The comments about Steve Jobs being an asshole of a person have a lot of solid ground beneath them. If you recall, Steve Jobs was forced out by the Apple Board of Directors because he was such an ass as a manager. If you were on the same elevator with him, and you somehow ticked him off (you were wearing a scent he didn't like) he might fire you on the spot. His whimsical on-the-spot firings were only part of the problems that the Board of Directors didn't like as they would have to fix the stream of problems (rehire the person or whatever other legal remedies needed).
Despite that, the hardware industry is a fast moving river with strong currents and rapids. Without a visionary to map out a feasible risky path to take, a company can be great one day and then fall down and be bankrupt five years later. The Apple Board was fairly conservative and only mapped out feasible non-risky paths. That was the wrong approach in an industry where many paths may end simply because a new better path is found and your now-former customers all stampede to the new product or approach. However, many paths cannot be seen because they are hidden by the mists churned up by the rapids. Thus, the starting point of such paths exist but there is no way to get to it without grinding on a bunch of rocks and enduring that to get onto the new path. Some do not have enough resources to endure the grinding rocks but many simply don't see it because the risk blocks their vision of what lies beyond. So Apple slowly went down the tubes.
When Jobs came back, he was "mellower" than before (although still a terror). Instead of trying to do all the management himself like back on lisa, he hovered over all the managers and supervisors (who could do the job much better than Jobs could) and semi-micro-managed everything. There are a lot of companies that would have employee revolts (like mine) if the president did that. I guess with the "Second Coming" of Jobs at Apple, his job there is pretty secure.
I don't like apple's proprietary approach, but it is necessary with china copying everything and using their MFN status to insert items into our distribution network. Without ways of preventing illegal copies from either failing or having occasional problems, Apple could find itself risking, investing, and producing a product line that legally belonged to it, but for which it had no DE FACTO profits because everyone was buying and using copies. There are many USA companies that have had such problems with mainland China and then gone out of business due to that; they had the skills and money to invent it, but China ended up as the collective that sold copies of it. The USA cannot individually slap China's hand and STRONGLY complain about how 17% of the mobile handsets are illegal copies, or other things. The USA slaps china with a wet noodle because it cannot do more as china holds over 3 trillion of the usa deficit debt and has been rolling it over. If china stops rolling it over, and says gimme my money 1 trillion per year for the next 4 years, it could easily create a 4 year long death for usa companies. While china would get some reverse shocks, it would still benefit as the low price leader as the desperately poor usa customers would buy chinese for the lowest price. Remember when china seized the usa military plane and then chopped it up before returning it to bush? Bush and the other hawks made very little grumbling due to china being able to twist the deficit knife in bush's first term which would have doomed his 2nd term. Apple's aggressive proprietary approach has resulted in it making huge profits instead of losing most of it to mainland china bootleggers. And it hasn't had the PR fallout that Sony did with its proprietary approach.
