Resolution: Newspapers should be more like Apple

We're coming up on the time to post New Year's resolutions. Here's a proposal: Newspapers should resolve to be more like Apple and less like Microsoft.

Just a few years ago, Apple was beaten. Its goose was cooked. It was on life support in the shape of a temporary investment by Microsoft, which feared antitrust action if Apple disappeared.

Now Apple's market capitalization -- a measure not only of current performance, but also of how much the stock market believes in a company's future -- is greater than that of IBM and Intel. Its customers are passionately in love with its products. The only thing cooler than an iPod is an iPhone.

You have to respect a comeback like that.

Alas, newspapers prefer to act like Microsoft.

After half a century or so of near-monopolistic market dominance, the average daily newspaper has developed a lot of really bad habits: rudeness, arrogant pricing, poor customer service and a really bad case of NIH, the "not invented here" syndrome. The newspaper often is as lame as the Zune and as resented as Vista.

Microsoft's idea of a level playing field has been described as "bulldozing the other guy's buildings." Oh, what a dream solution that would be for today's troubled newspaper publisher. Let's get a law passed against Craigslist, or the new free commuter paper, or Myspace.

It would be easy to proclaim Apple's success as the natural consequence of an innovative culture. As a guy who likes to peddle culture change and teaches innovation classes, I'm tempted. But it would be wrong, because I don't think that's the real key difference.

Here's Apple's magic: Other people's ideas.

Think about what Apple did not invent:

• The windowed, mouse-driven interface. That actually came from Xerox PARC.
• OS X. Inside is Carnegie-Mellon University's Mach kernel, overlaid with functionality lifted from BSD Unix. Key parts come from hundreds of open-source software projects. The entire printing system comes from Unix/Linux.
• Safari. That came from the Linux-based KDE project.
• The iPod. Apple was a latecomer to the solid-state audio player game, and the original iPod software came from a third party. Even the name was outsourced.
• The video iPod. Companies like Archos had pocket video systems long before Apple, which initially disclaimed any interest in video.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The magic is not in the invention, but in the execution, the singular focus on user experience. Apple's innovation is aggressively outsourced. Smart integration of other people's ideas has transformed the entire company.

Newspapers, which have built up institutional layers of protection from outside influences and outside ideas, are stuck in a past that doesn't exist any more. Just look at how we typically respond to a new idea. Let's take video:

• Assumption 1: We'll shoot it. After all, we have the visual experts.
• Assumption 2: We'll edit it. After all, we're the experts in deciding what's important.
• Assumption 3A: We'll post it on our website and rig it so it's difficult, maybe even impossible, to copy/post anywhere else. After all, we own it. Can't have the unwashed masses stealing it.
• Assumption 3B: No, it's not going on YouTube with the exploding cola bottles and half-clad dancing teenagers. We have to protect our brand.

And the result is about as successful as Microsoft's Plays For Sure dudware.

Now, I wouldn't want to carry the Microsoft vs. Apple analogy too far. I have my own list of issues with Apple, and Steve Jobs is a bona fide jerk. But come to think of it, newspapers were more interesting when they were edited by brilliant, obsessive jerks than nowadays, when they're edited by committees.