The IPOD Innovation
Index
Introduction
...3
Evolution
..
...4
Analysis of
the Innovation Process
...6
Conclusion
..
.10
References
..
.
..10
Introduction:
8 out of 10 people in the world are
fond of music. These days when you say music the first thing that comes to your
mind is Apple Incs IPOD. Apples IPod is the most popular mp3 music player in
the market. iPod stores media on an internal hard drive, while all other
models, aside from the Microdrive-based mini, use flash memory to enable their
smaller size. As with many other digital music players, iPods can also serve as
external data storage devices.
Apple's iTunes software is a jukebox
application, which stores a music library on the user's computer and can play,
burn, and rip music from a CD and facilitates transfer of music, video, images
and other data to and from the iPod. The iPod has a unique user interface which
is easy to use. As of September 2007, the iPod had sold over 110 million units
worldwide (stated in "The Beat Goes On" conference) making it the
best-selling digital audio player series in history.
Fig 1:The first iPod
This paper focuses on the process
Apple Inc used to decide to build an iPod and how they built it in record time,
protected it and extended it to build more innovative products like the iPhone
based of it which put Apple from a path of recovery to path of prosperity.
The innovation process used by Apple
is quite different to the traditional innovation model and has set the tone 21st
century innovation model. Studying this innovation model will help understand
how to innovate on demand in this lighting fast 21st century!
Evolution:
Music has been around for centuries.
The way people listen to the music has evolved with time. In the ancient times
musicians used to perform live for kings and powerful and wealthy men,
gradually as technology progressed we found a way to record music and listen to
it at our own leisure. This started with large gramophone discs which evolved
into small compact magnetic audio tapes which led to Compact disc audios. The
interesting jump came from magnetic audio tapes to Compact discs. CDs improved
the sound quality by great extent and allowed user to seamlessly shift across
songs with accurate precision and no delay. However the number of songs that
could be held in a CD or an audio tape was almost the same. With the advent of
computer aided encoding techniques audio experts were able to remove certain
frequencies from the audio tracks there by reducing the memory required to
store songs and still maintain the audio quality of the sound track. This new
encoding audio format was called MP3. It was to store approximately 300 songs
on a CD. Now we had a mechanism to store more music on a CD. However the
players remained the same. In case of audio tapes you had the portable battery
operated cassette player and for CDs you had the portable CD player which
evolved into MP3 CD player. However any of these devices still needed discs to
carry their music. Also with the advent of MP3 format people had found it easy
to download songs of Napster and build their own music libraries and these
libraries consumed memory space which was in GBs and not MBs which could not be
placed in one standard compact disc. Also burning songs on to a CD on an
average required at 15-20 minutes plus if you were using a re-writable it
consumed even more time. Finally, there were growing concerns over music piracy
too.
Apple
Inc was on a comeback path at that time around year 2000 and they were
wondering how to boost up sales for the Mac.
Music
lovers were trading tunes like crazy on Napster. They were attaching speakers
to their computers and ripping CDs. The rush to digital was especially marked
in dorm rooms a big source of iMac sales but Apple had no jukebox software
for managing digital music.
To
catch up with this revolution, Apple licensed the SoundJam MP music player from
a small company and hired its hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin. Under the
direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months retooling SoundJam into iTunes
(mostly making it simpler). Jobs introduced it at the Macworld Expo in January
2001.
While
Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and Co. started looking for gadget
opportunities.
Thus Apple saw a huge value in this
opportunity and decided to build a Mp3 music player which would overcome all
these flaws. And hence the birth of IPOD
Apples team knew it could solve
most of the problems plagued by the Nomad. 1.Its FireWire connector could
quickly transfer songs from the computer to player an entire CD in a few
seconds; a huge library of MP3s in minutes.
2.Thanks to the rapidly growing cell
phone industry, batteries with longer life and power friendly displays were
constantly coming to market.
In February 2001, during the
Macworld show in Tokyo, Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apples supplier of
hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just
developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter considerably smaller than the
2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players but Toshiba didnt have any
idea what it might be used for.
Apples Rubinstein quickly jumped on
the idea of using it for development of IPOD as quoted by him:They said they
didnt know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook, Rubinstein
recalled. I went back to Steve (jobs) and I said, I know how to do this. Ive
got all the parts. He said, Go for it.
Fig 2:The evolution
how it came together
Analysis of the innovation
process
Need for Innovation:
Apple Inc recognized the fact that
although there had been innovations in recording of music, playing of music and
instruments to play the music these innovations to a certain extent were
independent. There was little effort to integrate all of these. Thus as
mentioned in the evolution process
There were three main sources of
pain
1. Need for doing away with discs or
cassettes
2. Need for more memory to carry
entire music library
3. Limitations to making the Memory
reusable
4. Prevention of Music privacy
The Process:
The Pain:
After identifying the sources of
pain Apple decided they were looking for an integrated product. Now the
interesting point to notice here is that Apple did not go to building the
entire thing from scratch. They decided to tap its technology network
consisting of suppliers and distributors and other industry contacts to find
out if anyone had accomplished anything similar or something which might set
the tone for what Apple was looking for.
