Apple: About as close to God as you can get

Several friends of mine - many in the Microsoft camp - complain about Apple and look at me with worried suspicion as I rave about the company and its products. It's sour grapes. We all wanted to produce devices and services that Apple have now delivered with twice the panache and many more times the expected commercial results than any of us imagined.

Apple TV earlier in the year showed us how effectively Apple have educated the public in clean and simple devices. They have educated and nurtured a public with the clean simplicity of the iPod and the measured delivery of iTunes. Who among us could have imagined several years ago just how important iTunes would become to the consumer public? None of us. Perhaps not even Apple. With superb competence they have simply followed their fortune, and their public, wherever it has naturally has led them. They listened to the market and they got out of their own way.

The iPhone attracts the especial attention of those with sour grapes and those that hang their head because they did not think of it first. But they are missing the point. They could never have invented the iPhone. It is simply the inevitable conclusion, not of plucking ideas from the air, but of looking at what you are doing that is succeeding and of following that wherever it may lead. The innovation of the iPhone lies in the much earlier vision of the Macintosh. It is the result of the continuity leadership and vision given to the company by one man, Steve Jobs.

This is an important observation because it speaks to the necessity of individual and not corporate visions. Apple is the reflection of the consistency an individual's vision can bring. Steve Jobs' skill is not in high technology but in simply being able to identify his fortune and the competence to follow that where it may lead. In other words, he is able to identify the inevitable next step.