What’s up with Apple suddenly wanting to give their operating system away for free? Let’s forget a moment that after they did so Microsoft quickly followed suit. This may have been a part of Steve Jobs overall plan, but that doesn’t matter anymore.
Jobs deserves a lot of respect for what he accomplished – and then accomplished again when he came back to his company – but Apple is going to continue for many years. And to do so they need to continue thinking outside the box, continue being rebels and the weird ones.
Attack on Microsoft?
No, not really. While it made Microsoft take action and copy what Apple decided to do, that’s not the big reason that they decided to go free. No one may know for sure why they did it – except for employees near the top of the Apple food chain, but there’s a lot of evidence that points to why they may have decided to start going free.
For one thing, Apple is at the top of the hill in many ways. They have billions of dollars of cash stored up. That’s how well they’ve been doing. A lot of people have speculated what they might do with all that money, but there’s one thing that not many are talking about – the ability for a large pile of cash to turn into something even bigger than an OS upgrade free for consumers.
Free iPads and More?
Software is one thing, but imagine for a moment if Apple took all that extra cash they had and bought everyone an Apple iPhone and gave it to them for free – if they signed up to buy another one later or use a wireless provider that gave Apple a cut of the service revenues.
That, my friends, would really shake up the mobile game. In fact, it might be the death knell for a lot of companies – Google and Microsoft included. This might be why Apple is playing around with the Free Model – something that has been shown to work in the past.
If Apple can take free and breathe new life into it – by spending all their excess cash – they could take that next giant leap that truly makes them one of the most valuable companies in the world because of their market share. People like free and would probably switch to the iPhone if they got it for no money.
Steve Jobs is gone (sadly), but Apple continues to dominate. Still, the world today is different than when Jobs started his dream so many years ago. And this might be one reason so many are looking at personal training courses available online these days rather than going out to the garage to start a company.
If you have an opinion about why Apple is suddenly so hip to the free movement, leave a comment below and let us know what’s on your mind.
