Which company are you: the Refiner

In an ongo­ing series of posts on the dif­fer­ences between large tech com­pa­nies, I look at the dif­fer­ent mod­els they take (refine,tin­ker, push, attach) and who their spir­i­tual chil­dren may be. In this entry, it’s all about the refiner.

The Refiner: Apple

It’s always been fas­ci­nat­ing to see the fight between geeks over the role of Apple as an inno­va­tor in the tech field. On one hand, peo­ple will argue that Apple pushes the enve­lope by intro­duc­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary new prod­ucts; on the other hand, peo­ple can point out that what Apple does is just imple­ment a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of what already existed.

For exam­ple, there were MP3 play­ers before the iPod, smart­phones before the iPhone, and tablet com­put­ers before the iPad (in the same vein, there has been ways to get the inter­net on your TV from a vari­ety of devices before the AppleTV). But in each cases, Apple came out with prod­ucts that changed the pub­lic per­cep­tion of those cat­e­gories, leav­ing the main­stream feel­ing that Apple was intro­duc­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary products.

The truth is a lit­tle more com­pli­cated: both side of the argu­ment are valid because what Apple does is not so much intro­duce new prod­uct cat­e­gories as it sim­pli­fies them. One could argue that the model of Apple ought to be “inno­va­tion through improve­ments.” Whereas other com­pa­nies look to throw new tech­nol­ogy at a prob­lem, Apple tends to look at solv­ing the prob­lem through reduc­tion: less is more.

An exam­ple: Dial­ing on iPhone and Android phones

An exam­ple of this is the iPhone vs. Android dis­cus­sion. As the owner of both types of devices, I can eas­ily say that the iPhone is a more pol­ished product.

A sim­ple exam­ple is how either phones han­dles the quick dial fea­ture on the phone. When pre­sented with a list of callers you selected, you click on the name of the per­son and the phone dials. By con­trast, on my Sam­sung Vibrant, a short click on the image of the per­son brings up a list of actions I can do (call, text mes­sage, send a pic­ture, etc…), a short click on the name or start brings up the whole detailed infor­ma­tion of the per­son. A long click brings another set of options. How­ever, I’ve yet to find a sin­gle click that will dial the person.

It’s a sim­ple dis­tinc­tion but it is hun­dreds of such lit­tle dis­tinc­tions that make the iPhone a tighter expe­ri­ence. I know Android fans will tell me that I can cus­tomize the phone in a much bet­ter way and that is great if you’re a geek like me but, to the gen­eral pub­lic, such cus­tomiza­tion is an imped­i­ment, not a feature.

Don’t inno­vate, improve

So the offer­ings of com­pa­nies that most look like Apple are not rev­o­lu­tion­ary in the sense of break­ing new grounds but rather are fol­low­ing an ethic of improve­ment. Their focus is less on brand new fea­tures that have never been seen before and more on improv­ing the user expe­ri­ence around a pre-existing approach.

Seen through that lens, Tum­blr, Pos­ter­ous, and Twit­ter can be seen as an evo­lu­tion of the blog­ging mod­els set pre­vi­ously by SixA­part, Automat­tic, and Blog­ger.

It’s a really impor­tant model to fol­low if you want to reach a mass mar­ket and are attack­ing a mar­ket­place with some estab­lished players.