This week Apple has surpassed Exxon as < strong>the most valuable company in the world, signifying a business milestone that illustrates the confidence of markets and investors in innovation. We all know the meteoric rise in both price and sales that Apple has experienced in recent years after the latest addition of Steve Jobs. Apple is the success story of the technology company par excellence, which perhaps only Google or perhaps Microsoft can overshadow.
However, there are some doubts about the future of Apple, not only linked to the uncertain state of health of Steve Jobs, which I do not want to discuss. Joichi Ito, director of MIT Media Lab, recently commented after his visit to Spain, that Apple will die mainly due to its closed ecosystem. Is Apple’s strategy of offering a closed and controlled ecosystem sustainable in this sense as a counterpart to generating the best user experience?
The Economist also wonders about the durability of Apple’s reign< /strong> and other technology companies. In the article “The test of time. Which of today’s technology giants might still be standing tall a century after their founding? published taking advantage of IBM’s centenary, in fact bet on Amazon, Apple and Facebook as companies of the future that will continue to be leaders 100 years from now while they do not believe that Dell, Cisco or Microsoft get it.
Moving away from the question of an open ecosystem versus a closed ecosystem, what interests me the most is discerning which is Apple’s most valuable core capability. The one that others have so much trouble copying and introducing into their companies. At first glance it may seem that Apple is a company that is at the mercy of the continuous introduction of new consumer products whose rapid diffusion and subsequent obsolescence creates a certain weakness for them. Will Apple be able to continue bringing these kinds of products to market indefinitely?
However, we can also observe Apple not as a product company but as a process company. Apple has managed to decipher the magic formula of innovation processes like no other company in the world; this is its core capability, and it is a capability that proves to be very difficult to imitate. Apple has shown that it is capable of applying its innovation processes to PCs, mobile devices, tablets, and now it is doing so in cloud computing. While the output of the process has been changing, its true competitive advantage is in the innovation process, whose dynamics it demonstrates mastering with excellence.
Investors who trust Apple trust in its seemingly infinite capacity to generate innovative and disruptive new products and services and, after all, it is a trust in innovation as a company’s most important asset. .