{"id":80,"date":"2005-07-14T11:33:38","date_gmt":"2005-07-14T17:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=80"},"modified":"2005-07-14T11:33:38","modified_gmt":"2005-07-14T17:33:38","slug":"money_isnt_ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=80","title":{"rendered":"Money isn’t everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly five years ago, in October 2000, I wrote a column<\/a> for the Industry Standard about Apple’s resurgence and the innovations that were powering it. I was reminded of that article last night when the company announced another blowout quarter<\/a>, fuelled by continued rapid growth in its iPod business as well as expanding sales of Macs.<\/p>\n

Through most of the 1990s, you may remember, the common wisdom was that Apple was doomed because, with its shrinking market share, it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the innovations on the Windows side. “The argument that Apple would fall behind in innovation sounded reasonable,” I wrote in 2000. “R&D on the Wintel platform was spread among dozens of big hardware and software companies, each of which was making vast investments in developing new technologies and products. Apple, by contrast, was pretty much on its own. There was no way it could come close to matching the dollars and time spent by the Microsoft-Intel axis. But look what happened. In product innovation, Apple has leapt ahead of the competition.”<\/p>\n

A half decade later, Apple continues to outpace the competition in the innovation race. And it’s not ahead in one narrow area. It’s the leader, arguably, in PC hardware design, PC operating systems, PC multimedia software, digital music players and online music retailing. That’s a pretty broad swath. Innovativeness is by no means synonymous with business success, but Apple’s experience in recent years provides a fascinating case study. It underscores, above all, one important fact: Whatever lies at the heart of business creativity sure ain’t money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple’s R&D expenditures are a fraction of those spent on the Windows platform, yet the company continues to outpace its rivals in the innovation race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}