Moving into selling music (‘content’) was a bigger move. But the Apple model (one company makes the hardware, OS, software, etc) positioned Apple to win at this, because they could protect Intellectual property better than the Microsoft model could. It can be argued that this was luck vice genius.
True, but they saw where their future lay, as evidenced by the name they chose for the company.
They were also developing a hardware streaming player in the mid 2000s, although they eventually decided not to get into the hardware business. That project eventually became the Roku player.
CREE, the LED lightbulb company which was started in 1987 by some NC State graduates. By 2011 they were one of the world’s leading LED bulb manufacturers and marketers. They also had a smaller side business in semiconductor chips, which they attempted to sell in 2016, but it fell through. Over the course of 2019 and 2020, they have completely divested of their LED lighting business, changed their name to Wolfspeed and are aggressively growing their semiconductor business.
What former Nokia folks told happened was that Nokia had two basic tenets about mobile phones: they must be extremely durable, and the battery must last for a long time with a single charge. Nokia phones did exactly those two things.
Then one night, the iPhone was launched. It was an extremely fragile appliance that had to be charged on a constant basis. It was also exactly what the world wanted.
The Win95 interface was extensively user tested (back when that was difficult and rare), was widely praised by UI commentators when it was introduced, and was wildly successful with users. Much more so on all counts than the Mac UI. And the Mac was stuck going nowhere until Steve came back and threw out all the software.
I don’t have an opinion on the superiority of Mac vs Win 3.x – I thought they both sucked – and Apple hardware was more technically innovative the whole way through, and optimization for print rather than screen display made them more attractive to that niche market, but the idea that the Mac was more intuitive and more user-friendly between 1995 and the iPhone was just a long-running delusion.
Purolator didn’t see much upside in oil filters, so they delivered food to Canadian food banks and grew that into Canada’s leading parcel service, rivaling UPS and FedEc.
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Obvious question; are there any of the former big mail order companies that made the transition? In theory, they should have been well placed to use the new media. In Germany, one of the biggest was Quelle, which flopped, and Otto has not exactly turned into a second Amazon. What did Amazon do that outpaced the competition?
Successful pivoting: Hewlett Packard? It changed from an engineering-driven company to a marketing-driven company.
More Japanese companies; Kanebo and Shiseido used to be textile makers. And while it is not quite pivoting (phoenixing?), Subaru and Nissan derived from the WW2-era Nakajima aircraft company. In something of the same vein, Krupp pivoted into a maker of domestic appliances.
How does IBM rate? It used to be the biggest computer maker out there, but dropped the ball with the IBM PC and the PS/2 system, which was an attempt to keep things proprietary. That ploy failed, very quickly, but Apple rode to success with proprietary hardware. But then, Apple pivoted by introducing the iPad and the iPhone, it would have stagnated with just Macs and Macbooks. And that leads to Nokia, which failed to make the jump to the Smartphone in time, let along lead the market.
A question: will Microsoft be an example one day of a successful pivot or of a failure to adapt? It makes a point of buying up good software so as to eliminate competition, but its cash cow is still Windows and it does not seem to be looking for a new paradigm. Time will show.
Apple is perhaps a good example. Traditionally, it was mainly a manufacturer of desktop and notebook computers but in 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Steve Jobs returned and led the company to an historic turnaround, selling first iPods and then iPhones and iPads, and importantly, selling songs and apps and such.
Peugeot - started out making coffee grinders and saw blades - made loads of other stuff but now of course are known for cars
BMW - a few engineering companies started out making bicycles, then cars and then into aerospace - BMW started out in areospace and went on to make cars, somewhart reversing the trend
Lamborghini - started out making tractors, when owner Ferrouccio wanted to make a statement of success he bought a Ferrari but soon realised the car could be improved, famously he contacted Enzo and made sime suggestions and was brusquelly rebuffed, and that’s when the famous Lambo marque was born - out of a spat.
There was an industry magazine that covered the business of selling advertisement on signs and papers posted outside.
Billboard magazine still exists - but it’s changed its focus considerably
Microsoft is pivoting to the cloud. The current CEO was the former head of its cloud division. And since its big corporate cloud customers not longer just want Windows in the cloud it also has Linux there.
In my household, they’re best known for pepper grinders.
Keating’s Powder was at one time a well-known insecticide here. In WW2 they pivoted into high-precision toolmaking for the govt, and have continued in that business profitably.
An example of how not to pivot was provided by Smith-Corona.
Originally a manufacturer of solidly built upright and portable mechanical typewriters, and electric ones when that era came, they had some good notions about pivoting towards electronic storage and retrieval and compatibility with existing computers, but they managed to make an utter hash of it.
Their initial first-wave electronic typewriters were nice — type and see the results in an LED strip the size of a fingernail emery board, store it if you want (limited to ten files and some max # of total characters), edit it including copy and paste, and then when you’re ready roll in a sheet of paper and hit a button and the daisy-wheel would bang it all out for you.
