A Product For Everyone Or a Product For The Few?
Each strategy has its flaws and advantages
When the first iPhone appeared, the then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Balmer, laughed at it (watch the video). Be careful what you say! As we know now, he was mistaken. Apple is still the smartphone market leader. The company has a relatively narrow smartphone range, and for a business of this size, it has a small assortment. So, it seems to be a good strategy.
Canadian company Research In Motion went even further. It concentrated on smartphones only (the brand name was BlackBerry). So did Taiwanese HTC. They chose the focus strategy, the one which many experts highly value. They believe it lets companies concentrate on the essentials and set aside secondaries.
But, as we can see, businesses do not always benefit from it. I guess you don't have a BlackBerry or HTC device in your pocket.
Both HTC and BlackBerry offered customers versatile and functional smartphones. But Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, and Huawei squeezed them out of the market. Samsung manag…