Towards an understanding of Apple´s success — Conceptualising product-service-business bundles

The consensus explanation of Apple´s commercial success has been put down to the excellent design of its products and the intuitiveness of the products´ user interfaces. This paper uses a case study of Apple and its recent products to explain its commercial success and build a conceptual model of product-service offerings. Apple´s key innovation was the bundling of its products with a service (iTunes, App Store) which not only enabled it to distribute chargeable content to its users but also enabled it to take a percentage cut of that revenue. Apple also opened up the App store to third party developers to allow them to offer products (software) and services to users and charge money for these, from which Apple took a percentage cut. It was this potential business revenue that led US stock market investors to turn Apple into temporarily the biggest company in the world. And for Apple to amass a $100bn+ cash pile. From analysing Apple´s product-service offering a general framework for the modelling of product-service offerings is created. This models the product-service bundle, the infrastructure required to deliver it and the business aspects to produce the Product-Service-Business (PSB) building blocks framework. This PSB framework can be used by others to design product-service offerings which will hopefully also be successful.