Innovation Lessons from a Master – Steve Jobs of Apple 108.0

Steve Jobs introduced a new feature into the iPod nano on Wednesday, a video cam with 8 gig of memory and all for US$149. He said the feature was added to take advantage of YouTube’s strong growth in video-based social media.

Jobs is a master innovator in Romer space – designing product architectures that are non-rival, partially excludable. In Romer space, the product architecture defines and supports strong entry into previously unserved markets. It allows the content component to be distributed cheaply over the internet with the hardware component gives full control of distribution, i.e. value lock and value recovery, to Apple.

For mobile music, the Apple product architecture has iPod as hardware partnered with iTunes selling the music. For mobile phones, the Apple product architecture has the iPhone as hardware and Apps Store selling applications.

Both hardware, are excellent consumer products in themselves. The iPod is a mobile music player on a flash drive. The iPhone was among the one with a touch screen.

Quickie Thoughts!

Is Apple happy just following and riding on YouTube? I would not think so. Maybe there is a new application somewhere which makes it easy to create and add a musical score on to a video clip. You never know with Steve Jobs.

(To visit Apple store.)