Apple Proves It Pays to Be Late

Apple (AAPL) now finds itself where everyone else in the mobile handset business wanted to be 15 years ago. Large companies full of clever people devoted years of planning and expenditure to fail to get here. If the iPhone continues to flourish–then both rival manufacturers and the networks have to tear up some long established strategies. For the established handset competition, if Apple takes the lucrative high end, that leaves them scrambling around for gimmicks in a cutthroat market that’s increasingly low margin. For the networks, they’ll need to find devices that people actually want–or pray that Apple drops its carrier exclusivity policy and partners with any network that wants to sell its gear. So how did someone with no track record in a notoriously difficult business find itself walking away with the laurels? What can explain this paradox?

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