CUPERTINO/REDMOND (Rixstep) — Apple's brand is now #1 in the world. The Microsoft brand is still placed highly but the company's slide continues irrevocably, despite astronomical research budgets.
But Apple didn't get into the top slot by outcompeting Microsoft Windows. They got to #1 by transcending yesterday's markets and creating their own, something the bunglers in Redmond were unable to follow.
The value of the Apple brand grew by a staggering 84% and bumped Google out of the top slot. The Apple brand has grown by (get ready) 859% in the past give years. This according to WPP.
'Apple continued quietly developing a cloud and loudly discovered an empty space in the computing category that it filled with a new device - the iPad', according to WPP subsidiary Millward Brown. 'In the last quarter of 2010, Apple sold more iPads than Mac computers.'
'An Apple cloud would further strengthen the brand as a trinity of platform, content, and device.'
An Apple cloud? Something like this?
Same Old Same Old
Corporations on the slide invariably find it difficult to branch off into new markets and instead overspend trying to keep their old markets afloat. So it is with Microsoft who have spent a staggering $9 billion per year on research and development which still has yet to produce a single market success. An example: here come the same old same old 'I'm a PC' ads that had people retching the last time around.
'PC sales are in a hole and people are throwing their money at tablets, so Microsoft need to come up with a way to persuade people their old PCs are no cool and no longer up to the job', writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.
But that's hardly going to work. Mainframes and 'real' computer laptops may remain but the brunt of the consumer industry is going to smartphones and tablets. And in those markets, Microsoft have nothing.
Reading out the list of egregious Microsoft failures over the past ten years takes longer than listening to Steve Ballmer squeal 'developers developers developers' ten thousand times.