Apple

[Grieve]

Focusing on doing a few things well instead of doing a lot of stuff and hoping some "stick" is actually a philosophy of Steve Jobs. When he came back to Apple, with it close to bankruptcy, he immediately got rid of all of the zillions of configurations macs came in, and the way they released multiple models a year. Instead he wanted a handful of models and options, because he argued it's not possible to focus and ensure quality with a huge amount of models.

He gave that advice to Larry Page before he died - Google is the king of starting up all types of projects in beta, most of which then languish without updates for years. Page has actually killed off a number of projects since then.

You could argue Samsung's model works as well - release multiple models of phones a year, with every conceivable option, compared to one iPhone a year (and one new design every 2 years). But while Samsung has very high revenue, it has much smaller profits than Apple. So I think the Apple route is pretty smart. We'll see in another 5 years whether it has true longevity.