I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Apple's Not A Special Company: Amazon Is A Special Company

This is an interesting insight. That Amazon is indeed a very different, very special company, while Apple isn’t such a special company. The inverse of this is that Apple’s products are indeed very special: the iPod, iPhone and iPad were most certainly ground breaking products at their release and we can all have a lovely argument about whether they’re still best of class or not (I’d argue not so much personally). Further, that Amazon’s product isn’t all that special at all. It’s something that people have been doing for hundreds of years actually: it’s just that Amazon does it extraordinarily well.

Apple’s core business is something that practically everybody wants to do (and can do): making phones and tablets. Amazon’s core business is something that practically nobody wants to do (or can do): build a massive online database and offline infrastructure to transport boxes from warehouses to hundreds of millions of doorsteps.

No, don’t start arguing about whether this is exactly true, or completely true, An insight doesn’t have to be such to be interesting. It only needs to contain some of the truth for it to be worth considering.

Yes, Apple has great design teams, superb engineers. They manage their manufacturing chain superbly (Tim Cook having been largely responsible for that build up). But so can other people hire good engineers and Samsung and others most certainly show that they can manage manufacturing chains. What makes Apple different is what they produce: the quality of the actual products. And that’s something that is replicable (admittedly, with a certain amount of argument about what is patented and what is not). As things like the Samsung Galaxy, the Nexus, indeed Android itself, show us.

There really isn’t anyone at all who can replicate that logistics operation that Amazon manages. There’s not even anyone out there who is really interested in trying either. Amazon is doing something that no one else really can: that makes it a very special company. Whenever Apple releases one of its ground breaking ideas or designs, everyone rushes to copy it. And they can indeed copy it. So, in this sense at least, it’s not a special company. It hasn’t managed to wall itself off from competition.

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