Apple’s Secret Asset - The User Community

I am an avid technology user in both my professional and personal life. Like most of you, I have seen firsthand the transformative effects of evolving technology, developed not just by Apple, but by other hardware and software companies as well. This includes the explosion of offers from the areas of infotainment and social media, which extend over the entire spectrum of benefits, empowerment or liberation from uninteresting, unhelpful, annoying or downright harmful and destructive.

That Apple has overlapped, if not fundamentally interacted with, each of these factors is evidence that it is not just a transformative nature of its own, but that it is a key species in this dynamic intersection between technology, industry, education, society and the cultures that define the corporate rules of engagement. This is a rapidly evolving ecosystem that is not just a rich medium for innovation and change, but a true feedback system that requires almost real-time changes to every other component of that system for any innovation.

In just two decades, we've gone from the wonder of having a beige box on the desk that can hold and store a lot of personal and professional goods to orders of magnitude more of that power in our pockets. We have seen increasingly accessible and convenient point-of-use applications, from stationary to portable technologies, from productivity silos on our desks to dial-up modems, that have pushed us into a new frontier called World Wide Web, real-time access and conversations in text, voice and video simultaneously with an infinite number of people scattered across the planet.

All of this has pushed aside many of yesterday's most progressive visions of a future that few of us would have expected to see, let alone live, work, play and thrive. So fast was this pace that few of us had time to appreciate its dizzying effect on our own balance and how breathtaking it all was. And it's still accelerating as novel technologies interact with each other in ways that even the sharpest minds of the most far-sighted visionaries could not have predicted in this short span of two decades.

In the martial arts there is the principle that action is better than reacting or, as a sign in a dojo reads: “If you hesitate, meditate in a horizontal position.” Nobody can see, understand and precisely summarize all the complex processes around us. Still, as a species, we can proactively identify key trends shaping our world and anticipate how these will affect us in even stranger ways now and in the future, and proactively adapt to the expected changes that will not only maintain our balance, that we but may be able to use it to our advantage.

This universal principle was perhaps best grasped by Louis Pasteur, who said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." The opposite of this is simply to passively let things happen to us with no anticipation or understanding; a recipe for fear and reactionary behavior that are themselves opposed to adaptation, growth, and benefit; in a word, survival.

As Apple products have shown us time and again, the creative process is not just the idea or product of Apple, but the way that that product or service is used by the community, not just when it is published, but over time. The creative process is thus interactive and progressive. This substantial contribution from the user community depends on the user looking beyond the obvious to the unexpected and potential use cases and possibly even pushing the boundaries of the hardware, software and supporting services. While not necessarily unique, it has been the defining characteristic of the relationship between the company and the user community, resulting in customer loyalty unmatched in the industry.

In the coming articles, we will explore both the business-community relationship, how and why this is essential to platform development, and the opportunities the momentum could offer for current and future technologies.

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