With Clarity comes sufficiency - How Apple dominated the tablet market and the future of self-driving cars and battery vehicles.

The sacred statement is that value is anything that is sufficiently useful to life. Yes, it is!

But what does it take to create a value that is sufficiently useful to life?

I want to talk about the science and art of value creation. What sets apart the best companies, institutions, countries, and individuals are that they produce stellar products, they deliver stellar value in their work. 

But how do you define a stellar value that is sufficiently useful to life? You determine it by the clarity and sufficiency of the solution it proffers to a problem. 

Let me explain.

On January 27, 2010, Apple launched the iPad to the amazement of the whole tech world. Though it was not the first type of device that had served like a tablet it was the first to truly serve as a really viable device between phones and PCs. Before the iPad, there were netbooks, Microsoft's slate PCs, and Pocket PCs. Also was Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992. Microsoft had tablets long before Apple. Many, many companies had tablets. It was just that nobody was buying them. Then the Apple iPad came and changed everything. The Apple iPad for the first time truly delivered the promise of the tablet - the dream of the industry.

At first, when they released it market analysts and experts berated it as being a failure but soon the market itself proved them wrong. 

In the fourth quarter of 2020, iPad sales generated about 6.8 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, an increase of more than 2 billion U.S. dollars from the fourth quarter of 2019. 

As reported by Statista “Up until the fourth quarter of 2018 (3Q’ 18 calendar year), Apple sold nearly 425 million iPads worldwide and released eight versions of the device. In 2018, iPad sales generated about 19 billion U.S. dollars in revenues... iPad revenue reached the highest figure to date in the first quarter of 2014 (4Q’ 13 calendar year), when sales of the device generated about 11.5 billion U.S. dollars. In that particular quarter, iPad sales accounted for nearly 20 percent of Apple’s total global revenue. In the third quarter of 2013 (2Q ’13 calendar year), iPad revenue accounted for about a quarter of Apple’s total global revenue, the highest share to date.”

With the success of the iPad over the years, Apple has established itself as the leading vendor in the tablet market.

What enabled Apple to rise above the competition and truly delivered this great product? How did Apple revive the fledgling market of tablets? It lies in one key factor: the solution they provided to the need of the market.

In my book “An Exercise in Clear Thinking: 11 Rules for Interpreting the World Accurately and Fast” I defined value as anything that is sufficiently useful to life. Value fills a void created by a need in the market. In order to fill that void, the solution that is to be created for the need has to sufficiently fill that void for it to be truly appreciated by the market. When you look at the definition I gave someone might ask: “well what do you mean by “sufficiently useful to life”? 

Life has only one goal, and that is growth. Anything that sufficiently supports this goal is sufficiently useful to life. But it’s still vague, right?

Let’s go deeper. For a solution - a value - that is delivered to the market to be sufficiently useful to life it has to be a sufficient solution to the need it seeks to solve. And for it to achieve this it must come with clarity. It must clearly interpret the problem. 

Understanding a need requires learning how to think clearly about the need. The value that clearly and sufficiently satisfies a need is the one that will pay a premium. In essence, anything that sufficiently satisfies a need is sufficiently useful to life in itself. Because at the core of the sufficiency of a solution to any problem are the core attributes of life’s most sufficient solutions to its systems and processes. Core attributes like simplicity, speed, network effects, amongst others.

Once you can clearly interpret a need to the point of its basic simple ingredients you have come to its clearest interpretation, and from there the simplest and most effective (sufficient) solution will emerge.

Lack of clear thinking forces you to provide a solution that is insufficient to a need. And this is what we see in almost 90% of the products and services in our markets today. This is one of the primary things that force a company or organization to fail.

The level of the clarity of your solution to a need determines its level of sufficiency to life. Clear solutions (value) become highly effective and simple, making them sufficiently useful to life. With clarity comes sufficiency. 

Apple delivered a value that was sufficient enough for the need for a tablet in the market. That was why in spite of their late entry into the market of tablets they still won the game and are still winning.

How did they achieve this?

It started with their approach to the problem, the way they saw the problem, it started with the way they interpreted the problem.

Instead of the old way other companies who previously worked on the tablet devices looked at the vision of the tablet and interpreted the problem (as a smaller PC or another version of PC) Apple thought of it differently.

They saw it as Steve Jobs explains it: “a third category device between the phone and PC”.

On the launch day Steve explained:

“A question has arisen lately," said Jobs. "Is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something that's between a laptop and a smartphone. The bar is pretty high. In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. They're going to have to be far better at doing some really important things. Better than the laptop. Better than the smartphone….If there's going to be a third category of device, it's going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise, it has no reason for being."

This way of defining the problem gave Jobs a better understanding of what was needed and how to approach the problem. The clarity of thinking he applied to get to this point was where the real work was, not in the designing or manufacturing of the product. The other companies like Microsoft didn’t interpret the problem this way and so it affected the way they approached their design and their final product. More than anything else a company and its people should train themselves more on how to think clearly than how to do engineering, design, or marketing. 

If you can learn how to think clearly about any situation you can clearly interpret the solution to any problem and with that, you can design and engineer an almost perfect solution to any problem like Jobs did with Apple products. More than any other thing, Jobs' ability to engage in an exercise in clear thinking, as chronicled in stories about how he thought about solving people’s needs with technology, was his greatest strength and the single attribute that brought Apple its fortune and glory till this day.

Your ability to proffer a sufficient solution to a need lies in your interpretation of that need. A clear interpretation of a need leads to a sufficient solution to the need. With clarity of interpretation comes sufficiency of solution. 

This was what Steve and his colleagues at Apple did. They had a clear interpretation of what the need was. This enabled them to come up with the most simple and sufficient solution to it. The person that has the best explanation for a problem is the likeliest to solve it. This clear interpretation begins with an exercise in clear thinking.

A highly sufficient solution to a need wades off competition. The sufficiency of your solution determines the level of competition you will face. And this is why since 2010 that Apple launched the iPad it has enjoyed a huge market share, a feat other companies are yet to match.

There’s another sector that is attracting a lot of attention and that is self-driving technology and battery technology. The world has waited for so long for a sufficient solution to this problem and anybody that truly delivers on it will lead the market for decades to come. 

A lot of companies have now jumped into it ever since Elon with his company, Tesla, Inc, blazed the trail in the market. But again more than anything the winner of these markets will not be either the first movers or those who have stayed longer in the market but those who through clear thinking has developed the clearest interpretation of the problem and thus the most sufficient solution to it. The company that would benefit most will benefit from its investment in thinking about the problem rather than working on the problem.

Two things more than ever that will enable a company to create a sufficient solution to a problem are; (1) how obsessive they in thinking about the problem and (2) their culture.

I will discuss in my next article how this makes the difference and how an organization can put up structures that support an ecosystem that will generate this sort of clear thinking that would generate sufficient solutions to market needs.

Thanks for reading my article

Ugochukwu Chukwu

Learning Coach & Author of "An Exercise in Clear Thinking"