Let's take a brief look at them one by one.
Going back to 2000-05 Google was nothing more than a search engine. Google became popular in a short span of time because it was capable of giving accurate search results in lesser time. It was quite later that Google started focusing on other products like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Earth and so on.
29th of June 2007 remains a historic date for Apple. It was the day when Apple launched the very first iPhone the success of which became a foundation for iPad in the later part of 2009.
Like the significance of the release date for iPhone, 20th of November 1985 remains an important date in the history of Microsoft. That day marked the launch of the operating system, Windows. After the huge success of Windows OS, later in 1990 Microsoft launched MS Office. Today over a billion people now use Office, to the point where Word and Excel are practically synonymous with word processing and spreadsheets, respectively.
There is one common thread that links all these companies together and I can sum it up in 6 words - "Be specialized in your CORE offering"
Being hungry for immediate profits or quick market share was not the way of Google when it started with a simple search engine. When Google search became a globally used tool for web searching, Google then offered Gmail and Chrome to its users because by that time, it had already won billion of online users on one thing - TRUST. Once customers became used to the Google search tool, they knew that Google is another name for speed and accuracy. These qualities were associated with the name 'Google' which in return made it easy for people to establish their email account with Gmail which offered free space of around 1 GB back in 2004 which increased upto 10 GB of free storage space in 2012. This was quite a rare case as Yahoo use to offer a very restricted storage capacity around a decade back. When people started using Google Search, Google Chrome and Gmail, It became easy for Google to instantly capture market by introducing a variety of products and offering most of them for free. Today Google is capable enough not just to compete with giants like Microsoft and Apple but also to create revolutionary and futuristic products that can change the way you and me experience life.
The story of Microsoft (with its products like Windows and Office Suite) and Apple (with its super successful iPhone) share similarity in terms of the way they approached their products that were capable enough to win people's minds and hearts and associate their company with values that can never be duplicated by any other firm no matter what they do.
So, what is the moral of the story here?
- From the perspective of a business, you need to focus on one specific need of the consumers and create a product that is capable of satisfying that need.
- Once you create such a product, keep on improving and innovating the same.
- Once your product succeeds (which depends upon whether customers associate your product with a specific quality like how people subconsciously associate Google with speed and accuracy)
- You can then proceed in offering a wide variety of carefully crafted products and services that will continue building their trust on your company and your products.
