At the risk of carrying on ad nauseam about iEverthing, iPad is sold out for weeks just about everywhere. I went into a packed Apple store this week looking for one and felt like I was in an electronic Disneyland except Mickey Mouse was a 20 something with bad hair. I also took note that the iPad displays had no prices, reinforcement for a value proposition based on a unique offering where price is almost irrelevant.

In the classic “I am a PC” commercials Apple throws mud at Microsoft and the PC platform, and perhaps the criticism is deserved.  Apple is clearly an amazing product innovator, but what has taken form is an integration of their products (such as MacBook, iPad, iPhone and especially the App Store) to a point where the Mac platform has become the strategic advantage.

We are no longer just enthusiasts, we are believers: believers that Mac’s future products and ability to integrate them will make our lives better.  We don’t only have iPhones based on what they do now, but because we know something clever will be on the App Store next week, or the week after that. We know we won’t need three different adapters, for whatever is iNext, we will use the ones we already own.  We know the machines will work harmoniously without pulling whatever hair we have left out.

Having a belief system that supports a platform can extend beyond iGadgets. If your investment advisor or insurance broker were on the wrong platform, you would lose faith in the advisor in the way that you may have with Microsoft (with security problems, coding issues and the release of the much maligned Vista). Cloud computing presents us with a new platform for storage, and DirecTV has a new DVR which will record programs on one central hub that you can watch on any TV in your home.

How can your platform change? What would be a game changer in terms of service delivery for your customers or clients?

While many businesses dependent on MS Office will run on PCs in the near distant future, it will be interesting to see if the Apple platform can steal away the office productivity market like it has all of the others. I was amused that when I ran spell check for this article in MS Word, iPhone was not recognized as a word.  I may be a convert very soon.