Through this network they found out
the most popular compact mp3 music player was the Nomad Jukebox from
Singapore-based company called Creative. This was about the size of a portable
CD player but twice as heavy, the Nomad Jukebox showed the promise of storing
thousands of songs on a (smallish) device. This device was a 2.5 inch Hard
drive built by Fijitsu. This player was not perfect and had some flaws:
1. It used Universal Serial Bus to
transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow.
2. The interface was not user
friendly
3. Battery life was just 45 minutes.
However this discovery as mentioned
before set the tone for what Apple was looking for: A portable memory hard
drive with huge capacity which could be loaded and unloaded quickly with mp3
songs.
Step by Step .collecting and putting together the building blocks:
Once the basic goal was realized
Apple looked at its resources to convert this creative idea into innovation.
1. As mentioned in the evolution
process at a Macworld event in Tokyo Toshiba showed Apple the innovative 2.5
inch Hard drive which potentially could be the heart of the product apple
sought. Apple quickly jumped on this opportunity.
2. Another area apple wanted to
innovate was loading and unloading music from the music player. After finding
out that USB was not the best way to go Apple looked at possible technologies
that could improve this performance. Apple selected its fire-wire connector
technology which overcame the problem posed by USB connectors.
3. With regards to the battery Apple
decided to choose a supplier and buy the batteries directly rather than try to
build its own. This was a wise move since batteries were evolving as the cell phone
market had a boom. Additionally Apple had some of its best hardware and
software technicians working on building a power friendly hardware and software
system.
4. Finally with regards to the UI Apple
was known for its user friendly operating systems right from the birth of Mac
it just incorporated this habit in building the hardware and software for the IPod.
5. Finally Apple noticed that people
(mostly younger generations) were using Napster to share and download music.
Apple countered this by providing i-tunes which again bundled copying, playing,
sharing and (legitimately) downloading music at one place.
6. Finally came the sleek packaging
which was possible thanks to the 2.5 inch hard drive procured from its supplier
Toshiba. Apple used its brilliant marketing strategy and since the product was
innovative and difficult to emulate it was able to dictate a higher price and
make high profit margins for number of years.
To summarize Apple systematically
determined what it was looking for by looking at deficiencies in the products
available in the market used their huge technology network consisting of suppliers,
distributors and to a certain extent competitors too to find outif there was
anything they could build on which accelerated the development process. Finally
they used their internal expertise in technology, marketing, distribution and
sales to convert the creative idea they saw outside into an innovative product
called IPod.
Fig 3: A rough flow
chart describing the innovation model possibly used by Apple Inc
Future Innovative
Extensions:
After the success of IPOD apple
introduced a lot of variant products like Video IPod with 30 GB memory which
helped apple keep its self ahead in the competition from Microsofts Zune and
other products. Apple realized that they could not stay ahead of the
competition by simply coming up with variants of their existing innovation
forever and hence had conjure up another breakthrough product which was the
I-phone.
Fig 4:Apples iPath
to iPhone and iPod series
Here the interesting thing was that
Apple used its strategy again but it had more innovative things to combine. The
phone industry was suffering the same fate as the music industry there were
efforts to incorporate music into phones. Apple saw that it had the best Music
player in the market at that time and building a phone was never going to be
difficult for Apples Hardware pundits and hence Apple basically had made an IPod
with a phone and a camera in it which became the I-phone and was sold as a
camera phone with an IPod. They did add
innovative features like touch screen controls without a stylus, google maps ect.
Apple also did not hesitate to take this innovative touch screen technology to IPod
and coming out with IPod touch
Going ahead I believe we will see
more variants of I-phone coming in the market with possibly a higher resolution
camera, more diverse applications like possibly shopping cart which will allow
you to buy things online from the phone itself. After the variants we have to
wait and see which product apple targets to incorporate into the I-Phone!
Conclusion
Apples IPod is a classic example of
innovation in the modern age. Innovations in 19th century were
confined within the walls of the company and each product and its aspect was
built from scratch within the company itself. This model of innovation although
gave fantastic products it was slow as research itself used to take a lot of
time. Time is a luxury one cannot afford in the 21st century and
time to market from idea creation to innovation has to be quick and on demand.
Apple was on a recovery path when
they thought of IPod. They needed something that would propel them out of
recovery and into prosper zone. This had to come quick and on demand.
Apples innovation model kept the key
concept within its walls but took the research outside. It looked for the
building blocks outside apple using an extensive technology network which
helped them gain access to these building blocks. Only Apple knew what it
wanted to do with a 2.5 inch hard drive, a musical juke box called I-tunes.
They then leveraged their internal expertise to put it all together to bring us
an innovative product.
This innovation model shows with
characteristics like collaborate and develop (which gave the 2.5 inch compact
hard drive to the IPod), an open but protected network (which helped in
development of I-tunes) has shown that innovation can be accomplished on demand
and is not restricted to lucky sparks in a few distinct creative minds!.
References:
-Business
Innovations in the 21st Century - Praveen Gupta
-Wikipedia.com
-Wired.com
-Apple.com
-Youtube.com
-images taken from images.google.com