Apple Ecosystem Quotes

A good family farm produces more, in net terms, than the farm family consumes. The good farmer has secured enough land to grow crops and support his or her livestock. The extra production beyond the farm family’s own consumption can be sold and traded for other goods and services—TVs, clothes, books. Some countries are like good family farms, with more bio-capacity than what it takes, in net terms, to provide for their inhabitants. Compare this with a weekend hobby farm, with honeybees, a rabbit, and an apple tree, where most resources have to be bought from elsewhere. Presently 80% of the world population lives in countries that are like hobby farms. They consume more, in net terms, than what the ecosystems of their country can regenerate. The rest is imported or derives from unsustainable overuse of local fields and forests.

Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. “Hi, uh. I’m Jack.” Kim took it. “Jack what?” “Huh?” “Your last name, silly.” “Jackson.” She blinked at him. “Your name is Jack Jackson?” He blushed. “No, uh, my first name’s Rhett, but I hate it, so…” He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. “Well, Jack, what’s your field of study?” “Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I’m working on a research project at the institute.” “Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini’s getting a little low.” “I’ve got that, one second.” He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well. “What do you want to do after you’re done with the project?” Kim continued. “Depends on what I find.” She sent him a simmering smile. “What are you looking for?” Immediately, Jack’s eyes lit up and his posture straightened. “I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, or one with a similar ancestry that could hopefully lead to rebuilding extinct animals via surrogate birth or in-vitro fertilization. We’re on the edge of breaking that code, and if we do, it would mean that we could engineer all kinds of life and reverse what damage we’ve done to the planet’s ecosystem.” Kim stared. “Right. Would you excuse me for a second?” She wiggled off back to her pack of friends by the bar. Judging by the sniggering and the disgusted glances he was getting, she wasn’t coming back. Jack sighed and finished off his beer, massaging his forehead. “Yes, brilliant move. You blinded her with science. Genius, Jack.” He ordered a second one and finished it before he felt smallish hands on his shoulders and a pair of soft lips on his cheek. He turned to find Kamala had returned, her smile unnaturally bright in the black lights glowing over the room. “So…how did it go with Kim?” He shot her a flat look. “You notice the chair is empty.” Kamala groaned. “You talked about the research project, didn’t you?” “No!” She glared at him. “…maybe…” “You’re so useless, Jack.” She paused and then tousled his hair a bit. “Cheer up. The night’s still young. I’m not giving up on you.” He smiled in spite of himself. “Yet.” Her brown eyes flashed. “Never.

The app economy provides an example of a new job ecosystem. It only began in 2008 when Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, let outside developers create applications for the iPhone. By mid-2015, the global app economy was expected to generate over $100 billion in revenues, surpassing the film industry, which has been in existence for over a century.

it enjoys strong network effects from its content ecosystem: thousands of developers write software for Apple devices because that’s where hundreds of millions of users are, and those users stay on the platform because it’s where the apps are.

Now that you understand the key players in ecosystems, here are the key principles of building an ecosystem. They are similar to the principles of creating a community discussed in chapter 8, “The Art of Evangelizing.” CREATE SOMETHING WORTHY OF AN ECOSYSTEM. Once again, the key to evangelism, sales, presentations, and now ecosystems is a great product. In fact, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop an ecosystem from forming. By contrast, it’s hard to build an ecosystem around crap. DESIGNATE A CHAMPION. Many employees would like to help build an ecosystem, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if an ecosystem doesn’t happen?” Ecosystems need a champion—an identifiable hero—within the company to carry the flag for the community. DON’T COMPETE WITH THE ECOSYSTEM. If you want people or organizations to take part in your ecosystem, then you shouldn’t compete with them. For example, if you want people to create apps for your product, then don’t sell (or give away) apps that do the same thing. It was hard to convince companies to create a Macintosh word processor when Apple was giving away MacWrite. CREATE AN OPEN SYSTEM. An “open system” means that there are minimal requirements to participating and minimal controls on what you can do. A “closed system” means that you control who participates and what they can do. Either can work, but I recommend an open system because it appeals to my trusting, anarchic personality. This means that members of your ecosystem will be able to write apps, access data, and interact with your product. I’m using software terminology here, but the point is to enable people to customize and tweak your product. PUBLISH INFORMATION. The natural complement of an open system is publishing books and articles about the product. This spreads information to people on the periphery of a product. Publishing also communicates to the world that your startup is open and willing to help external parties. FOSTER DISCOURSE. The definition of “discourse” is “verbal exchange.” The key word is “exchange.” Any company that wants an ecosystem should foster the exchange of ideas and opinions. This means your website should provide a forum where people can engage with other members as well as your employees. This doesn’t mean that you let the ecosystem run your company, but you should hear what members have to say. WELCOME CRITICISM. Most organizations feel warm and fuzzy toward their ecosystem as long as the ecosystem says nice things, buys their products, and never complains. The minute that the ecosystem says anything negative, however, many organizations freak out and get defensive. This is dumb. A healthy ecosystem is a long-term relationship, so an organization shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of discord. Indeed, the more an organization welcomes—or even celebrates—criticism, the stronger its bonds to its ecosystem become. CREATE A NONMONETARY REWARD SYSTEM. You already know how I feel about paying people off to help you, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reward people in other ways. Things as simple as public recognition, badges, points, and credits have more impact than a few bucks. Many people don’t participate in an ecosystem for the money, so don’t insult them by rewarding them with it.

