Secret of Success

Recently, Apple has been rated as the Most Admired Company, No.1 by Fortune Magazine. GE comes No.2. I was personally surprised by this positioning, for one reason, because it is not the product or its critically earns the reputation of a company. It is the innovative mindset and Passion to excite customers. That has become the new mantra of current generation!. Otherwise, why the whole world would wait for a mobile phone when there were thousands of models already available in the industry from Nokia and others.
The magazine also featured an interview with Steve Jobs. Steve was asked about his competitiveness in the industry. For that question, Steve answered as the the composite chemistry. "We make the hardware, We make the OS and We write the applications on top of it. So, there is a lot of intimacy between Mac Notebooks and OS X. You cannot expect the same level of initmacy between Dell notebooks and Microsoft Windows". Thatz a spectacular answer!.

If you go back to history, you can relate to this principle very well. RIM/BlackBerry had this same combination which led the company to roaring success. Palm pioneered this idea and there are thousands of palm fans around the world,including me! :-)
So As I read in the past, the secret of success lies in the ability to lock-in the customers with best value and cost of change is expensive. And thatz what all Microsoft and SAP are doing...
Whether SaaS/Open Source will break this pattern is yet to be seen...