Following Apple’s earnings release yesterday, Tim Cook expectedly teased new products on a conference call with Wall Street analysts and investors. Hints of new gadgets were also dropped in Apple’s media release announcing the earnings.
“We’re eagerly looking forward to introducing more new products and services that only Apple could bring to market,” Cook was quoted as saying in Apple’s press release.
And now responding to pressure from analysts who demand new-category devices, Cook sat down with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday to reflect on Apple’s development process, touch on such subjects as mobile payments and explain why Apple isn’t rushing out new stuff to market just to please investors…
In the interview, Cook admits that it will take new blockbuster products to revert the notion that the company is declining, quipping that “Maybe it will take some new products.”
Here’s your money quote:
You want to take the time to get it right. Our objective has never been to be first. It’s to be the best. To do things really well, it takes time. You can see a lot of products that have been brought to market where the thinking isn’t really deep and, as a consequence, these things don’t do very well.
We don’t do very many things so we spend a lot of time on every detail and that part of Apple isn’t changing. It’s the way we’ve operated for years and it’s the way we still operate. I feel great about what we’ve got coming. Really great and it’s closer than it’s ever been.
As for mobile payments, this is what Cook had to say:
I think it’s a really interesting area. We have almost 800 million iTunes accounts and the majority of those have credit cards behind them. We already have people using Touch ID to buy things across our store, so it’s an area of interest to us.
And it’s an area where nobody has figured it out yet. I realize that there are some companies playing in it, but you still have a wallet in your back pocket and I do too which probably means it hasn’t been figured out just yet.
Discussing Apple’s earnings yesterday with the NBC, Cook reiterated that the firm’s “laser focus” separates it from the competition.
“I think some companies decided that they could do everything,” he said, alluding to Samsung’s strategy of throwing enough mud at the wall to see if some of it will stick. “We know we can only do great things a few times, only on a few products.”
“We are not ready yet to pull the string on the curtain but we have got some great things that we are working on that I am very, very proud of and I am very, very excited about,” he also said in a question-and-answer session with Wall Street analysts following the earnings release.
And yes, Apple is embarked on entering some new categories.
“We currently feel comfortable in expanding the number of things we are working on,” he said. “So we have been doing that in the background.”
“When you care about every detail and getting it right, it takes longer to do that,” said the CEO. “That has always been the case. That is not something that just occurred.”
If you ask me, Cook thus far has mentioned phrases like “laser focused” and “exciting new stuff in the pipeline” too many times to be dismissed automatically as PR talk.
Naysayers be damned, Apple is of course working on new stuff as we speak.
“There is no shortage of work going in on that nor any shortage of ideas,” he said.
This process is taking time and the company will delight us with exciting new innovation when its management feels that products in development are up to Apple’s high standards, not when crazypants analysts in their wet dreams think they should be ready.
Fair enough?