All posts tagged apple

How Apple recovered from mediocrity

By Bryson Moore on September 13, 2010 in Ideas with No Comments

I know, I know, I write about Apple a lot. There’s just so much to learn from them. This video is no exception.

This is Steve Jobs in 1997 announcing his plan to get Apple back on track by communicating their core value in a new way (“We believe people with passion can change the world for the better”).

In short, this was at a time when Apple was trying to figure out who they were. In 1997, Apple was a hodgepodge of products and a diluted brand. The “Think Different” campaign is recognized as the beginning of Apple’s rise to greatness.

It starts to get really good around 3:00 –

“Our customers want to know who is Apple and what do we stand for in this world. What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well. Apple at its core, its core value is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. We wanted to find a way to communicate this.”

More explanation here.

P.S. I think I’ll start wearing shorts and sandals to work (hey, it worked for Steve Jobs).

Invincible Apple

By Bryson Moore on June 30, 2010 in Ideas with No Comments
(From FastCompany.com)

(From FastCompany.com)

Here is an interesting article about how Apple became the largest company in the tech universe. Many of Apple’s success factors seem to defy what most would consider rational “business” strategy.

One of the stories I like is about a guy who was hired to create a DVD-burning program that Apple planned to release on high-end Macs — an app that would later become iDVD. He worked on the pitch for weeks. He had page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program’s various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work. Then Steve came in. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. ‘Here’s the new application,’ he says. ‘It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.’ ”

Keep reading…