“Anyone who says that a particular company has all 7 Powers (of Hamilton Helmer fame) is full of it.”
“Apple has all 7 Powers.”
“No they don’t.”
“Go on, have a think.”
“I … Well they don’t have network eff- … or cornered res- … but they can’t possibly … god dammit.”
Conversation
I mean seriously.
Scale economies — iPhones and chips
Network effects — App Store and iMessage
Cornered resource — their chip design team
Switching costs — duh
Branding — duh
Process Power — their JIT manufacturing process
Counter Positioning — I guess their in-house content?
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I sort of don't believe their chip design team is a cornered resource. From chatting with friends in the industry, lots of other teams, *given that brief*, could have come up with something similar
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Interesting. My understanding is that they got the folk who did Celeron early on, and then they’ve been working together towards this for 10 years. Hard to replicate this sort of bond + tacit knowledge.
I don’t know this space well, though, so I’d defer to your friends.
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I'm sure it's an excellent team—there are lots of other teams in the industry with a similar sort of bond though. A friend was like, "I spent a while trying to figure out why we never did this, and we definitely could have, but the economics never would have made sense for us."
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Which is a combination of vertical integration—Apple put all the $ that would have gone to Intel's profit markup into chip design—and the punishingly low commodity profit margins of non-Apple hardware in general.
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