THE THEME BEHIND WORLD's MOST PROFITABLE COMPANY's STRATEGY ??

If any one asks us about what can possibly be the STRATEGY that drives the world's most profitable company many of us would be forced into thinking something really too complex  having so many permutations and combinations that cannot be easily replicated . Also the amount to time that would have gone to create this Strategy and the input and the variables  involved which even if we are privy to won't be easy to decipher and understand .

But the truth is that Complexity is the recipe for failures unless you are in business of manufacturing of Rockets or satellites or sending people to Mars .

For everything else the message is to KEEP IT SIMPLE & SHORT ( KISS )

And the Logic is it is better to explain , delegate , drive , easy to manage in terms of production , inventory , design excellence , vendor management , specialization and therefore cost optimization , ability to provide better products at more competitive prices , better refurbishing options and market etc. etc.

The most profitable company in the world  APPLE INC with turnover equivalent to the GDP of the world's 20th largest economy and cash more than the US government treasury and had a product strategy as put by Steve Jobs after re-joining the company on the mission to rebuild it was a simple FOUR QUADRANT PRODUCT GRID .

Complexity distorts information flow and decelerates clear decision-making. Any decision made in the face of complex operations, unnecessary product types or models are increasingly incoherent. Companies that do well have a sense of clarity and focus with less complex operations and product lineups.
Companies whose business models are simple can replicate their successes repeatedly. Apple’s co-founder Steven Paul Jobs (Steve Jobs) realized this quite early. At the Mac World Expo in 1998, Steve revealed a four-quadrant product grid. Upon his return to Apple, Steve toured the company and found that there were far too many teams working on the Mac. Each team had different names and viewpoint of the Mac in mind and lacked coherence. He came up with the idea of a simple four-quadrant grid with two rows labeled as ‘Consumer’, ‘Professional’, and the columns as ‘Portable’ and ‘Desktop’. This way Apple engineers and managers had to focus on only four core product areas and the company could deploy the best engineers in the right area. Additionally, there would be no product or resource overlap. Even the naming convention seems simple e.g. ‘i’ in consumer products and ‘Power/Mac’ in professional products.

A newer grid today might look like this:

The success of Apple had been so tremendous and powerful that many companies have tried to follow it and some of the recent examples of companies reducing product complexity are Google, HP and MTV. Google has retired many products. In a recent conference call in Feb 2012, HP’s CEO Meg Whitman emphasized the need to trim down its many products models, SKUs and configurations and to remove unnecessary complexity from designing to manufacture and delivering products. MTV India, the music channel is shifting its focus back on music and reducing non-music format shows.