The new iPhone – the 4S – is the first product to be launched since Steve Jobs left his CEO post, and possibly the first to get a luke-warm reception from Apple fans.
Before he passed on, Jobs was the co-creator, innovator and, largely, the face of the brand with indisputable strength.
The new phone has disappointed fans anticipating something perhaps more innovative than what many see as just a faster version of the iPhone 4.
Professor John Naughton of the Open University and Wolfson College, at the University of Cambridge says that the response to the new iPhone has little to do with the product itself.
“The ‘disappointment’ reaction to the iPhone 4S is a reflection mostly of the idiocy of the stock-market analysts and some parts of the blogosphere,” Naughton said.
“What did they expect? A phone that could do teleporting? The 4GS seems to me to be an intelligent enhancement of an already superb product: the voice-recognition system is potentially very important; and the improved camera is also significant – the iPhone is now the most popular camera on Flickr, for example. This seems to have bypassed the more excitable – and clueless – parts of the mass media.”
“Apple’s real problem is that Apple’s competitive advantage is culture – many great technology companies have tried to replicate Apple and failed,” said Stephens, who does not think customers will downgrade the brand after Jobs’s passing.
Ian Stephens, principal at Saffron Brand Consultants in the UK says,”The thing that frustrates them is that they get smart people, they invest, the do the market research, and yet, time and time again, they fall short of where Apple is, and the difference is culture,” said Stephens, who said Jobs, known as a “tough micro-manager on every level”, was “irreplaceable and an all-encompassing eye-in-the sky”.
The danger the company faces is that Apple will stop being Apple, and that “over time their invincibility will wane, and the very hungry competitors around them will actually do what they’ve not been able to do for at least the last decade, and match Apple’s ability to somehow create these amazing products that capture people’s imaginations, because those things have come from the Apple culture, and the Apple culture comes from Steve Jobs,” Stephens said.
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