There was once a time (once being even today in some product companies), when companies would spend two to three years on making a new product. That was the competitive environment back in the day. These days though products are developed in much less time than that, with new product being produced at least every year. These annual companies are dependent on making that product successful, and making sure that they do not make mistakes. The natural improvement for that has been to reduce that timescale down to three or four months, as it has happened in the consumer electronics industry.
Let us look at Apple and Google in the mobile phone space. Apple is in this annual process of incremental improvement, with new improvements appearing every June. Google however has an improvement to that approach of the rapid product development lifecycle combined with parallelism of product development with many companies. The product development lifecycle for each company in this space with Android in the mix is less than four months but combined together with the parallelism of multiple companies, the effective lifecycle of the product has become monthly! It is through this that Android has caught up with Apple in such a short time – rapid iteration of new product features through many development companies.
This is a revolution in the principle of evolution that has come into the tech space. Place your code in the open source space and do deals to ensure as many companies are involved in product development at the same time, which leads to many gradual improvements being made to the product in a very short timescale.However this has a downside in that buyers remorse comes into effect almost immediately, which I believe has held back aspects of Android roll-out, but Google are now moving into a more stable development period – largely because the 80% of the improvements necessary to catch Apple have been made now. Now it is about building brand ownership in the customer’s mind. Brand ownership is a major component of the Apple geek, and I believe Google is trying for this in the Android customer.
Will this June be the last point at which Apple is perceived as being ahead of the game with the iPhone?
Who else could use the parallel iteration development approach? STB companies? TV companies? Laptop companies?
Note: I have heard recently that Sony is opening up its Vaio brand to 2nd tier suppliers. This sounds very much like Sony trying to parallelise its product lifecycle.