Insights discovered about my professional passions: Branding, Marketing and Communications
In just a day, this reimagined Apple Inc. logo tribute to the passing of Steve Jobs has made its way around the world – a testament to the nature of truly brilliant, elegantly simple viral ideas, the power of the internet, as well as the speed of social media.
This wonderful design came by way of 19-year-old Jonathan Mak, a self-described designer, photographer and philosopher living in Hong Kong.
Today, I join the chorus of many who have enjoyed Steve Jobs’ “game changing” innovations to bid him adieu. Truly a visionary and creative genius, the world is less of a place without him.
“Because the ones who are crazy to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
No matter how inevitable, it’s always shocking when what you expect really does finally happen. In a gasp heard around the world, Steve Jobs has announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. While there are plenty of analyses and implications to come in the following days, I think it’s just enough for today that we celebrate the man who really did revolutionize the world, one iDevice at a time.
From The Edge Malaysia: Steve Jobs has a different operating system
Continue reading ‘Jobslessness: Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO’
I was reading this bit of news about Apple’s newly launched iTunes Match – touted in the article as “more than just a cloud storage system for songs that fans buy legitimately through iTunes.” What really intrigued me was the value proposition and how Steve Jobs sold it: essentially, Apple has succeeded in making you pay for music piracy without making you pay for music piracy.
What do I mean by this?
Aside from offering to freely distribute new and old iTunes purchases on all of a user’s devices, the Apple impresario unveiled “iTunes Match,” a $25-a-year service starting this fall that will scan users’ devices and hard drives for music acquired in other ways, store it on distant computer servers and allow them to access it anywhere.
The service acknowledges a well-known fact — that most music on iPods, iPhones and iPads was ripped or swapped. Apple reached a deal that gives recording companies more than 70 percent of the new fees, addressing a dark secret that has crippled the music industry, and provides them with some economic payback.
Where Apple is able to identify and match songs from its 18 million-song database, it will transfer them into the user’s iCloud, a storage area housed on servers, including those at a massive new data center in North Carolina.
This is exactly the kind of creative strategic thinking that is lacking in so many businesses and brands today! No wonder we are faced with “more of the same” despite so many new brands coming to life these days. In fact, innovation is highly rewarding:
Industry observers said the new service could translate into big bucks for both Apple and the recording companies.
Apple has about 225 million credit card-backed accounts on iTunes. If only 10 percent signed up for the convenience of accessing music they hadn’t bought there, it could turn into more than $500 million a year in new revenue, said Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore Inc., a company that helps independent artists sell their music on iTunes and other digital music outlets.
The best thing is that consumers get the sense that they’re paying for convenience, not for things they already own, he said.
“It allows for revenue to be made off of pirated music in a way that consumers don’t feel that’s what they’re paying for, and that’s what I find fascinating about it,” Price said.
Read the full article here (and also learn just how much “better” Apple always tries to make things).
I’m often amused and surprised that some of the best business insights I’ve ever come across are from cartoonists (although, maybe I shouldn’t be!). In following the iPhone4 “Antenna-gate” controversy, I came across Dilbert’s Scott Adams positing a very interesting observation on how Steve Jobs successfully managed the controversy for Apple.
Basically, he applied what Adams called the “High Ground Maneuver“.
Steve Jobs muses on Creativity – via CreativeBits (link here).
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
- Steve Jobs
