Tom B

The Mysterious Steve Jobs

You weren't supposed to know about the Osama Bin laden communication strategy! Expect a call from the CIA, which does better funding-wise in lunatic-rich environments.

But seriously: Tech is different from pumping oil (Exxon) or Union-busting (WMT). Tech is hard to get "right"; and "right" is in a constant state of change.

And Apple is at a crossroads. When the Stores opened and Apple started selling iPods, the pundits all said "Oooh, Apple wants to be a CE company". But, in fact, all their successes have lead to a boost in Mac usage. Apple has HUGELY increased the usability, performance, security and stability gaps between Mac and Windows (which were at their lowest points around 1996, just before Jobs returned). OSX runs on great machines and has dev tools Redmond can only fantasize about.

And yet, market share sits around 10%, in large part because Enterprise is slow-moving; way more willing to spend 100's of thousands on IT support than $50 more on a CPU; and has, very, very simple needs-- E-mail, Powerpoint, some database. That is changing, but slowly.

My feeling is that, at some point, OSX will pick up monentum and really start to hammer Windows on market share. 10.6 will help. Maybe Win 7 will help, if it is anything like Vista (and it looks like it will be very much like Vista!). After that point Apple's CEO will matter less. My hope is that Jobs will stay at least a few more years and finish what he started.

I remember the Apple-is-doomed 90's, and it wasn't that they didn't have the best computers or the best programmers-- they did. The problem was they got WAY behind transitioning to a UNIX-like OS, needed in the modern age where everybody is always running many apps at once.

MSFT has STILL not made the transition to UNIX, and I'd say its a bit too late to start now, particularly with weak, ineffectual management at the top: Ballmer (Yahoo deal, Vista, Zune, Xbox).