The Financial Page of The New Yorker goes to the point.
Apple is facing next week a very dramatic challenge.
But Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (2004), a must-read every week in The New Yorker, explains very well the news behind the news.
As he says:
Apple’s launch of the iPad next week is a gamble in more ways than one.
To start with, it’s obviously a bet that there are millions of people looking for a new way to surf the Web, watch movies, and read magazines.
But it’s also a more fundamental gamble; namely, that people will pay for quality.
Starting at five hundred dollars, the iPad is significantly more expensive than its competitors.
But Apple’s assumption is that, if the iPad is also significantly better, people will happily shell out for it (as they already do for iPods, iPhones, and Macs).
That’s why when Steve Jobs first introduced the iPad he said that, if a product wasn’t “far better” than what was already out there, it had “no reason for being.
Tags: Apple, JAMES SUROWIECKI, THE NEW YORKER, The Financia Pge, iPad