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Lessons from Apple

The Economist has an article about Apple and business lessons to learn from it. According to the article, the lessons are:
  1. Incorporate outside innovations. Not all innovative ideas have to come from within your own company.
  2. Design from the perspective of users, not from the perspective of a technologist. Usability is key.
  3. Be willing to ignore what the market says it wants today. Sometimes, concentrating on prospective instead of existing customers is the best policy.
  4. Fail wisely. Expect some of your products to fail and to learn from those failures.

More on "failing wisely":

The fourth lesson from Apple is to “fail wisely”. The Macintosh was born from the wreckage of the Lisa, an earlier product that flopped; the iPhone is a response to the failure of Apple's original music phone, produced in conjunction with Motorola. Both times, Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent computers have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a company Mr Jobs set up in the 1980s that appeared to have failed and was then acquired by Apple. The wider lesson is not to stigmatise failure but to tolerate it and learn from it.
Will the iPhone ultimately be a success, or failure from which Apple learns? Time will tell.

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