Business, Featured - Written Monday, August 10, 2009 by Nick Vitalari - 10 Comments

Apple and the Rise of Competitive Business Platforms – What Other Companies Must Know

Last Friday, the Apple rumor mill went into overdrive. Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster and All Things Digital’s ardent Apple follower of Boomtown fame, Kara Swisher, openly discussed the long-rumored Apple “iTablet” computer. Unceremoniously, Apple Stock moved upward. But it’s not simply innovative products and fancy form factors that drive Apple’s growth – rather it is Apple’s 21^st Century business model.

Apple understands that business platforms fundamentally change the rules of competition and accelerate cumulative business performance. Competitive business platforms drive and nurture the latest business innovations – mass collaboration, social networking, community formation, ecosystems, global cooperation, prosumerism, community branding, transparency, options portfolios and real time analytics to mention a few. And they also do the same for “old-fashioned” ones as well – things like business process management, customer intimacy, and supply chain management. We’ve studied business platforms extensively at nGenera Insight and Apple is not alone. But Apple has taken the approach and out-executed almost everyone else on the planet.

While many see Apple as enslaved to secrecy, unresponsive to external input, and obsessed with product control, the company has put many of those behaviors behind them. In fact, Apple is writing the book on 21^st Century style collaborative business models and continuous business strategy. Continue…