The Four

Woz’s brilliant architecture and his own elegant design. But no
corporation was going to buy his computers when they could buy
inferior, but adequate, machines at a lower price and guaranteed
volume delivery.
So, Jobs instead went after the individual consumer. There, he had
free reign: his small competitors were stuck building hobby machines
that average folks didn’t trust or understand. Meanwhile, IBM was
staying out of personal computers because it was fighting antitrust
indictments over its mainframe computers; DEC had dismissed the
idea of consumer computers, and HP—even after Woz offered Apple to
Bill Hewlett—decided to focus on engineers and other professionals.
Within three years of its founding, Jobs and Apple owned the personal
computer market.
Then something interesting happened: those same consumers
started sneaking their Apple computers into the office. It wasn’t long
before an insurgency was in full flower, with individual employees by
the thousands using their Apple computers at work in violation of the
rules put down by their employers’ IT departments. That was the
beginning of Apple “cool”—users felt like mavericks, corporate
guerillas, fighting the Man in the MIS department. That’s why, when
IBM finally unleashed its PC, it destroyed the rest of the personal
computer industry. But Apple, like the tiny mammal skittering under
the feet of a dinosaur, survived... and eventually triumphed.
Google did the same thing by pretending to be small, cute, and
honest with its simple homepage—even after it crushed all other
search engines. Remember, Google started on Yahoo, which decided to
outsource search to the little engine that could—and did: Google
became a hundred times more valuable than Yahoo, which didn’t see
the threat. Facebook defeated the dominant Myspace by being the
nice, safe alternative that wasn’t overrun with sexual predators, or at
least the fear of them. Facebook’s roots on Ivy League college
campuses made it feel more upmarket and safe: it demanded a .edu
email address. The requirement to confirm, and share, one’s identity
created a different, more civilized decorum on Facebook.
Content on Twitter is more likely to get a hostile response than
when posted on Facebook, since, similar to real life, it’s easier to be an
asshole anonymously. Amazon was careful never to portray bookstores