Apple’s P-type loonshots, of course, transformed their industries: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But what ultimately made them so successful, aside from excellence in design and marketing (most, although not all, of the technologies inside had been invented by others), was an underlying S-type loonshot. It was a strategy that had been rejected by nearly all others in the industry: a closed ecosystem.

Apple’s P-type loonshots, of course, transformed their industries: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. But what ultimately made them so successful, aside from excellence in design and marketing (most, although not all, of the technologies inside had been invented by others), was an underlying S-type loonshot. It was a strategy that had been rejected by nearly all others in the industry: a closed ecosystem. Many companies had tried, and failed, to impose a closed ecosystem on customers. IBM built a personal computer with a proprietary operating system called OS/2. Both the computer and the operating system disappeared. Analysts, observers, and industry experts concluded that a closed ecosystem could never work: customers wanted choice. Apple, while Jobs was exiled to NeXT, followed the advice of the analysts and experts. It opened its system, licensing out Macintosh software and architecture. Clones proliferated, just like Windows-based PCs. When Jobs returned to Apple, he insisted that the board agree to shut down the clones. It cost Apple over $100 million to cancel existing contracts at a time when it was desperately fighting bankruptcy. But that S-type loonshot, closing the ecosystem, drove the phenomenal rise of Apple’s products. The sex appeal of the new products lured customers in; the fence made it difficult to leave.

Jobs was not a first-mover. He imitated and improved in an emerging technology to lead it. But he imitated and improved better than anyone else. He understood his market and offered convenience and style. He developed platforms around his core products, controlled the ecosystem of all the products and services being sold on Apple’s networks, and built one of the world’s greatest companies.

A complete ecosystem allows you to build a new business model that is often difficult for competitors to catch. By offering a complete line of products and services that customers seek, and with convenience and competitive prices, a complete ecosystem can make customers happier and keep them tied to your business. Perhaps the master of this strategy was Steve Jobs. His platforms included entire companies. At Pixar, he changed the old system of movie production by keeping the same team of creative and business types who developed endless hits. The company was the platform. At Apple, after his return, he built platforms for music (iPod), cell phones (iPhone), and computers (iPad). Apple’s operating system can also be considered a platform, since it can be used across Apple’s computers and phones.3

As Jobs knew, the war of platforms and ecosystems often was winner-take-all. Apple and Google built platforms and won. RIM and Nokia did not, so they lost.

apple's iphone came along, followed by google's android operating system. both companies offered not just snazzy products but successful platforms for developers. ecosystems of apps grew around them, while nokia's symbian operating system became, by comparison, hopelessly passé. by 2011, nokia was in free fall, never to recover.

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

Apple doesn’t care about privacy. All it cares about is privacy for the privileged.

Apple is losing its grip on the IOS and iPhone ecosystems. One example is the bad experience of IOS killing the background apps, which shows that Apple is not planning and controlling the IOS ecosystem well. Another example is the sudden increase in RAM for different iPhone models, which creates a lot of fragmentation and confusion for developers and users. It also makes the iPhone less efficient and reliable. I remember the days when the iPhone had 1G RAM, and it could keep the app content even after restarting. But those days are gone and it's not over yet.

