[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.]
Yes monopolies are terrific.
[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.]
As Apple has demonstrated many times taking a product and making it better and perhaps glamorous at the same time can make you rich.
[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.]
And this is new for Apple going boldly where no one has gone before...
[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.]
There are a thousand new companies with very talented people out their that Apple can buy and still have 20 billion left.
[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.]
I don't believe that the computer market is solved or that Apple believes this either. I do believe that it is about to change Big Time to a whole new level.
[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.]
I believe we will see less and less of Jobs and maybe the Big and Bold is really a future with less of him.
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