Apple started as the most successful company in personal computing, because they invented the field. Then Apple became the most successful company in the world. More successful than its competitors, not by a decent margin, but by an order of magnitude.
Apple products are unbelievably better than the competition’s. Their customer satisfaction scores are outliers. Their customer loyalty borders on religious belief. Their brand recognition and appreciation are without par. Their revenues are enormous, on enormous margins. Apple is not just better, it’s different.
Why? That question is easy to answer. The reason for all of this success is Steve Jobs. We know that because Apple was, for part of its history, not run by Steve Jobs, but run instead by bona fide CEOs: Sculley, Spindler, Amelio.
Those years were the years of failure: Apple slowly became less impressive, lost market share, lost quality, lost focus.
Apple, run by CEO-types, sucked.
Steve Jobs only got to be CEO of Apple because he was its founder. Steve Jobs was emphatically not a CEO-type. Steve Jobs was the kind of person that is carefully kept away from…
