NEW YORK (AA) – Marketing and then innovation is what is driving today’s Apple, said Hartmut Esslinger, first Apple’s designer who transformed company products from 1982 to 1990. Esslinger suggest - it was not the case during the era of Steve Jobs, American entrepreneur and inventor, best known as a co-founder of Apple, who died in October 2011, at the age of 56.
But, “what we’ve seen from Apple since Steve Jobs passed away implies that Apple largely may be done innovating in any groundbreaking fashion,” Esslinger wrote in his author’s peace in Time magazine. He stressed, “it’s all been refinement since then.”
American media widely reported Tuesday, Apple has sold 170 million iPads since it launched in April 2010. That's up from the 100 million iPads Apple said it had sold one year ago. At the same day the CEO of Apple Tim Cook gave an update on how the iPad “got to where it is today” becoming market leader of the industry.
- It is not only about money
Yet, Mr. Esslinger, a well known German-American industrial designer, who worked also with Sony, fashion leader Louis Vuitton and others, (he is founder of Frog design and author of the book “Keep it Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple,” which will be published in January) - says deep innovation takes decades. He suggests innovation should be driven not only by market and money trends, but by passion for change and long envision of future.
“When Steve and I worked on the Snow White project starting in 1982, we decided to project the future of Apple well into the future, paying no heed to what might be technologically feasible in five, 10, even 20 years,” Esslinger wrote in Times. He said, he and Steve Jobs “wanted to envision the far-off future, and imagine how people would use futuristic products.”
That is how many of the Apple products were ultimately created, Esslinger wrote — becoming industry-changing innovations such as the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and even the MacBook Air. And they all, as he said – “were in development in one form or another all those 30 years ago.”
- Still hungry but not foolish
Rising this issue at the day when Apple introduced another series of new products – Esslinger pointed out those new Apple products should not be just about - being “better, thinner and lighter.” This is not, he said, “what the world was used to under Steve Jobs.”
As someone who spent best years of his career beside the Apple creator Steve Jobs, Esslinger wrote – one thing is clear to him about the company today.
“To put it in the terms of Steve’s famous commencement address, in which he advised young people to ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’: Apple may still be hungry, but it’s no longer foolish,” Esslinger wrote in Time magazine on Tuesday.
By Erol Avdovic - Anadolu Agency
englishnews@aa.com.tr
