Apple’s Bad Apple – Want A Bite? A Week In Review
It can be seen that the bad Apple in Steve Job’s strategy has been the complete and utter lack of a social media strategy and now he hopes to solve it with the new 85.34mb iTunes 10 update that offers something that’s called Ping.
Ping’s Pong?
The interesting element of all this is that Apple have been known for being ruthless in business and exhibiting an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what people want, but they must of have had a glaring blind spot to the social aspect of music. Spotify first came onto the scene in November 2006 and not only offers consumers free access to millions of songs, but from an early date have managed to build in a very strong social aspect by offering the ability for users to create and share their own playlists. Not only that, but within the system you can tweet and Facebook individual songs and those playlists – they even encourage others to recommend music by fostering other music sharing networks based on their own infrastructure. But, how can it take a company as “on the pulse” as Apple so long to bring something that they can only hope dominates “their” market? Crikey even Myspace was offering sociality to music 6 years ago.
If Apple were so late off the starting block, how can they take the lead? With 160m users compared to 40m for last.fm and 7m for Spotify you would sure expect they could do so. Even with great marketing (in the past) you’re only good as the product you offer. Twitter is good now at encouraging you to connect with more people (they recently even stopped you bulk deleting your follows) and Facebook excels at helping you find friends to connect with when you give them temporary access to your email accounts. How does Ping do it? Well you’ve got to know your friend’s email addresses. With most of us having more than one email account, how are we supposed to know which account to use – especially as most of us connect within social networks that don’t even rely on email use?
Furthermore, people may become a bit wary of the commercial nature of iTunes and the possibility of the recommended music being influenced by the marketing dollars of the record labels rather than the grassroots recommendations of the masses.
So what can entrepreneurs learn from Apple?
- Just because you’ve been successful in the past, don’t assume that you will be in the future;
- If you spot a hole in your strategy, fix it quickly;
- Don’t lose sight of the strengths of those new competitors and make sure you replicate or improve upon them in your own offering;
- Make the damn thing work properly.
Business Plans Less Important?
Perhaps Apple needs to revisit their business plan? But if they’re like the UK internet community then they’re probably less interested in them than they used to be – well that’s according to Google data.
Are we right in asserting that as people have become less interested in business plans that they’ve turned their attention directly to getting a business loan instead? An alternative view would be that as people disregard the need for business plans, the end result is that in time they’ll forced into getting a business loan? The reallity of the situation is anybody’s guess.
Angels Den Comming To A Conference Hall Near You
What’s new us though? Well Co-Founder Bill, will be speaking at the Web 3.0 conference in Hong Kong in November. However, if you can’t wait that long and would like to see Bill in action closer to home, you can at the London Connections event in association with Business Scene, The University of East London and Knowledge Dock. The event will be held on 27th September at The Marriott Hotel, Marble Arch. Click here for more details.
Of course they’re not the only events to be of interest in the coming months. Don’t forget we’ve got a whole host of SpeedFunding and free Funding Clinic events up and down the country – all with the aim of helping you attract Angel Investment. Find out when and where they are here.
-
http://www.azullo.com Guy Cookson
