Apple’s product-launch pattern resembles memory recall in young people’s brains

Too frequent switching between different areas slows down memory and hampers companies
George ILIEV

As people age, their memory worsens partly because when they try to recall things, their brain flits between different areas and categories more often than necessary/optimal, research by Warwick University shows. If an old person would be asked to name 100 animals, he/she would switch too often between predators, herbivores, pets, marsupials etc. without exhausting each category, while a young person would be more focused and would exhaust the category before moving on to the next.

Apple’s product launch strategy thus resembles the pattern of functioning of a young person’s brain, as Apple does not flit between categories unnecessarily: Six years after the iPod came the iPhone, three years after the iPhone came the iPad. Google, on the other hand, used to move between various product categories a lot more and has only recently started to narrow down its focus to a few core areas.

(Photo: The old Apple logo, Wikipedia)

Who says caterpillars and milkweed cannot do game theory?

"Outgrow to outcompete" strategies succeed in both nature and business
George ILIEV

(Caterpillar feeding on Milkweed, Wikipedia)

My favourite game in Game Theory is the little known "sailboat race": When you are the leading boat in a race and the second strongest competitor is right behind you, all you need to do to maintain your lead is simply to mimic every move the second boat makes. You must have seen this in Formula 1 racing as well.

The biggest threat posed by this strategy is that a third boat that does not play by your rules may overtake both of you while you are locked in the mirroring strategy. Therefore, when other competitors are around, your best bet is not to look back but to focus ahead.

This is what milkweed seems to be doing: First it evolved a range of defensive mechanisms against caterpillars, such as hairs on the leaves and poisonous latex in the plant's tubes. However, in response caterpillars evolved leave-cutting techniques that stop the flow of latex, while the monarch butterfly caterpillar has even developed immunity to the toxicity of the plant. 

At some point this outcompete/co-evolve strategy must have got too complicated and risky for the two sides locked in the game and some plants just took the fast lane. Instead of defending against the caterpillars, many of the 38 species of milkweed focus on repairing and growing faster. The strategy of outgrowing the enemy, rather than defending itself, seems to be working for the milkweed.

In the corporate world, Sony was applying this forward-looking strategy for decades. Rather than fighting over market share with its next biggest rival, it would simply create a fundamentally new category of product and outcompete everyone in this newly created blue ocean: from the radio transistor and the walkman to the Blu-ray DVD and PlayStation. Apple and Google seem to be doing the same though they still dominate most of their historical market niches. In East Asia, this strategy of shedding old technologies and industries and focusing on the new ones has a name derived from nature: The Flying Geese model of economic/technological development.