The point you're making is only partially fair. Their decision about *what* to do (flat rate internet, expensive but high quality, thought out experience, focus on one product) was revolutionary and their software was already very good in the ways that mattered thanks to years of spending. What they managed to do was take immediate advantage of a development where the hardware appeared that could run their heavy but good software well. They left everyone else scrambling - people who had abused their software to try and make it work on crap hardware and had not looked after it were thus unable to change direction quickly. Plus they were spreading all their development effort across many types of chipset unlike Apple (who design their own CPUs BTW).
So this is taking this analogy much too far but my general reading is that if you sleep, you're dead. If you stop working on new things, you're dead. If you don't focus all your might on making something so good that your competition are left scratching their heads for years then you can't win.
Every advance has to be thought out in terms of whether people will actually find it so hard to use that they can be bothered. If you get caught in technology for it's own sake but don't sort out the other issues that affect your users then again you can't win.
....but, if you get it all right and have an amazing product then people with no money will get into debt and sell their grannies to get it.
I promise to shut up from now on on this. :-) .. Except one more thing - every development that looks cheap usually has some gigantic bit of expense before it somewhere. Even if all the spending does in the end is to pay engineers salaries and train technicians, the stuff that they will go off and do apparently cheaply later on will be because of all the amazing ideas that they had while they worked on these expensive things now.
Last edited by t43562; 5th Oct 2012 at 04:45.