A Fast Second lets other companies innovate and experiment to create new markets. Then the fast second 1) enters the market just as the dominant design is about to emerge, 2) helps create the dominant design, and 3) uses its size to capture the market.
Microsoft is a classic example of a fast second. The concept of the fast second is studied in a book that is notably entitled: Fast Second. (I just added Fast Second to Wikipedia.)
Apple and Steve Jobs have a reputation as trail-blazing innovators. But are they really Fast Seconds?
iPod wasn’t the first portable MP3 player on the block. I believe the Creative Nomad and others existed well before the iPod.
iTunes wasn’t the first media jukebox on the planet. Winamp had a jukebox 4 years before iTunes was released. And Apple itself built iTunes on top of SoundJam MP after acquiring it.
Apple just launched a “media center” called Front Row. Microsoft has been pounding its fist on the table for years to eke out adoption of their Media Center PC. Has Apple created the dominant design for media centers and will they capture this market?
Apple avoids confusing their customers with real innovation. Real innovation fails 95% of the time. Instead, Apple establishes the dominant design when it is ready to emerge.
And Apple’s dominant designs are usually an incremental improvement on the products they have already trained customers to use. iTunes + iPod’s video distribution is an incremental improvement on iTunes + iPod’s audio distribution system that customers already know how to use. And the price of the iPod didn’t change when Apple added video.
Apple is un-innovation if you ask me. They don’t care about technology. They are simplifiers. They care about the customer experience.
Note: In the spirit of John Gruber’s Brief Observations…, here are some brief and random observations regarding Apple’s recent machinations.
[Fortune quotes Steve Jobs](http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1119074,00.html ): “There are more phones yet to roll out… Cingular has been great to work with.” Please note that Jobs didn’t mention Motorola. Did Steve Jobs sabotage the iTunes phone so he could blame Motorola when the phone didn’t sell? So he could market the rumored Apple phone directly to Cingular?
There are quadrillions of people who would buy an iPod if they could avoid the cost and trouble of using a computer to manage it. Robert Cringely now reports that “There’s an outfit called DVDstation that puts video distribution kiosks in stores and malls. As its name implies, you go to the DVDstation to pick out a movie and burn it on a DVD right there. Well, DVDstation just announced that you can plug your video-enabled iPod into their kiosk and download an HD movie in 90 seconds or less.”
iPods sports transflective displays. Transflective is a mashup between transmissive and reflective. Transmissive displays have a backlight that “lights up” the liquid crystals from behind. Typical laptop displays are transmissive and they don’t work well under intense light such as sunlight. Reflective displays work when light bounces off the display. Paper is a reflective display and it works well under light but it doesn’t work in the dark. Transflective displays are both transmissive and reflective. They work in the dark and under intense sunlight. This is a big deal. If laptops were transflective, their displays would work well outdoors.
John Gruber says “I’m sitting here looking at my year-old 40 GB iPod and the thing looks like a relic.” Apple does a great job of bringing the perishability of fashion to consumer electronics. Each revision of their products makes the last revision look like last year’s bad fashion.
In spite of being an early WinAmp and Rio user, it took an iPod and iTMS to get me to carry an MP3 player around and throw away my CDs.
That’s innovation. (and I’m not just talking Apple, there are other vendors that do the same)
It’s not technology innovation, but that’s ok. Technology doesn’t necessarily make my life better. It’s product innovation. It assumes (correctly) that I want to be lazy, I want to show off, I enjoy aesthetics. All the things that the iPod does well.
I don’t think the iPod was the fast second to the MP3 player market. Or the fast third, or fast fourth. The market was well-saturated when Apple entered. It was the kind of thing you got for Christmas and stuffed in a drawer.
I think a better analogy is the video game industry in the early 1980s. It was ridiculously saturated – even Quaker Oats was in it. Nintendo was able to use a fire cone pine market strategy. They waited for everything to come down crashing and burning, and then successfully launched NES at the moment when everyone thought they’d have to be crazy to enter the market.
Some would cry that this approach is not innovative, but I’m not so sure. You have to pay very close attention to every other product out there on the market, and you have to have a strong vision of a customer need that isn’t being met.
Hello! Apple? Offer this guy a million dollars and hire him already. His analysis on your products and company direction have been consistently interesting and insightful.
(full disclosure: i have been reputed to consider Nivi a friend and i highly doubt he is actually looking for a job with Apple)
The classic example of Apple as a Fast Second is their famous user interface, which they borrowed from the Xerox Alto back in the 1980’s.
Reference: Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander
Sony are past masters at that game. Obviously Jobs has done his homework as a “second” (albeit not incredibly fast) in the tech-as-fashion paradigm.
I agree with the essence of your post, but I take issue with your take on the iPod taking the innovation of existing MP3 players and becoming the “fast second.” The real reason the iPod became dominant was that the iTunes Music Store was far and away the “fast first” of purchasing digital music.
While Pressplay and other services were scrambling to create a full digital storefront and THEN, on top of that, figuring out a way to deliver an easy way to hook up with devices, Apple was way ahead.
So, yes, the iPod itself may have been second, but the total digital purchase and download to device process was all Apple, and it gave them a huge lead.