Apple succeeds on its own terms, suggests Box CEO

Apple has proved there’s a viable business model in continuing to optimize,

Box CEO, Aaron Levie sat down for an incredibly wide-ranging interview (well worth a read) during which he made numerous notable points concerning the strength of Apple’s business model.

Apple must be Apple

For so many years, Apple analysis has focused on new markets, new products and the need to invest/acquire new businesses.

Apple, we are told, must enter this category, purchase that company, or introduce this new thing in order to compete. Ridiculing this approach is actually part of the genesis of this site, as the earliest of 2,000+ stories published here show.

Apple tends to follow its own drum, and while it may respond to external pressures in many ways, it has a habit of doing so while following its own unique path.

A path which is usually proven correct.

What Aaron Levie thinks

Levie recognizes this, too, as this year-old Tweet shows:

The “conventional wisdom” on Apple for the past decade is that they needed to enter completely new markets to grow. As the world’s first $2T company, it turns out continuing to build better and better products and services works just fine.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) August 19, 2020

So, what does Levie say about this in his interview (which I urge you to read)?

“If you remember the past 10 years or so, there was always this commentary of “Apple has to get into cars. They have to buy Tesla, they have to buy Disney, they have to buy Time Warner. These are the only ways that they’re going to be able to continue to grow,” he states.

“I think what Apple has proven out is, actually, continuing to build amazing products, build ecosystems around those products, whether those are in payments or media or just new underlying features in the OS.

“And they’ve been able to prove out that there’s a very, very large scale—in fact, the largest company in the world—a viable business model in just continuing to hone, continuing to optimize, build around adjacencies, without having to do what a lot of analysts were thinking they had to do, which is you have to enter a hundred billion-dollar market categories if you’re going to continue to scale and survive.”

I’ve taken the liberty of using these comments verbatim, but once again urge that you read it in its original.

Up next?

Apple builds foundations, each one a new beginning.

Consider iTunes and how the software helped propel Apple’s moves into mobility, not just iPods, but iPhones, iPads and portable Macs alongside a dizzying range of services. Each unique, and each based on what has happened before.

This approach has empowered Apple’s march to become the world’s biggest company by market cap, and it still has upside today.

You can see the company moving in the same direction now, as it slowly builds out new services that inexorably will be seen as supporting future announcements.

The company knows that so long as it keeps its customers happy, it will continue to grow its business to the benefit of everyone within its ecosystem.

Anything that tarnishes that customer experience is destructive to the platforms, which is why Apple will replace, revise, or revoke it.

It’s really that simple.

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