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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GVTucker who wrote (75749)	6/17/2008 1:21:38 PM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 213177

Apple and Steve Jobs Steve Jobs left Apple in the late 80's in a dispute with Sculley over the Macintosh. The Mac was initially a closed system, with a tiny screen and no hard disk. This was Steve's vision to meet the low end price points. Sculley wanted to expand the Mac, and Steve said "Only over my dead body". The Apple Board sided with Sculley, and Jobs left in a huff, selling all his Apple holdings, except for one symbolic share. Initially, Apple prospered dramatically after Jobs left. Sculley was right and the expansion of the Mac increased the acceptability and the ASP of the the Mac. Sculley became the Media Darling, and even ended up sitting with Hilary at Clinton's first State of the Union Address. Sculley launched the Newton, the precursor to all Handhelds, and the Project Taligent(Pink). Soon Sculley was ousted by the Board, and under subsequent CEOs, the "wheels slowly began to fall off" the Apple automobile. Newton was too far ahead of its time, and lacking the "Jobs touch", it failed to excite the market, and became a drain. Project Taligent,a collaboration with IBM to build a revolutionary OS, became an engineering disaster. The parade of new CEOs were fixated on gaining market share for Apple, and were all disasters, and Apple appeared to be headed for oblivion. In desperation Jobs was drafted to save the company he had founded. He dumped the Newton and the Taligent projects, and brought in the NextOS to be a core for the new Apple OS. He abandoned the market share fixation, and focussed on innovation and improved differentiation of Apple products, which has slowly paid off. The iPod and iPhone have been master strokes. If Jobs again departs Apple, I am sure that the momentum will carry Apple forward for a while. But will the successors lose their way, as happened the last time ? Last time,Jobs succesors got lost when the market changed significantly, and Windows 95 narrowed the differentiation between the Apple and Wintel platforms. They were pure managers, and lacked the technical vision and insight to adapt to the changes in the technology and the market place. Is Jobs infallible ? No ! Is he irreplaceable ? Time alone will tell !