Apple is NOT The World's Most Innovative Company. Here is Why.

Apple regularly comes top of the polls that score the world’s most innovative companies. Here is the main reason why not being the most innovative bodes well for the Apple share price.

In the past year, Apple has topped Fast company’s -for walking the talk(?) – “Apple definitely has the keys–because where it goes, everyone follows.” It topped Fortune’s most admired for innovation.

And Boston Consulting Group/BusinessWeek had it number one in their global list. The Forbes list of the world’s most innovative is a notable exception placing Apple fifth

Apple has been innovative and disruptive. It reshaped the smartphone industry while Nokia toyed with its Symbian OS. It gave us the Ultra, with MacAir, and it finally got tablets right with the iPad. That run ended in 2010, too long ago for the kudos to continue accruing to Apple.

But leaving the time lag aside, there’s a good reason for not considering Apple to be the world’s most innovative company. And that’s simple. Companies that disrupt need what Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits,authors of the recently published Lean Entrepreneur, described earlier as a“sustaining” period.

The market needs to recognize that disruptors go into hibernation and rightly exploit what they have created before they disrupt again, if ever.

The lack of cognizance of this is affecting interpretations of Apple’s performance. But Apple has been losing innovation kudos – rightly so – for some time, if your reference point is the general public.

In the graph below you can see Apple’s reputation for innovation in decline from 2010 onwards. At the beginning of 2011 Google was regarded in social media channels as being as innovative as Apple.

But Google too had been through a trough just before, after the failures of Wave and Buzz. And that is the most important reason why Apple should not be regarded as the world’s most innovative company. Google came back with a 30% share price rise.

The reality is innovators need time in the doldrums. They need their relative failures (Maps, Siri). And they need time to reap the rewards of disruption.

They can sustain those failures if they switch off the disruption button, or at least tone it down. They become sustaining innovators, improving the basics of their product offerings (Phone 5) and services (iTunes in the Cloud).

But just as Google came back with Glass and the driverless car, and updated their innovation reputation (and share price), so too Apple will return. Cook promised as much to investors this week. At that point it will deserve the plaudits once more. In the meantime the most innovative tag is a millstone, forcing its share price down despite its enviable economic success.

We and the markets need to embrace the idea of sustaining innovation, periods of incremental change and relative failure. They are what make champions like Google and Apple tick. [Forbes]

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iPhone Continues to be The Most Sold SmartPhone in The U.S.

Apple's iOS mobile operating system remained the top-selling smartphone platform in the U.S. in the final quarter of 2012, continuing its reign over Google's Android, according to new data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

During the 12-week period ending on Dec. 23, iOS nabbed 51.2 percent of U.S. market sales, while second-place Android took around 44.8 percent. Microsoft's Windows Phone came in third with 2.6 percent.

"Apple's continual improvement is thanks to both the iPhone 5 and older models attracting various customer groups, from repeat Apple buyers, first time smartphone buyers, and those coming from other smartphone brands," Kantar Worldpanel ComTech analyst Mary-Ann Parlato said in a statement.

Overall, 36 percent of iOS sales during the quarter came from consumers who switched to the iPhone from another smartphone brand, largely Android. The percentage of those saying goodbye to Android for Apple over the last year rose to 19 percent from just 9 percent in 2011.

Another 35 percent of iOS sales during the quarter came from those who upgraded from an older iPhone model, while 30 percent came from individuals who were purchasing to their first smartphone, according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

The data comes from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech USA's consumer panel, which conducts more than 250,000 interviews per year in the United States. The report focused on sales rather than market share.

Meanwhile, AT&T maintained its lead as the top smartphone carrier in the U.S., according to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. AT&T nabbed 33 percent of smartphone sales during the quarter, narrowly edging out Verizon, which captured 32 percent. Third-place Sprint declined during the period with 14.8 percent of smartphone sales.

AT&T continued to leverage its large Apple base, with 55 percent of its iOS sales stemming from users upgrading to a newer iPhone model, while the majority of Verizon's iOS sales came from its massive feature phone base. [PCMag]

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Leaked Screenshots of HTC's Sense 5 Show Major Areas of Improvement

You know, for all the changes HTC has made to its Sense interface for smartphones over the years, it generally looks the same as it did back in the old days. That may not be the case for much longer if a new batch of screenshots spotted on the xda-developer forums are to be believed — they claim to provide an even better look at HTC’s forthcoming Sense 5 interface, and (if real) they represent a big step forward for HTC’s custom UI.

Before we go any further, I just have to point out that the kicker here is where the images came from — according to a thread on the xda-developer forums, someone managed to flash a Sense 5-laden build of Android 4.1.2 onto a Verizon Droid DNA. And where did that ROM come from? Well, should you believe the original post, it came from a Sprint-branded HTC M7 (you know, the not-so-secret flagship that HTC hasn’t officially announced yet).

It sounds sketchy, I know, but the visual style seen in these images matches the one seen in a batch of leaked photos that purportedly depict the M7 itself. As always, I’d advise you to have your grains of salt at the ready.

First impressions? If all of this is legitimate, HTC really may be onto something. It’s a pretty drastic leap from the Sense overlays of yore, which have generally looked very similar (save for some recent, much-needed changes) for years now. There are plenty of little touches that seem to bring the overall Sense experience closer to the cold, digital aesthetic that Google had in mind for Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, and that’s just fine by me. Perhaps one of the biggest tweaks here is to Sense’s typography — the skin’s usual font has been replaced with a narrower typeface (Engadget referred to it as a sort of “Roboto condensed”) which helps things feel less cluttered.

                                     

Interestingly, the icons for the stock dialler, web browser, messaging, and camera apps all seem flatter and less skeuomorphic than the ones seen in earlier versions of Sense. The word that keeps popping into my head is “sparse” — the visual quiet of the phone app and the app launcher is a curious change, but one I hope pans out and pervades the rest of the company’s custom UI. Then again, your mileage may vary on that: I prefer Google’s minimalism, but Samsung sells a crazy number of TouchWizzed devices so someone clearly enjoys garish, overwrought interfaces. [TechCrunch]

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