Copy Jobs-style success

January 17, 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced his sick leave. Within 17 minutes, Apple's stock price in Frankfurt, Germany (US closed for a holiday) fell 8.8%. The body of an entrepreneur has attracted the attention of global investors. This is Jobs' honor, but Apple's misfortune.

Under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple has achieved a perfect second rise. In fiscal year 2010, Apple's sales revenue was 65.2 billion US dollars, a surge of 52%; the annual net profit soared 70% to 14 billion US dollars, and it also won the global IT industry champion with a market value 24% higher than Microsoft's. Most people, including US President Barack Obama, believe that all this should be attributed to Jobs, an innovative genius. The Financial Times directly called Jobs "a management guru who really knows how to explore the limitless and does not want to be too ambitious."

What will Apple do when innovative geniuses and management masters are on sick leave without a return date? Whether the COO Tim Cook chosen by Jobs who is "good at solving Apple's inventory problems" can make Apple stabilize the original R&D team, maintain the original innovation ability, and continue to provide super cool products for fruit fans ? Although global investors chose to vote with their feet for the first time, people still look forward to rational analysis of Apple without Jobs.

Looking back at the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad products that Jobs launched after returning to Apple in 1997, it was these products that supported Apple's re-emergence, created the Apple myth, and successfully subverted the PC, music, and mobile phone industries. Market structure. Studying the characteristics of these products and finding the patterns and laws of Jobs' research and development from these products are of great significance to both Apple and Chinese companies.

Finding product ideas for customer needs

The author of "Creating the Apple Myth" described Jobs this way: "The market research Steve does is look at himself in the mirror every morning." This is deeply misleading People, make most people think that Apple products can only and can only be created by geniuses like Steve Jobs, and they are not replicable.

However, this is not the case. Apple's broad user needs are the source of Jobs' innovation. From 1985 to 1997, when Jobs started the business of NEXT Computer Company, he did not launch products that satisfied customers. This is not because Jobs and his NEXT team are not strong in R&D and innovation, but because NEXT Company lacks extensive and loyal users. The source of inspiration required for R&D innovation is missing.

The epoch-making "iTunes" launched by Steve Jobs at Apple was an innovation based on the needs of old users, and he himself only discovered and explored this demand. The prototype product of "iTunes", SoundJam, is the most popular MP3 player software developed by Jeff of C&C Company for Macintosh (Macintosh, referred to as Mac). value, repositioned it, and coined the term "data hub" to describe it, hoping it would bring Apple into the digital music space. Therefore, the application foundation of Apple users is the fundamental factor that inspires Jobs' inspiration. Without this foundation, Jobs' innovation can only be a source of water.

Paying attention to the application needs of old users and digging deeply into the needs of old users is the source of enterprise R&D innovation. Huawei's "access server", which accounted for 90% of the market share that year, was only when its senior management captured the "large capacity" and "support for signaling No. 7" of domestic users' dial-up Internet access and other special needs during a user visit. This best-selling product was developed.

Platform-based product development innovation

At Macworld 2007, Jobs defined the iPhone first as a touch-enabled widescreen iPod, and then as a revolutionary mobile phone, which brought Apple's platform-based approach to life. The R&D concept is clear in one sentence. When the iPad product was launched, ordinary netizens also saw the similarity between the iPad and the iPhone, and also tied the three iPhones together with Scotch tape to mock the iPad. As everyone knows, this is precisely the greatness of Apple. This platform-based research and development is the guarantee for Apple to conduct high-quality product research and development in a short period of time.

The concept of platform-based research and development is to first create a successful product, and then expand and amplify one of the factors around the product, strengthen its functions, and quickly develop a series of products that meet the needs of a specific customer. This can not only greatly shorten the development cycle, but more importantly, reduce the development risk and ensure the success rate, which is the biggest advantage of platform-based research and development.

After Huawei launched the C&C08 million-gate switch product, it has successively launched a series of platform products based on this platform, such as "transmission products", "queuing machines", "intelligent platforms", and "access servers". The growth has made great contributions.

Pursuit of perfect R&D quality management

Jobs is already paranoid about the pursuit of perfection when it comes to the quality requirements of new products. He pursues the precision of every step, whether it is appearance design, user experience, industrial design, or system design, or even how the motherboard is placed, everything must be beautifully designed. Designers had to endure his nitpicking, modifying the product over and over, or even being rejected outright.

Why do R&D personnel, who are so well-loved and strictly forbidden to criticize in various companies, tolerate such ravages under Jobs? There are two tricks: First, Jobs has been forcing developers to raise their self-expectations, inspiring them to produce masterpieces beyond their imagination; on the other hand, Jobs is even more demanding of himself, according to former Apple employee Mike Evange Lister recalls that Jobs would typically prepare for new product presentations weeks in advance, reviewing the products and technologies on display, rehearsing them, and consulting on-site product managers for feedback, all for a 5-minute product presentation. Apple's perfect quality is the result of these "offstage" efforts.

In the domestic R&D management model, companies generally only pay more attention to the progress of R&D, while the management of R&D quality is relatively lax, which leads to a low pass-through rate in the production process, a high rejection rate, and many quality problems during mass production. Product promotion has struggled. Starting from difficulty, strictness, and actual combat, complete small-batch trial production in all kinds of critical, after large-scale production, strictly follow customer service, observe product quality and technical status in one or two years, and improve new products, These are some measures taken by Huawei to reform R&D quality management that year, and have a good reference for domestic enterprises to improve R&D quality.

Copy the new service-based business model

In 2002, with the popularity of the iPod player, in order to be able to download music on the Internet, Jobs formed the iTunes music store and signed with the five largest music companies at the time The agreement has created an online service model recognized by the music industry. Since then, Apple's profits have had two paths: one is to obtain one-time high profits by selling hardware products; the other is to obtain continuous profits from repeated purchases by selling music and applications. The revenue of iTunes music download service has maintained a relatively high growth. Even in 2009, when iPod sales slowed down, the revenue of music download service still increased by 21%, and the proportion of revenue in the music service segment also increased from 16.4% in 2005. To 33.3%, total revenue rose to $4.036 billion.

After that, Jobs cloned this model again and again. In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone and the App Store. At present, the total number of programs in the App Store has exceeded 300,000, and the number of downloads in its online software store in January 2011 exceeded 10 billion. On January 6, 2011, the Apple Mac application store was officially launched, providing more than 1,000 application software for users to download, and 100 downloads were obtained within 24 hours of going online.

From hardware to service, it is a strategic transformation of manufacturing enterprises. With this model, Apple controls the most core and most profitable part of the industry.

Apple's user base, platform-based R&D philosophy, pursuit of perfect quality and duplication of business models are the four reasons why Steve Jobs created the Apple myth. Huawei and Samsung, who are also practicing these principles, have also become the most innovative in R&D. capable high-tech company. This shows that we can replicate the excellent research and development capabilities of Jobs in the absence of Jobs.

About the author: Lv Moudu, a partner of Zhenglue Junce, an expert in enterprise operation reform, has rich experience in supply chain, process, enterprise informatization and other practical and consulting experience, is an expert in the field of enterprise operation ability improvement Including IT, medicine, manufacturing, construction, service industries, etc.