Our Strength becomes our Weakness & The Pending Fall of Apple

Predicting the fall of Apple while they are the most valuable company in the world could be viewed a few ways..

*  there is nowhere to go but down

*  it's blatantly trying to abuse of their popularity to get facetiously noticed

*  it's accurate

*  it's inaccurate

Time will tell on the latter two options, and I won't make comments on the first two, other than to highlight them to demonstrate awareness.

The argument I'd put forth centres on innovation.  Not in a product sense, as clearly they have thousands on staff who do that. Rather in an expectation sense.   The Apple that people have come to love (and in the process make the most valuable company in the history of ever) is one that historically came with regular surprises, entering new markets (phones), developing whole new platforms we didn't know we needed - pods and pads and the like.   It competed ferociously with the likes of the PC folks and the big software folks, and wanted to offer alternate choices.  Obviously Steve Job's was the champion of this approach.

The challenge today (even leaving Mr. Job's absence out of this), is that the Apple of the last 2 years has become iterative.  Indeed, the foundation for this was already in place for this behavior while Steve was at the helm.  There doesn't seem to be company-risking, turn the world upside-down new directions in the pipeline.  I say that with some certainty as the drapery of secrecy that they were so good at in the past has been torn down in recent times.  Even if they failed in some new venture, they re-kindle (no pun) the spirit that put the company on the map, and I might humbly suggest would deliver the biggest bump to their stock price imaginable from exciting their core believers.

Sun Tzu taught us that strategically, our strength becomes our weakness, and Apple's challenge I'll predict is that they have to look away from today's successful product ranges into an unknown future and try to keep blowing away our expectations.  If they don't - their strength becomes their Achilles heel as they'll just continue to leverage their existing lines, diminishing over time the concept their stuff is worth a premium. 

That future is hard to avoid - look at IBM and Microsoft in the 80's and 90's who for shareholder's sake had to keep pushing what worked.  Apple is in a trap now- a success trap, and to prosper needs to move in another direction.  Otherwise they'll be a footnote in technology convergence and quite likely the RIM of 2021.  It may seem unfathomable, but history shows us over and over that every empire ends.