To be fair, on top of that, they're also really good at marketing. But their marketing is only effective because it has a sincerity--they're genuinely proud of the products they make. I bet you can tell when someone is trying to fake that.

Yeah, this definitely is an important component of their success. The authenticity of their marketing message, thanks to that pride, resonates with people who are being fed bullshit everywhere else.

Regardless of how you feel about him, it's impossible not to be at least a little captivated by a Steve Jobs keynote. The joy of watching someone stand up and just be proud of how honestly hard his company works – it's refreshing.

When somebody says that, they are either a Microsoft/Google fanboy trying to rile you up, or they just don't understand what makes something great.

Back in the 1990s, Apple's products were junk, but the marketing was still excellent.

I think when engineering types hear the word "marketing", they immediately take it as dismissive. But Apple is an example of a company who owes their skin to phenomenal marketing over the long term.

That's not how I remember it at all.

Apple's marketing in the mid-to-late 90's was poor to nonexistent, frankly, while on a technical level Macs weren't any worse than PC's (both crashed a lot and came with fairly comparable hardware, but the Mac OS 7/8/9 UI was very arguably better than the Windows 95/98 UI). Apple's user loyalty was fantastic (and fanatic) in the mid-to-late 90's, but the company itself didn't do anywhere near the kind of promotion they did once Jobs returned.

Yes, Mac OS 9 had technical disadvantages compared to Windows NT and Windows 2000, and Apple had a second-system effect of legendary proportions with Copland. 90's Apple wasn't that great at technology. But they were abysmal at marketing, while Microsoft were fantastic at it.

Yeah, Apple's 90's marketing was ass. But I loved every last Mac I owned during that decade.

Apple had overall high product quality but their focus was lacking and they weren't terribly ballsy. They had a distinct feeling of running on the fumes of the Mac's initial success. But it was (and is) a sufficiently great product that those fumes informed an OS that, from a user perspective, remained the best. Mac OS got long in the tooth, but I'd still take it over Win95/98/NT any day.

I don't know about you, but the things I do not miss are putting spaces in extension names to reorder them (at boot time, they were loaded alphabetically and there were often conflicts, if the order was "incorrect"), manually setting up, how much RAM can a specific app use, or rebooting with virtual memory on/off, depending on which app I wanted to run. I still remember, that reading websites with table-layouts on the only somewhat standards-compliant browser (IE for Mac) was exercise in frustration.

Both windows (95/98) and macs had their share of shortcomings, you just had to pick, which set you can tolerate.

Windows had the same problem, except instead of having conflicts between extensions (which everyone understood were extensions to the operating system), installing applications could cause conflicts. Personally, I never reordered extension names to avoid conflicts.

agree with philwelch. Apple's reputation for good marketing is a very recent phenomenon. As someone who has followed apple for a long time, in the 90's I recall them being mocked for their crappy marketing.

The problem isn't necessarily that other companies can't make great things. Many of them just don't think it would be as profitable.

Making great things can be very risky. Most companies are setup to avoid risky behavior at all costs because exposing yourself to risk can be very destructive. The few truly great things squeeze out of a typical company are all because of accident more than by design.

Apple has managed to figure out how to be risky in their behavior without being destructive. They've learned that you can actually jump out of plane if you have a parachute.

Making great things is marketing. The first (and perhaps most important) part of marketing is understanding the, you know, market, and what products would be appropriate for it.

The pervasive Marketing==Advertising mindset is a little short-sighted.

That’s silly. If anything that implies “understanding of the market” is “marketing” then “marketing” has become an all-purpose synonym for “running a business”. At that point, it has no reason to exist as a separate word. I contend that “marketing” does not in popular practice have such a broad definition.

Yes, absolutely. Marketing is part of everything. It's not a separate department or effort, it's a facet of every effort of a company. It's something that everyone, from product design to development should keep in mind.

I'm just running with the definition given to me by my marketing professor at my university's business school :)

Look at 37Signals. I contend that everything they do is marketing, even if it's not writing commercials or buying ads.