You have to hand it to Steve Jobs and Apple for timing and the way his company manipulates market sentiment. Apple can teach the car industry a thing or two.
First, the company announces a 50% increase in its earnings for the first quarter to $3.38 billion. Pretty impressive, until you remember that Apple had changed its accounting methods that allow it to report revenues earlier without necessarily making more sales. The accounting rule changes came in last year and I blogged about it here.
What a perfect opportunity for Apple to unveil its latest new gadget tomorrow which is expected to be its much anticipated tablet computer. The Apple cheer squad in the media has gone ballistic and The Wall Street Journal Digits blog gives us some idea of the buzz that's being created. It's a bizarre situation and as Dave Patrick at Tech.Blorge says, the media is creating a lot of the hype to sell the product before it's even been launched. Who needs marketing when you have media fans?
Much of this comes back to the secretive nature of Apple. And as David Carr in the New York Times says, it's all about having the discipline to build the suspense and have the tech journalists falling over themselves to spread the word.
Financial Times blogger John Gapper makes the excellent point that the battered auto industry could learn a few lessons from Apple. Gapper writes: "One of the reasons this works is that Apple used to have a strict rule that it only revealed new products on the day they were ready to be sold. More recently, it has let that rule slip a little, with the tablet reportedly only going on sale in March. Still, it is a lot better than car companies, which routinely unveil 'concept cars' at auto shows that are very far from being built, and sometimes never are."
Gapper is spot on. The question is whether the auto industry would have the discipline to do it.
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