What Apple always does well

It was 20 years ago when I bought my first home computer, an Apple Macintosh.

When I told my boss about what to me was a pretty exciting purchase, he laughed.

Apple wouldn’t last long as a company. Maybe another five years, tops, he said. The world was going the way of IBM PCs and similar computers.

Just like the Borg, that race of cyber organisms on television’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the IBM PC was expected to be futile to resist. What I had just purchased, he added, was a pretty expensive paperweight.

He was much smarter than I, probably in general and certainly when it came to computers. So I listened to what he said. But I kept my Mac.

It was cool and fun and easy to use. I didn’t know much about it. I knew nothing about how it actually worked. But I liked it.

Since then, Apple has had its ups and downs, but it’s still very much alive. Apple products are still cool, fun and easy to use and people still like them.

I was thinking about that the other day when Apple introduced the iPad, its version of a product that has had only lackluster sales for Amazon and for others that have developed e-readers and netbooks.

The launch sales for Apple’s iPad, estimated at about 300,000, were considered pretty decent. One of the buyers was Tyler Pruitt of Everett, who’s excited to see what will happen with the product.

“I can’t wait to see what magazines will do for it,” he said.”

Pruitt‘s excitement about not only the product, but for its potential, is at the heart of why Apple was able to deflect the juggernaut of the IBM PC. People get excited about not only what Apple products do, but what they might be able to do in the future.

A lot of that excitement is pure marketing hype. But Apple products typically do have elegant designs and almost always have something that you’ve never seen before.

When Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, a marketer of the caliber of circus pitchman P.T. Barnum, unveiled Apple’s first iPhone, he showed how by using a simple finger pinch, customers could zoom in and out of photos, maps and Web pages.

Such touch-sensitive screens have now become smartphone standards. You now see people pinching their phones, tapping them to select items, and flicking them to scroll up and down a list.

Apple has been good not only in exploiting its own new ideas, but in inviting software developers and designers of other products to add their inventiveness to Apple products.

That’s why Pruitt is excited to see what magazines will do with the new iPad. I might add that I can’t wait to see what newspapers will do with the new product.

I mention all this not to jump into the long line of people extolling the virtues of Apple products, but to suggest that people in nearly any business can learn a lot from the company. It’s a model for companies with a competitor who thinks he’s about to crush them.

Here’s what I’ve learned from watching Apple for the last 20 years:

The first thing that you need to do is to make a product that is simple and easy to use.

Then you need to develop a clean and attractive design.

It goes without saying that the product should be something that people need, but if you can develop a product that fills a need people didn’t know they had (think iPod), so much the better.

Along with creating that unknown need for your product, it’s always good to add a little of the “wow” factor — something that’s cool and interesting that people haven’t seen before.

Resistance is not futile, and Apple is a good example of that.

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.