This will be the year Apple pivots definitively toward services

There’s been no shortage of doomsters since the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011 predicting the demise of Apple and blaming it on the company’s inability to innovate. But the facts tell a different story: Tim Cook took over at a company valued at $300 billion dollars, and was able to take it past the trillion-dollar mark, overcoming all kinds of problems and crises. At the time of writing, Apple is valued at around $900 billion, above $190 a share, compared to the $55 per share in October 2011 when Jobs died.

Yet despite all the positives, Apple is has embarked on a huge strategic reorientation, one of the key drivers of which will be unveiled tomorrow, Monday: a company that has spent its entire history selling consumer electronics devices, a market in which its competitors copy its products no sooner are they launched at ever lower prices, is increasingly focusing on services through a growing range that will include music, storage and applications, as well as television content, news and periodicals, and possibly areas such as health or banking.

Many of the elements that the company considers important for this reorientation have been announced recently: a growing commitment to users’ privacy, redoubled research into combatting fake news, the search for partners for its content business, which has prompted speculation about the acquisition of Netflix, whose founder, Reed Hastings, has a good relationship with Apple, but is nevertheless denying the rumors and insists his company will not participate in Apple’s television content platform because it considers ownership of its subscribers’ data fundamental for its business model.

This year, which began with a profit warning, will be especially important for a company that is obviously going to continue designing and selling consumer electronics devices — next up, say the oracles, will be an augmented reality viewer — but it will certainly increasingly diversify into services, and differentiating itself from the competition in the process.

It’s not often we get to see one of the largest and best-known companies in the world strategically reorient itself, but all the signs are that this is exactly what is about to happen.

(En español, aquí)