Apple — The Three Trillion Dollar Company

Apple — The Three Trillion Dollar Company

Apple is now a three trillion dollar company and worth more than all of the FSTE 100 companies put together. Why? Because they look after their customer base, and they typically return. It is the first lesson in the rule book of business.

Apple doesn’t go chasing into new markets and try to flood the market; it knows its customers and aims to keep them. The great thing about MacBooks, for example, is that they manage to keep both engineers and graphic designers happy, and their device integration just makes life so much simpler. Their products generally work well, are reliable, and they are of good quality.

I may be wrong, but you can keep an Apple product as long as you want; it will still feel like new. And, if they break, they are willing to fix them (and often own up to the fact that there was something not right in the design and where they pay for repairs — again keeping the customer happy). And, for security, it’s not a bolt-on, and where Apple devices have always led the way. The way that the devices work together to perform out-of-band authentication is just stunning in its simplicity and operation. And you can just tell there’s a whole lot of back-end security going on.

Steve Jobs would be happy with the way his closed-system approach to software and hardware has worked so well and that he did not licence his operating system and hardware to anyone that wanted. Microsoft is the company it is because they took that step, and we have ended up with a rats nest of uncoupled software and hardware — and which lacks proper integration and device security. It needed a domain controller to apply proper security to the rat’s nest in a way that Apple devices have never needed. The poor security of Windows has meant that companies needed domain controllers, which has given Microsoft their golden product: Active Directory. Apple never needed that.

Steve Jobs was right all those years ago, and Bill Gates was, too. And, so, the two companies have taken different routes, but both are highly successful. Microsoft is a software company, and Apple is a computer company, and that’s what Steve wanted.