The "big bold moves" are things like iPad and iPhone. He didn't mean they were about to go buy someone.
Cmaier has it right. If you look at Apple's history over the past, say, 15 years, you can clearly see that they've had the greatest success when they don't compete with anybody.
The iPod is the least-good example of this; there were other portable music players before the iPod, but the iPod was the one that defined the market. Now Apple basically owns that market.
Same with the iPhone. Obviously there were products vaguely similar to the iPhone before it debuted, but the iPhone was more different from those devices than the iPod was from its antecedents, and now Apple certainly owns the mindshare of the mobile phone market, if not the market itself. Every device in the market has to compete with Apple's product, not the other way around.
The iPad is an entirely new class of product, which I think is why the popular response to it was mixed. It looks and acts like a large iPod touch, but it's really quite different. You can use it as a reader, but it's more than that. It's got email and Safari, but it also runs apps. It doesn't fit perfectly into any existing product niche; i.e., there's no competition.
Apple's got tons of money right now. Rather than spending it by the truckload to acquire some other household-name company, my bet is that they're going to invest it in R&D to identify and step into whole new markets that either aren't being served at all, aren't being served well, or haven't even been noticed yet.
Apple buying Adobe would, of course, be an awful idea. The Creative Suite is more or less their flagship product (depending on which definition of "Creative Suite" you accept; there are several), and it's mostly rubbish. After Effects is quality stuff, InDesign is the standard for page layout, but the rest of the applications are either stagnant or really quite poor. Photoshop hasn't materially improved in years; they just keep rearranging the UI, and not necessarily in ways that help anyone. But to tear an application like Photoshop down to its bones and rebuild it to the point where Steve would be satisfied would be a monumental effort
and an unnecessary one. Because literally everybody in the world who needs Photoshop buys it. It's like Microsoft Office in that respect, but even more so.
I think Apple's take on it is that the computer market is basically a solved problem. There are refinements to be made, sure, but no massive, game-changing innovations left. Apple has built a reputation for massive, game-changing innovation, so it's not surprising that their attention should turn elsewhere. I'm sure we can continue to count on Apple to release more-or-less state of the art desktops, desksides and notebooks every year or so, but it'd highly doubtful that we'll see anything truly exciting from them in those product lines, at least any time soon. Unless somebody at Apple has a bright idea, obviously.
If you want, think of Apple as a dude. He's a genius, but one with a really short attention span. He has no particular loyalty to any one job or invention; he just likes inventing. So he'll work on a problem until he's solved it to the point where he's bored where there's no more exciting innovation to do and then move on to the next thing. That ever-growing list of next-things is what Steve was talking about when he alluded to making big, bold moves.
). Thanks for your understanding.
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