But they wanted to straddle the middle ground between typewriter and computer, and there was one of sorts back when computer ownership was more expensive.
• Their first Personal Word Processor was an add-on that used any of several of their electronic typewriters and added major storage capacity and a character-based CRT screen. The storage medium was a little cassette tape.
• They pitched that model overboard and replaced it with the same idea except the storage was now on 3.5" floppy disks, using a propretary Smith-Corona format. You could no longer buy the tape drive and at no point did they make a mechanism to transfer stored documents from the older tape drive to the new floppy.
• Then they rethought the notion from scratch. The next model of Personal Word Processor no longer made use of their line of electronic typewriters, but instead incorporated a keyboard and daisy-wheel as part of the design. So the PWP was no longer an appealing add-on if you owned a Smith-Corona electronic typewriter. This new model stored documents on a propretary 2-inch diskette that you could flip over and store more on the other side. And again there was no mechanism for moving any data from either of the previous two storage media types, and you could no longer buy the storage devices compatible with the previous versions.
• Their next iteration could load some simple programs — I think there was a spreadsheet for example — but it wasn’t an IBM-compatible computer and by now you could buy an IBM compatible fairly cheaply and run DOS programs. It did, however, use 3.5" floppy disks formatted in the IBM-PC format. So it was finally able to exhibit some degree of compatibility with other machines. Not so much with their own previous line, though, as once again there was no method of transferring any of your work from any of the now three previous types of storage media they had used.
By this point Brother was cleaning their clock badly in the low-end electronic typewriter market, where they had almost no discernable profile (probably due to all their misbegotten pivoting efforts), and no one wanted to buy a pseudo-PC when for just a bit more they could get a Packard Bell or something of that ilk.
When my husband went to work for Best Buy in 1999 they were a brick and mortar retailer with a small on-line presence. The company decided to take advantage of the dot com boom and was going to spin off BestBuy.com in order to get rich quick, but really wasn’t interested in the .com side of the business.
Then the dot.com bubble burst and Best Buy was stuck with an investment in their get rich quick scheme. But they still really didn’t see it as anything worthwhile. They spent the next five years not investing in their internet business. For over FIVE YEARS. Until it became obvious that the internet was starting to outsell stores at a much lower cost of operations.
There are a handful of people (my husband included - and when I saw handful, I can count them on my fingers and toes without getting to my toes) that had spent those five years swimming upstream, but they had Best Buy well positioned to pivot to the internet. Now its the biggest part of Best Buy’s business - and they would have gone under without it in 2009 and again with Covid.
And ancient one. Boyd and Sons was a Boston purveyor of leather goods during the early and mid 19th century. They made, among other things, backpacks for Union soldiers during the Civil War. They are now a company known as National Foam, a world leader in foam firefighting.
For me, bicycles. I can’t remember the last time Peugeot had cars for sale in the US.
They left the U.S. and Canadian markets in '91; they were only selling a couple thousand cars a year here at the time.
Peugeot autos might become available again in the US, now that Chrysler is a subsidiary of the same company as Peugeot (Stellantis, which owns the Abarth, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Citroën, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Fiat Professional, Jeep, Lancia, Maserati, Mopar, Opel, Peugeot, Ram and Vauxhall brands).
Geico, the insurance company with the Gecko mascot, was originally “Government Employee Insurance Company”. I’d say that the pivot to insuring the private sector was pretty successful.
I am thinking about the “other” big famous Rochester, NY company, Xerox. (There’s also Bausch & Lomb but I know very little about them.)
When I was an engineering student in the early 1990’sm Xerox was in the news a lot as a company famous for having adopted a lot of new practices (quality improvement) to improve their performance and win back some market share from the onslaught of cheap printers and copiers from Japan (such as Brother). Xerox was already famous to engineers and technologists for having invented much of modern computer technology but also having failed to capitalize on it, allowing Apple to steal the GUI and mouse ideas, spinning off the postscript language into Adobe, and LANs becoming associated with Novell. Today a lot of people give Apple credit for the modern approach to computing, which was “copied” by Microsoft in the form of Windows, not realizing it all came from Xerox.
So for a while it was looking like Xerox was a big success story, having pivoted to modern digital technology, recognizing that copying was merely scanning + printing, and Xerox was pretty good at developing high speed, high quality document handling systems. For a few years I worked at XIP, which was a joint venture between Fuji Xerox (FX) and Xerox Corporation, whose job it was to build printers in Japan and customize them for customers of Xerox (such as Apple, DEC, etc.).
But I guess things must have gone downhill for XC since then, as recently they were acquired by Fuji Film, who had for years been partnered with XC in the form of Fuji Xerox. Now, FX is the dominant, controlling force. Not sure what that means for XC really, but it seems like, in an overall sense, a failure. (They used to be the big bosses but are now the subordinate group.)