Apple - Falling in love with itself - Recipe for disaster

Why do successful companies fail? Because they get into the mode of incremental growth and stop thinking about game changing scenarios. It may be beginning to happen at Apple. 

Apple has become so predictable that people knew all about iPhone5, much before it was officially launched.

Some time back I had written a piece on Innovation. http://manishvermabrainwaves.blogspot.in/2010/04/living-in-flat-world.html#.UFK7UcHiZcQ. For easy reference I am pasting some excerpts from it here. It is so relevant to Apple of today. 

"For survival depend on innovation. It is no longer sufficient to do, what you do, better and faster. Understand what you do! Question the very need of doing it. Ask what besides that. It is about breaking the mold, but not for the heck of it, or just to see how much noise it makes when it breaks!

From organization's perspective, there is one lesson as well - Doing it better and faster gets the incremental growth, the tectonic shifts can't be handled by this philoshopy. Killing of Walkman by iPod is a typical example. Why could Sony not see the digital revolution coming? Did it not have smart people? Well, I think it is not about people, it is about the way organizations are structured. The organizations puts blinders on the employees. The incentive structure gets setup such that everyone in the organization does well when incremental growth is achieved. No one is incentivised or disincentivised to handle the tectonic shifts. A large ecosystem gets created that lives and breathes the incremental targets. While, milking an established product for incremental revenue is essential, however, to secure the long term future, a separate ecosystem has to be created that thrives on innovation, experiments and crystal ball gazing!"

Apple will have to get out of its cozy position of coming up with a few tweaks every year to its product lineup and expect the whole army of people to upgrade to the new tweaked products. Competition is  breathing down its neck and is segmenting the market in all possible ways. After living with iPhone, in almost the same avatar for the last six years, it is high time that it does something drastically new/different. Apple says, design center for the phone is the hand and thumb is the most important tool. Well, that might be true, but the most dreaded finger on the hand is the one in the middle, especially if the customer shows it!