Apple wants to be a rebel

Apple has been blessed -- and cursed -- with success. The iPod, iPhone, iPad, and even the MacBook have all been good to Apple. They are also Apple's problem.

It should be no surprise that Apple is the rebel in the computer industry. They are the small, scrappy upstart competing against the big, established company. Consider their "1984" ad to introduce the MacIntosh computer, or the later "Think Different" campaign.

Apple won its counterculture role by accident. They were one of the first companies to sell microcomputers in the late 1970s. At the time, there was no PC standard; IBM would introduce its PC in 1981. Prior to that, the market was fragmented in terms of hardware and software. Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, and several others offered non-compatible systems. The CP/M operating system was beginning to emerge as a standard, but it was by no means universal.

IBM became the computing standard-bearer, and saved Apple from becoming that fate. The IBM PC and PC-DOS was an instant success, and other manufacturers were pushed aside. Only by adopting the role of rebel could Apple survive.

The strategy worked for several decades. Apple built a reputation as the "other computer company" with the expensive but well-designed products. It has software that "just worked" without the need for support teams.

But now Apple has a problem.

Their products, and Apple by extension, have become the market leaders. The iPod was the premium music device. The iPhone and iPad are the envied mobile devices. The MacBook is the standard for laptop computers. Other manufacturers design their products to emulate the Apple line. (Even the lowly Mac Mini is copied.) It's hard to be different when everyone is trying to be like you.

A bigger problem is the demise of the empire. A rebel needs someone (or something) to rebel against. In "Star Wars", the Rebel Alliance exists only because the Empire exists. (So much so that the latest Star Wars movie had to invent the First Order to keep the Rebel Alliance alive.)

Apple's first foe was IBM and the PC. IBM served well in the role of evil empire; it was despised by all of the hobbyists and tinkerers who had adopted the earlier computers, it was large and bureaucratic, and it was successful. The IBM PC empire was defeated by a combination of PC clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Windows, and when it fell, Microsoft neatly stepped into place and became the empire against which Apple could fight.

But now the PC market is split between Windows, Mac OS (and a smidge of Linux); the phone market split between iOS and Android (and a smidge of Windows); and the cloud split between Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google (and others). There is no big, evil empire to fight.

Apple cannot be the rebel that they were, and I think that they are uncomfortable with that. I think the folks at Apple yearn for "the good old days" when they were not number one, and when they made computers that were different.

The question is: Where does Apple go from here?