What Should Apple Do Next?

Sexy hardware and sleek new media services are all but certain. But what other products, services, or industries should the company tackle?

by Matt Vella

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On Jan. 15, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs will bound onto the stage of the Macworld Conference & Expo to give his annual keynote address. Jobs typically uses the venue to set the company's agenda for the coming year and reveal new products and services that—in terms of buzz at least—might well outshine the countless gizmos introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show recently held in Las Vegas.

Jobs devotees and Apple aficionados—not to mention competitors—have come to expect a lot from these performances. And with good reason. With a keen sense of theater, Jobs has used the forum as a platform to launch some of the company's biggest products and make key strategic announcements, including the tectonic switch to Intel (INTC) processors that rocked the computer industry in 2006, as well as, of course, the unveiling of last year's tech phenom, the iPhone.

But to get a glimpse of what might lie beyond this year's keynote, BusinessWeek asked an eclectic group of analysts, designers, innovators, educators, and marketing experts for their opinions on what products, services, and experiences Apple might set its sights on next. Predictably, suggestions ran the gamut from the highly improbable—a ride on the Apple subway anyone?—to all but forgone conclusions, i.e. über-thin notebooks. (For a complete list, see the slide show.)

Innovation Playbook

But there's a serious lesson to be learned from the prognostications, fantastic or otherwise. For example, the degree to which asking "what if" reveals key elements in Apple's innovation playbook. Jobs' game plan for Apple has been apparent since he took back the reins of the embattled Cupertino (Calif.) company in 1997. Products, from the original iMac, which was launched in 1998, to the iPod, have focused on relentlessly reducing complexity, honing the brand's image for clean, simple design.

What's more, additional products—from a new Apple operating system to media devices and computers—all fell into a well-designed ecosystem for a seamless user experience. Jobs also encouraged socializing so users could easily share music, movies, or videos. Executives asking themselves how their company might create a product as successful as the iPod are barking up the wrong tree. A better question, according to designers and innovation consultants, is: "What would Apple do?"

The key, explains Yves Béhar, founder of fuseproject and a winner of a Gold IDEA/BusinessWeek design award, is that "Apple conceives its products as a symbiosis of hardware, software, and user experience." Under Jobs' leadership, he says, Apple has cultivated a corporate culture that inculcates this holistic type of thinking throughout the organization. One result: the so-called iPod ecosystem that includes not only the sophisticated hardware and technology inside the industrial design, but also the iTunes software and user interface, the online music store, and more generally the Mac operating system. "The joke around our offices is that everyone at Apple is a designer because they all think in this way," adds Béhar.

Jesse James Garrett, president of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco firm specializing in user experience design, says: "Apple really excels at taking aspects of our daily lives that we find frustrating and overly complicated and proving they don't have to be as complex as we've always assumed." The company's track record of doing this successfully contributes to the "enormous amount of goodwill for the brand," he adds before suggesting someone should apply the Cupertino-based company's logic to mass public transportation.