The Mouse That Roared

By Nicholas G. Carr

One of the most profound, yet least discussed, implications of the Internet is that it will push businesses to adopt shared, generic processes. Highly efficient ways of doing everything from procurement to customer service will be built into software that will be universally available. Such standardization will bring big benefits. It will reduce companies’ operating costs and make it easier for them to work together in seamless partnerships. But there’s a dark side. As processes become homogeneous, companies will find it harder and harder to distinguish themselves from the pack.

So where will competitive advantage come from? Mainly from human creativity and ingenuity. Those are two things that can’t be scripted by software engineers.

Which brings me, believe it or not, to Apple Computer’s new optical mouse. In a world of drab "input devices," Apple’s mouse is a thing of beauty -- it looks and feels like a sleek crystal paperweight. It’s also an example of clearheaded engineering. Rather than fall victim to geek chic and add a half dozen programmable buttons and a couple of scroll wheels, Apple has kept its one-button mouse simple and intuitive – just what the average computer user wants.

But it’s only a mouse, right? Wrong. The mouse is just the latest in a stream of innovations that have come out of Cupertino over the last two years. And what that story says about corporate creativity is important to any company that will have to compete in a world of indistinguishable processes.

It wasn’t long ago that everyone was shoveling dirt onto Apple’s grave. The company was doomed, it was uniformly believed, for three reasons: lack of compatibility with a Windows world, inept management, and a massive scale disadvantage in research and development that would create a deadly innovation gap. The Internet has relieved (though not eradicated) the first problem by providing a common networking platform for all operating systems. Steve Jobs seems to have nailed the second through a combination of disciplined thinking and smart hiring. And as for the third – well, it never panned out.

Certainly, the argument that Apple would fall behind in innovation sounded reasonable. R&D on the Wintel platform was spread among dozens of big hardware and software companies, each of which was making vast investments in developing new technologies and products. Apple, by contrast, was pretty much on its own. There was no way it could come close to matching the dollars and time spent by the Microsoft-Intel axis.

But look what happened. In product innovation, Apple has leapt ahead of the competition. Most obviously, Apple’s hardware looks a heck of a lot better than everyone else’s. But it’s not just esthetics. On the engineering side, the company has delivered breakthroughs in accessibility (the swingaway sidewall on the G4 desktop), cooling (the fanless iMac), miniaturization and digitization (the G4 Cube), wireless networking (Airport), and high-speed connectivity (FireWire). On the software side, it has quietly pioneered the integration of the PC and the Internet, enabling users to easily mount a Web-based "hard drive" on their desktops, and its iMovie program sets the standard for simple video editing.

I have no idea what the future holds for Apple (or any other company, for that matter), but its resurgence over the past two years proves one thing to me: When it comes to innovation, money and scale don’t matter all that much. What matters is getting smart, creative people and giving them the freedom and the incentive to, yes, think different. If you can do that, your company will stand out while others fade into anonymity.

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