Breaking the rules

Being a conformist rarely spirals into greatness. It is those who have challenged common thinking and practices, that have become legends. Google and Apple had done brilliantly along these lines.

With the ability to add as many links and ads on a web page as you want, Google chose to design an ultra simple home page, with a logo, a text box, and not much else. That was the Google homepage. That’s how Google became a household name. While everyone was jumping at banner ads and flashy animated ads, Google stuck with simple text ads. There is the rise of PPC and Google AdWords, raking in $21 billion in revenue for Google in 2008.

With MP3 players flooding all over the world, their capabilities expanded. They had fm radio, recording capabilities, etc. Then the iPod was launched, and it was the most simple of devices, and it could just play music. It took the world by storm. The new iPod Nano can record video yes, but the product has been established, the entrance into the marketplace was simplicity.

Henry Ford said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very interesting piece for The New Yorker (May 11, 2009), and it’s all about breaking the rules and the rise of the underdog.

Gladwell says:

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

You can read the complete article here.

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CEO of the Decade

Fortune Magazine has named Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, as the CEO of the Decade. That’s really extraordinary, especially considering that he stands alongside Google’s Schmidt, Buffet, and Gates.

After being booted out of the company 80s, he returned back in the 90s, survived two brushes with death, and some other challenges – and despite all of this Apple is now one of the most valuable companies in Silicon Valley./

Apple products like the iMac, MacBook, iPod, and iPhone are becoming household names, and have expanded far beyond the tech and creative communities. Apple is a culture. A Tribe. And it’s only going to get bigger, and better.

Fortune says:

He’s a visionary, but he’s grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple’s various operational and market metrics. He isn’t motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500). Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned — proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.

You can read the complete article here.

More interesting links from CNNMoney.com: