — "a masterpiece", "one of the best mobile devices I've ever used". Yet it has been absolutely crushed in the marketplace by Samsung. How? Well, Samsung used its business scale to, as Horace put it on Twitter, "invite operators to a better party with an eye-watering marketing budget". This has nothing to do with Samsung making a better phone (they probably didn't), or Samsung copying Apple (indeed, HTC may have just done a better job of copying Apple). Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that Samsung has had its business sucked along in Apple's slipstream.
There's another way of seeing just how deep the problem lies. Jobs promised "thermonuclear war" on the copied devices, and so far, the biggest target of Apple's many legal warheads has undoubtedly been Samsung. Getting a $1 billion judgement certainly proves Apple was serious about it. But doesn't it seem strange to you that the target of such a devastating strategy on the legal side, just so happens to be… one of the most important suppliers for Apple's new phone?
The problem that Apple is facing right now has nothing to do with their designs being copied. There is a long history of copying in the tech industry; patents being deployed in lawsuits by giants often signify desperation more than anything else. Rather, the problem that Apple faces is that it now is going up against at least one competitor that has been a beneficiary of the scale that Apple has achieved on the business side. Samsung has clearly demonstrated that, like Asus, it was not satisfied being a low-margin ODM — of doing all the menial work while somebody else made the big bucks. Suing Samsung over Android patents isn't going to change that — if Google's operating system gets too expensive to use, there'll be a switch made to Microsoft. Or to another operating system altogether. It doesn't really matter, because design in the smartphone space has been commoditized. It's good enough. Manufacturers are now creating performance that most consumers aren't able to absorb. Instead, as we've moved into a world where performance is now "good enough", the world has flipped into one where it's the business side — operational scale — that matters most.
Apple have taken steps to minimize the ability of competitors to duplicate their business advantage. There's a great post here on Quora describing how Apple has used its supply chain as a competitive advantage and how competitors end up subsidizing Apple's use of the technology. But the approach of "locking in" key new technology so nobody else can get them works best in a world where consumers need more performance from their devices — a world is rapidly slipping away.
So, what's Apple got to do? In so much as it is able to trust its suppliers of key components not to become competitors, it can continue to use them. But where it can't, or where those suppliers have already become competitors, it has only one sensible choice — replace them. It has two choices here: the first (and obvious one) is with another supplier. But that risks the same thing happening all over again — Apple nursing another supplier into a competitor. The second choice: for components and services that are critical to maintaining competitive advantage in the markets which Apple plays, Apple needs to build the components themselves.
Most companies wouldn't be in a position do that. But Apple is almost already there. I also hear that there might be a country out there with relatively high unemployment rate, looking for some jobs to be brought back home. Funnily enough, it seems that's just what Tim Cook is doing right now. This approach might just be a good way of on-shoring some of those untaxed offshore profits (I imagine the tax benefits for building a few factories in the US would be quite high), all the while taking away business from competitors — both current and future.
But there's one question that still remains. In the instance of the threat that Samsung poses to Apple: is it already too late?
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Looking for more information on the renaissance of production and its effect on the technology industries? Then come to Asymconf and take part in the debate.
John Sculley:
"I think they're going through a very significant change now in terms of product cycles," Sculley explains. "Traditionally Apple introduces products once a year; now it's really introducing products twice a year. The complexity of that from a supply chain is immense, and Apple seems to be doing it well. So, I think that people are underestimating just how well Apple is run, and just how successful the company can be when it gets to that twice-a-year product introduction cycle."
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: Apple is well-run | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Suggesting that Apple is moving to a semi-annual cycle is a very provocative thing to say, but it's something I've also speculated is happening during a Critical Path podcast. Sculley's comments prompted me to weigh the possible evidence that this is happening:
Admittedly, these are circumstantial pieces of evidence but they do corroborate Sculley's claim of a six month product cycle. Put another way, if Apple is not switching to a six month cycle then there seems to be a lot of stress for no benefit.
I would also add that this change in cycle time is an enormous undertaking. Since Apple is an integrated company, not only production but marketing, design, hardware and software engineering must be re-configured. To put it in perspective, when Ford changed its operating mode from producing one model to a flexible mass production method pioneered by General Motors, the company had to shut down for production for six months.
The operational aspects are daunting and would affect almost all employees in the company. Therefore if it is happening it's also possible that there is some knowledge of this change dissipating outside the company, perhaps explaining Sculley's confidence in the claim.
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Looking for more information on the renaissance of production and its the effect on the technology industries? Then come to Asymconf and take part in the debate.
An update on Asymconf California, a discussion of engagement and why Android does not get enough of it, why Amazon likes giving away Fires and the causal hypothesis of Samsung's success in smartphones. That plus announcing a new 5by5 show: High Density.
via 5by5 | The Critical Path #65: The Shoe Seller's Dilemma.
A dialogue with Benedict Evans, mobile analyst. Benedict has observed not only the technology and telecommunications industries as an equities analyst but also worked for an operator and a major media company. We take a look at mobile strategy and what the media industry will evolve into.
Horace and Moisés talk about the consequences of Samsung's absorption of all Android profits, the limits of iPhone's addressable market, Apple bear markets and, like an object in orbit, how Apple seems to always be falling but never hits Earth. Finally, Horace introduces Asymconf California.
In this episode Horace and Moisés discuss the iPad mini launch weekend (vis-a-vis older iPads and Windows 8), the curious case of choosy late adopters of smartphones in the US and the mystery of Apple's capex late in the year. Horace spins a yarn about how Apple is playing chess with Sharp and Foxconn (and others) vs. Samsung.
5by5 | The Critical Path #61: Testing the App Supernova: An interview with Maxwell Wessel.
Horace interviews Maxwell Wessel, fellow at Clay Christensen's Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School. We explore the notion of apps as a disruption for multiple industries, especially entertainment.
Tim Cook speaking about the Apple TV product:
For Q4 we sold 1.3 million. That is up over a 100% year-on-year. We sold more than 5 million Apple TVs during the fiscal year, which is almost double the previous year, when we sold 2.8 million. So the business continues to do very well, but if you look at the size of revenue of this business versus our other businesses, it’s quite small and so it still has the hobby label, however it’s a beloved hobby and we continue to focus on it and continue to believe there is something more there and continue to pull the string to see where it takes us.
Five million Apple TVs per year is a half-billion dollar hobby. As such it quintupled from the first year (calendar 2007).
The value for hardware is, of course, only a part of the story. It is accounted for as part of peripherals revenue and amounts to 18% of total peripherals revenues. Last May I estimated that the installed base of Apple TVs was 10 million. I'd estimate current total to be closer to 12 million. Assuming $10/month in content sales per Apple TV results in $1.4 billion of which 30% might be retained by Apple as revenue (agency fee).
The yearly revenue thus could be as high as $900 million. Therefore it seems plausible that Apple TV is on the verge of being a billion dollar business.
It may be a hobby to Apple but I've noted before on my podcast that Apple TV is a mirror image of the Kindle business model: Sell hardware at low margins and experiment with content sales as a profit model. The "hobby" moniker means that it's not a big business but how big is Kindle or Nexus 7 for their respective owners?
Kindle may sell up to 10 million units at nearly break-even but is the average revenue per user much higher than Apple TV? What about the Nexus franchise? Is the loss on hardware leading to revenue to Google+OEMs above $10/month? I doubt it.
I can't be precise or absolute about it since we don't have data from Amazon or Google about units or from any of the platforms' margins or attach rates for content, but I'm doubtful that they qualify for more than hobby status according to Apple's definition. At least in terms of profitability, Apple TV could be bigger than either Kindle or Nexus tablets.