Stephen Jobs's Profile

The iPod and Mac are true Apple innovations and nothing Gates can say can take that away! Yes, it is true that the Mac was inspired by a trip to Xerox seeing their windowing/mouse system.. Ok, Steve ripped it off, but Apple's innovation was that they did rip it off and nobody else had the vision to do that. The iPod, however, is an innovation and a success which nobody can grant to any company except Apple... and that is an undeniable fact! Ok, mp3 players and downloadable music was around for years, but Apple had the creative vision to rip off the idea and sell it as an unique invention. Perhaps, Apple is a fad oriented company relying on minor successes for short periods of time while the likes of Microsoft gain even more share at the expense of Apple. But Apple isn't about sustainable long-term successes. They are a company dedicated to innovation and delivering what the user really wants: hyped technology marketed in a cool way to excite the market only to loose that share to companies which can deliver a cheaper feature-compatible units. But here are Apple's undeniable successes from the beginning. 1) Apple II: It started the PC revolution; ok the IBM PC and Microsoft's DOS eventually won that one. 2) the Mac: ok cheaper x86 boxes with Windows won that one too in the long run. 3) firewire: ok, so USB is now the standard. 4) Newton: now PDAs rules. 5) iPod/iTunes: on top now... but without a doubt Apple will loose this one too. Here's what Apple does better than anybody: hype. They're good at getting the ball rolling, but extremely poor at sustained execution. Jobs always criticizes microsoft for lack of innovations, but apple doesn't truly innovate anything, except hype. Franky, I think, Microsoft , Intel and Dell like Apple being around. Apple get's the ball rolling and the industry says "thanks, we'll take it from here."