Doing Things the Apple Way

by Bryon D Beilman

In the IT infrastructure and consulting business there are many competitors who all provide IT support to the companies around the US and perhaps the world.  When we do competitive analysis and look at our market we try to look at what we (and our competitors)  are doing well or poorly.  We also look at other companies that are not in our space and analyze what they did to turn perhaps an ordinary idea into an extraordinary company or product.

A few examples would be Github who turned the esoteric GIT SCM system into a business valued at 750M.  Another example would be Evernote who provides a service to collect and categorize all that is important to you and make a searchable reference link of your brain. The other company 37Signals have developed a suite of different applications that take a new approach in project management and collaboration.  Although we are a service company, not a product company, these three examples all show different ways of making tools or processes around perhaps ordinary (read not-exciting) products and making them very useful and even innovative.

When people think of innovation, very often Apple is the gold standard for creativity and producing products that simplify ordinary ideas to the point of innovation and elegance. A few months ago Business week's Josh Tyrangiel had an interview with Tim Cook, entitled "Tim Cook's Freshman Year" that took me by surprise. Tim Cook was known as the guy who ran the efficient operations that was key for Apple to have some of the highest margins in the industry. What I expected from him was a process oriented culture that applied continuous consistent processes to eek out every ounce of profit.  What he outlined, however was something that I felt was unique. When asked about the process they go through, he stated , 'I wouldn't call it a process. Creativity is not a process, right? it's people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it."  Tim Cook also went on to say that they "integrate hardware, software and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic"

When I was reading this, I was thinking Yes and Yes.  One of the services we provide in our company, we call "Chaos to Clarity" . When we see new clients with infrastructure that  is problematic, nearly all of the time, it has been designed overly complex so that is unreliable and difficult to maintain.  It turns out that designing something that is simple and elegant (and works well)  is much more difficult than designing something large and complex.  Usually the complex (or the opposite of simple) is done because the IT person did not know enough to seek a simple solution or perhaps didn't care. It was good enough and they left it like it was without caring enough to keep working at it until it was simple and worked well.

There are alot of IT people out there , but there are surprisingly very few "excellent" IT people who can design simple, elegant services that work well.  All customers (users of IT ) want is to get their job done and do not care about the underlying infrastructure, they just want a fantastic experience. Apple is a good model to show how this is done and to never stop caring enough to design the best solution.