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Showing messages 1 through 8 of 8.

• Branding and "customer delight"
  2002-12-09 06:10:43  Chris Adamson | [View]
  
  
  Clearly, there's a class of people who "get" O'Reilly, and zero in on the animal-cover books with a complete disregard for anything else that might be on the shelf. In that sense, an O'Reilly user is a _lot_ like an Apple user.
  
  I have a friend who's a process consultant, and his big stick is the concept of "customer delight", ie, companies with products that people like so much, they admire or value the company just for bringing it to them. Apple is his main example... but we've tried to expand the examples to include non-geek consumer-delighting companies like Krispy Kreme and Harley Davidson. I hadn't considered Gobe's factor of a "humanistic" corporate culture - can't say whether it applies to KK or HD - but clearly it applies to the likes of Apple and O'Reilly.
  
  -invalidname
  

• Back to the question
  2002-12-09 04:29:20  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I don't think that O'Reilly has emotional branding just yet. What is does have is a very robust reputation for quality, which means that you can pretty much buy any O'R product or service sight unseen and be sure that it is money well spent...95% of the time anyway. However, there is certainly a hipness factor in the geek community...a shelf full of O'R books indicates a different kind of person than a pile of TEACH YOURSELF Nerdix+-++ IN 24 HOURS... It'll be interesting to see if the t-shirts take off.
  
  David Mantripp

• branding is for cattle
  2002-12-08 20:24:44  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I admire Tim for being smart and bridging various
  ideas and communauties. I thought that he respected
  ideas and people more than money and that form was
  the way to convey content not an end to itself.

  
  
  Now Tim seem to be only the cool kid on the block
  that can afford the latest gizmos and enjoy showing
  off.
  Come on, Apple stuff is too expensive hardware.
  
  
  If only branding was skin-deep. But ruthless marketting is thouroughly displacing any human value. I hope that by becoming more and more
  mainstream, Tim does not loose his values.
  
  O'Reilly, the company, has a strong identity
  tied to Open Source that goes beyond branding.
  
  Certainly O'Reilly has expanded well beyond that
  communauty. I thought that was good because
  it is giving visibility to the Open Source
  world. But with this Apple switch endorsing, I feel it goes the other way. Tim is in effect mere
  marketting agent that force on use what decidors
  have decided is good for us. An what worries me
  is that Tim is very effective at that. But, I thought the Open Source communauty less conformist. :(

• Wonderful innovators, but...
  2002-12-08 10:29:08  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I have to agree that Apple has impressed me in the amount and quality of their innovations. I have used a PC all my life and the more I looked at Apple, the more I wanted to work with MacOS X and their products, which is why I bought my first Mac this summer.
  
  However, I find it odd that depite their humanistic appeal, Apple only rallys around it's products. I understand that this tough economic times, but Apple is not doing anything for the community outside of using their products for the benefit of it's education customers. Hasn't Apple been somewhat consistently making a profit this past year or two?
  
  For example, a lot of people here at my university are getting excited about Apple and MacOS X. We wanted to show off how great Apple's products are by giving away an Apple iPod to the top male and female finishers in a large charity race we put together (we raised over $8000 - not bad for never having done this before). We called Apple because we wanted to see if they would be willing to donate for the cause. The sad thing I found out was that while Apple claims they have a community service department, nothing has been going on there and they specifically stated they don't endorse events or donate their products for any cause.
  
  For such a "humanistic" company, where we would think that Apple execs are down-to-earth and care about it's customers and the greater community, this was a big disappointment. While I am not switching back to a PC ever, I do hope sometime down the line that Apple gives back to the community in other ways besides pushing their products into the education market.
  
  Don't get me wrong, what Apple has and is doing is magnificent. I really see how Apple is listening to it's customers and creating some of the greatest products in the computing realm, I just wish Apple could help out the community in a greater way.

• Apple skin deep? You are clueless.
  2002-12-07 16:13:56  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  Oh man, what on earth are you talking about? I am no expert of Apple history, but Apple either invented or pioneered vast majority of the technologies used on today's PC (Windows and Mac):
  
  GUI, mouse, 3.5" floppy drive, SCSI, laser printer, ColorSync, Plug and Play, Ethernet, AppleTalk, OpenTransport, Newton PDA (with natural hand writing recgnition, a decade before MS Tablet PC), QuickTime, USB, Firewire, Giga Bit Ethernet, Open Source Darwin and QuickTime Stream Server, translucent color iMac, Titanium PowerBook, LCD iMac, iPod, Xserve, Mac OS X, Aqua, Quartz, iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iCal, iSync, iDVD, Rendezvous, and many more to come.
  
  Apple has not only ignited the PC revolution, but also continues to innovate at a faster pace than MS, HP, Sun and a host of other much bigger and richer players, for the benifit of the whole computer industry. In many ways, Apple is the victim of its own inventions which have made it possible for pure box makers like Dell to parasite on other's R&D budget and undercut them in pricing. Steve Jobs is mostly right in saying that Apple is the only one left in the computer industry that is capable of innovations, and I would suggest that IBM is another.
  
  According to an interview with the CIO of O'Reilly, the company is in the process of switching 70 to 80% their computing system to Mac OS X and could be the first corporate Switcher to Apple technology. And if you have been paying attention to Tim and virtually all other O'Reilly staffers, they are all clearly impressed with OS X and other Apple technologies. So if you think O'Reilly has depth, shouldn't you trust their judgement?

• re: message above
  2002-12-07 13:13:38  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  and i think your comment was beyond worthless.
  

• With Apple it is only skin deep
  2002-12-07 10:00:20  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  O'Reilly has great depth behind its products.
  
  Apple, despite the carefully crafted impressions, is very shallow.
  
  I think that is reflected in the marketplace.
• With Apple it is only skin deep
  2002-12-07 19:31:00  Tim O'Reilly | [View]
  
  
  Thanks for the compliment! FWIW, I don't think that Apple is at all shallow. I might agree that their "emotional branding" may be a touch calculated -- a point that the Wired article went on to make. But Apple has shown some real depth of conviction and clarity of vision during the best moments of its up and down history. Right now, it seems very much to me to be in one of its up periods, with a lot of insight into what people are looking for in today's computers. See my blog on a new class of productivity application, as well as various thoughts about the importance of rendezvous that I shared in the interview that ran on openp2p.com the other day.