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Apple is great at a lot of things. So great in fact, that it is difficult to emulate them with any real success. They are Apple and they are better than everyone else at almost everything that they do. I bet they always will be, even now that Jobs has stepped down.One of the things they are brilliant at is approaching strategy without regard for competition. When most companies approach new product development, they look to capture share of the market. When Apple approaches a market, they look to draw new people in, and scale the market, or perhaps create an entirely new one. When they launched the iPhone, they weren’t concerned with capturing a share of the smartphone market, they were going to pull both smartphone and stupidphone users in with a compelling product that met their needs in a way that no company had done before. The iPad didn’t capture market share of the tablet market, it created it.While no one but Apple can be Apple, every non-commodity company should consider growing a market rather than just capturing share. When companies capture share of an existing market, they create offerings that are generic and undifferentiated. However when companies look at unmet needs and create products to fill them, they create products with compelling points of view that lead to sustainable growth over time.
