Hamilton Helmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's funny because the Mac, just the desktop line, has a lot of power today. It is a remarkable amount that people will pay in dollars, they wouldn't pay to a different manufacturer with a different operating system for an Apple computer. Now they bundle in proprietary chips that are the best on the market, so they have a dramatically lower cost structure. It's just margins everywhere. Right. As you might guess, I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs. I think his impulse to control the stack was not based on power but on aesthetics almost. He wanted to control the experience and had this sense of the aesthetics of the experience. He was a genius at that kind of stuff. It could have aligned with power, had their execution been better. But it was a failed opportunity, unfortunately. This will really date me, but I remember when IBM entered the PC business, Apple took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal or something welcoming them to business. That's sort of a common trap that you sometimes see, which is people that are just amazing at innovation, which I have a huge admiration for, that is to say, getting product-market fit think that they can just out invent the competition forever. That story usually doesn't end well, I don't think. The things you're in, you have to solve the power equation, or else you end up competing in a commodity way on your base business. Obviously, the answer is different for every company, but what are some ways to think about when you can feel comfortable enough in your power position to start dialing up your profitability, which I guess would equate to dialing back your subsidies on the platform?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.