If Apple has a flaw, it's the inability of the company to crush competition using the kind of aggressive tactics that companies like Microsoft and Intel have always applied.
Intel's a great company, and Microsoft is a great company. Everybody seems to do a lot better when there is competition.
The United States ran the table on Internet innovations, creating companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, YouTube, and others. Europe and Japan scarcely contributed.
The Apple iPad is not going to be the company's next runaway best seller. Not if the industry can help it... With the iPad, Apple may have irked it's somewhat new partner Intel Corp. Intel gets spanked by nobody.
Microsoft fears Intel is eventually going to create its own operating system and optimize its chips for its own OS, cutting Microsoft out of the picture. Kind of like what Microsoft allegedly does to people who write applications for Windows.
Companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel were just starting at their 10-year anniversary.
Imagine a world where Apple, Google, and Intel were Chinese companies. It would be scary.
Think of everything in Seattle - Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks. Then you go down to Silicon Valley - Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter. What does New York produce?
The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.
Apple isn't the next Microsoft, you see. Apple is not the next anything because the role it aspires to transcends anything imaginable by Microsoft, ever. Google is the next Microsoft, so Google is seen by Ballmer as the immediate threat - the one he has a hope in hell of actually doing something about.
That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be.
If you truly don't have competition, then zoom out until you can define some. Competition can be as simple as the reliance on the status quo, Microsoft (since at some point Microsoft will compete with everyone for everything), or researchers in universities. Pick something, because saying you have no competition at all is a nonstarter.
I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.
Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.
In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn't to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.
I want to live in an America where we are able to marshal all the resources we have at our disposal and that we - people like me, and companies like Apple and Intel and others - can make it our business to put a tablet computer in the hands of every single kid in America. Every single kid.