Secrecy, Surprise and the Real World

There are two ways you can launch a product: launch by surprise, or launch several months after the announcement.

If you launch by surprise, you can’t easily gauge the public response, or generate a wave of hype (at least, not for the initial release). You also can’t get public support easily for things like app development. The tradeoff is that, if you’re truly innovative, you can leap months or even years ahead of the competition if they’re not thinking along the same lines. This has its own tradeoff, though: if you’re wrong, you’ll have wasted even more time & resources on a failed concept. Finally, you don’t have to make a promise to the people that you might not be able to keep.

If you announce your product before launch, you do get the chance to have the public evaluate the product, but you also make a promise to the world that you’re going to have this product shipping in the near future. This approach is the safer of the two, but doesn’t have the potential for success that the first option has. You’ll have a more quantifiable idea of how the product will succeed in the market, at the expense of giving the competition more lead time to react, as well as having the chance of missing the ship date and causing a public embarrassment.

The key to using Option 1 is knowing that you can achieve success with your product. Apple has had more success at this than any other tech company, and that’s why they can take the risk of waiting until release day to make its presentation. Well, that and they’re sitting on a ridiculous amount of cash should the product flop.

So, if you’re thinking that Apple being secretive is stupid and obviously something that came from some kind of random policy generator, think again. It’s a well thought out plan, and other companies only wish they could pull that off without getting stung.