Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) lead in consumer electronics would have allowed it to launch an armada of new devices. It could look at the largest selling devices in the industry and pick and chose targets. The most obvious among them was video game consoles, both portable devices and traditional machines. The pick was an obvious one long ago, based on the sales of Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Xbox series, Sony Corp.’s (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation and the Nintendo products. The tragedy of Apple’s mistake is that the three companies in the sector had little market advantage to make its game consoles a long-term and smashing success. Apple did.

The conventional view of Microsoft is that it has lost its ability to innovate as a way to grow beyond its Windows franchise. Its search engine operations and mobile efforts have been failures. It moved into video consoles and lost billions of dollars. But Microsoft was stubborn, and the stubbornness yielded a success.

Sony is supposed to be the most poorly run large consumer electronics company in the world, its substantial edge lost long ago when it did not follow up the success of its Walkman. It has fumbled in the smartphone, camera and TV businesses. However, it has maintained impressiveness in the video game business, despite almost complete failures elsewhere.

All that needs to be said about Nintendo is that the company was so tiny before its Wii release that no one ever considered it a company that would grow to even modest size. Instead the Wii topped the industry in unit sales for years.

Critics can say that Apple should have gotten into the smart watch business long ago or pressed its brand in the television delivery sector. Its iOS has been a leader in operating systems and could have been leveraged in either business, as it was the favored operating system in the sector before the rise of Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Android. But the smart watch business was uncharted territory. Apple’s lack of aggression in the living room will haunt it.

Only one business was ever large enough that Apple absolutely had to make an effort. The game console industry has produced hundreds of millions of unit sales over the year. And not one of those units was from Apple.

Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.