Apple and incremental innovation


Fast Company has a great piece with Apple's Cook, Cue, and Federighi. One area I found interesting was described as Apple's innovation process:

Gadflies who scorn Cook's Apple for its imperfections also scold the company for being "behind" in whatever is the technology du jour. This is nothing new. "What tends to happen with Apple, not just today but in the 18 years I've been here," says Cook, "is that invariably some people compare what we're doing now to a vision or a product that somebody says they will create in the future."

Over its 40 years of existence, Apple has been seen as a laggard in music, video, the Internet, telephony, wireless, content creation, networking, semiconductors, software applications, touch screens, gesture controls, materials, messaging, news aggregation, social media, voice recognition, and mapping. (That's not even close to being an exhaustive list.) Nevertheless, the company has managed to survive by doing an unmatched job of integrating the most important of those technologies into products that eventually delight many customers. By the time Jobs died, Apple's innovation process--the way it accomplishes that job of creating, acquiring, improving, and integrating technology--was polished and proven. It was arguably Jobs's greatest gift to his successor.

I think the last 10 years or so we've seen an explosion in innovation in mobile devices. And as Apple has gained the reputation of dazzling new products, people now expect that every or every other year. That's not sustainable. The last few years as the mobile boom has leveled, I think people need to appreciate slowing innovation isn't a sign of a problem, but rather maturity for the industry.

The second part here is consistent incremental innovation over time is likely to beat big bang innovations. All the little stuff adds up quickly, plus smaller changes allow systems to work better along the path. Not to mention, you're not asking users to continuously learn and relearn products.