Among them, you are almost certain to see Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta.2 How would you classify these companies? To say they're tech companies would be an oversimplification. Apple offers credit cards and runs the App Store, which provides customers with everything from food delivery to exercise classes to ride sharing. Amazon runs a large chain of grocery stores and owns the movie studio MGM. The difference between the list of top companies in years past and today reflects a colossal economic reorientation, the significance of which is only now beginning to be felt.

I don’t regret selling Nest to Google. Neither does our executive team. We always revisit this question when our old team meets up. Our only regret is that we didn’t get to finish what we started. But we made the decision to sell together, and we all stand by it today. Given the data we had at the time, we’d do it again. Especially since we were right. As predicted, once Nest brought the idea of the connected home to life, the giants of Apple, Amazon, and Samsung all wanted a piece. They built teams to compete with Google and Nest and created their own home products, platforms, and ecosystems. We dodged a bullet. And Google was and remains an incredible company. It’s filled with brilliant people at every level. It’s changed the world many times over. Google’s culture works for them—there’s a reason a lot of people never leave the mother ship. But that culture is enabled and driven by the fact that Google’s search and advertising business pretty much prints cash. Even Googlers call it the “Money Tree.” It’s turned Google into a place of wild abundance where anyone can more or less do anything—or sometimes nothing at all. They’ve been so profitable for so long and have had so few existential business threats that they’ve never had to cut back or slim down, never had to be scrappy. They haven’t had to really fight for anything in decades. Lucky them! But at Nest, we were fighters. Our culture was born from the Apple way, a culture that survived multiple near-death experiences over its forty-plus years of existence. We were ready to fight for our mission and our place at the table, fight to keep our culture and our way of doing things.

The big institutions are not so much worried about what a Lending Tree or a SoFi are doing to them. They’re worrying about Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. They’re worrying about what happens if Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google really, really make significant headway into creating their own financial ecosystems that are leveraged off the back of their existing networks.” They have reason to worry. Big Tech is coming, and the bankers—at least the bankers who “know they’re screwed”—know it.

Nadella has struck a powerful balance—aligning the Azure ecosystem, where Microsoft is clearly the leader, while allowing partners in the ecosystem to leverage their participation toward progress elsewhere. His goal is not to create the operating system for the intelligent car, for example, but to be the infrastructure that processes the information (at least for now). As Providence St. Joseph Health CEO Rod Hochman explained when announcing his choice to shift the data and applications of his fifty-one-hospital system to the Azure cloud, he chose Microsoft over Amazon, Apple, and Google because “[Microsoft isn’t] trying to be in the health-care business, but [is] trying to make it better.

If a platform achieves scale and becomes the de facto standard for its industry, the network effects of compatibility and standards (combined with the ability to rapidly iterate and optimize the platform) create a significant and lasting competitive advantage that can be nearly unassailable. This dominance lets the market leader “tax” all the participants who want to use the platform, much as levies were imposed in the bygone Republic of Venice. For example, the iTunes store takes a 30 percent share of the proceeds whenever a song, a movie, a book, or an app is sold on that platform. These platform revenues tend to have very high gross margins, which generate cash that can be plowed back into making the platform even better. Amazon’s merchant platform, Facebook’s social graph, and, of course, Apple’s iOS ecosystem are great examples of the power of platforms.

bender is going to cook up. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then Google came along and said, “We’re doing Android.” So what’s the difference? Android was going to allow people to download third-party apps. Steve Wozniak: The first iPhone did not have the App Store. Guy Bar-Nahum: Steve panicked, and literally all of a sudden everything clicks through his head and he realizes that he was like a mile behind Google! Steve Wozniak: Openness is so important, and the App Store is a type of openness. It wasn’t the original idea of the iPhone. Steve had to be convinced of it. Guy Bar-Nahum: And so he went to Forstall and told him, “Hey, Forstall, we have to open up an ecosystem,” and that’s where Forstall shined the second time, after making the iPhone UI. He told him, “I was working on it the whole time.” So Forstall had actually ignored Steve’s verbatim order and he worked on it in the basement and made it happen. You have to have balls of steel to do something like that. Guy Bar-Nahum: And then because of Google, Apple was pushed into putting apps on the iPhone. And then apps became the way people touched the web.

Apple’s mobile ecosystem has 60% of smartphone share in the United States and 80% share among teenagers, and over two-thirds of mobile gaming revenues globally.