Struggle to come up with one? Well here is a short list of HIT mobile / CE products that came from a single company:
- Palm Pilot
- Treo
- Blackberry
- iPod
- Garmin Navigation Units
- TiVo
- Nintendo Wii (really any gaming platform)
- iPhone
- Kindle
If you are really interested in understanding the details of why vertical integration wins the day in early markets read Clayton Christensen's books. The short answer is that in the early days of markets the technical integration points between various points in the technology value chain are not well defined and therefore you need a single company to own the end-to-end product to create the best consumer experience. Google finally woke up to this and that is why they are getting more involved in hardware (i.e. - Nexus One).
The mobile market will continue to be a market where innovation happens so quickly that there won't be well defined integration points for years to come. This will also increasingly be the case with the CE market as CE products (HDTVs, DVD players, Gaming Consoles, etc.) become network connected and their interfaces and interaction points with other products change dramatically.
Apple is the company best positioned to create hit products in markets where vertical integration matters. These aren't small markets (phones, portable media players, tablets, etc.) and the markets that will soon require vertical integration (CE products) will be markets that Apple will make inroads into.
Full disclosure - I own Apple stock and will continue to own their stock until I see the importance of vertical integration diminish, which I don't expect to happen for years to come.
