[chiefzilla1501]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

They absolutely would have and did.
They already were there and didn't.

Badly worded on my part. This is not what I meant to say.

You seem to be conflating marketing with innovation. They are discrete entities.

I've worked in both Marketing and Marketing Innovation. This mentality that they're discrete is exactly the reason why Apple succeeded while competitors failed. The core of marketing is about knowing who your customer is and then giving them what they want. Competitors built mp3s/phones/etc... that delighted the same geeks who developed the products. Apple built their products with the average consumer in mind, and they focused not just on the product, but on the whole user experience.

iTunes was not a revolutionary idea, it was borrowed from 10+ year old technology at the time of its release.

The iPhone was a more marketable Palm Treo

If you don't think iTunes was revolutionary, you should think back to how frustrating it was to load music onto competitive mp3 players. iTunes was the first software system to integrate everything about music into one platform. You could buy music, share music, build playlists... and then quickly transfer music to your iPod or someone else's. They took an old system and put a massive user facelift to it, something nobody else was doing.

The Treo didn't have wifi, media capability, or the multi-touch we used today (it was geared more toward styluses), and the enormous resolution fullscreens. Not to mention wifi access. It was the most integrated phone at the time by a longshot.

Apple hasn't created anything truly revolutionary in many years. What they have done, masterfully, I might add, is create the belief that their products are revolutionary because of the way they market them.

They didn't create the belief that their products were revolutionary. They didn't just manipulate people into buying their brand. They were the only company that understood what their customer wanted and built a product for them in a way nobody else did. That's extremely revolutionary.

These products had already had many years in which they were floating in your "life cycle chasm". Apple was prescient enough to see when those technologies were gaining momentum and adopters. By no means did they act as a tipping point for the adoption of those technologies.

The other technologies never crossed the chasm because they were made for geeks. They had horrible storage memory, limited music libraries, were horribly difficult to buy music for (in most cases, were subscription-based), and were often difficult to even use. Again, integration. They integrated the entire experience together seamlessly while competitors made it ridiculously difficult and frustrating. Because Apple became the universally accepted standard for mp3 players, that was the first time the music industry was ever bullied into backing into demands of an online music distributor. That included offering songs at $.99, which the music industry furiously resisted.