Matt Burns, author of CrunchGear, published this week an article with which I identified a lot. According to him, the key to Apple's current success is its own * lean * product line. You may not have stopped to think about it calmly, but on the hardware side, Apple today basically has a smartphone, four iPods, three notebooks and three desktops. That’s it.
By comparison, companies like Garmin offer consumers 82 (!) GPS units to choose from. My God, I'm already crazy when I have three models of a certain product to compare, I see specification by specification to make sure what is best for me … but 82 ?! to drive anyone crazy. We all know that if Apple decided to produce a GPS, it would offer one, if very two models and that's it.
Want more examples? Canon today sells 23 cameras point-n-shoot within four product lines; Nikon, 17 out of three; Monster Cable offers HDMI cables in 10 different product lines; Motorola currently shows 27 cell phones available on its website. With a single device, Apple sold 88% more than this one, in 2008. In addition to driving any potential buyer crazy, it all contributes to high investments in the production of all this variety of models.
As a longtime Apple consumer, thinking this way shows me how beneficial such positioning and organization are for Apple. If you visit the site of a Sony for life, you will surely be lost in less than 3 minutes. Even the Apple site map is very simple, so lean and well separated that things are. What do you think about that?