The Era of Niche Innovation

For more than a decade now, I am big fan of Apple events; my two favorites are the annual WWDC event and the “September event” that usually presents all the new iPhone models. All these years, it was very exciting to watch them and in addition I can see the transformation of the company, under the management of Tim Cook.

The aftermath of those events, usually left me waiting for some big release. The next version of a product, or the new version of iOS and MacOS. But this time this did not happen. And the weird thing, was not the absence of innovation, it was more that the updates presented, were not affecting my day-to-day life. And I think this happened in a sense last year as well, in a way at list.

So, for example, let’s take the MacOS Mojave, they presented the “Dark mode”. Is this a big thing, that will make people waiting for the upgrade (even more upgrade their Macs). Or for example take a look at the iOS innovation, some very cool usage statistics they are now exposed and you can use them to regulate yourself, when using the phone. Are really people care so much about that? I am sure that many people do, but if you see the features one-by-one, nothing is really making a big difference.

It is like the features are refinements that target specific audiences, so many get small improvements, or those that have special needs gain more benefit than the general population.

It seems to me, that innovation-wise things are beginning to go dry and now we are polishing stuff and gonna milk the cow. But from some point on, this is the natural course of things, can you expect from someone, even a company to continuously reinvent itself every several years? Let us wait and see what happens, but right now things are going a little slow and I’m not that optimistic.