I agree with jefhatfield that Steve Jobs is responsible for both the biggest successes and the biggest failures of Apple. The reason he's so fascinating is because he's such a paradox - he saved Apple from oblivion in 1997-1998, but he almost SENT Apple into oblivion in 1984-1985. If he hadn't left the board of Apple, he would have been ousted, and if he hadn't been ousted, the Mac would have literally died in the marketplace. Everybody likes to bash John Sculley, but if it weren't for him, Apple would have probably filed for Chapter 11 before the '90s.
Apple will never capture more than, I would guess, about 15% of the market while Steve is at the helm. Unlike basically all other computer company CEOs, his motivation is much more aesthetic and ideological than business-oriented. He wants to make great computers, and he's great at doing that, but he has no sense of the business that follows in that process. Look at NeXT: Kick-ass graphical workstations that nobody could afford, aimed at a market that had no money to pay for them. And look at Apple today: Great computers (at least as great as they can be made with the slow available CPUs) sold in relatively low volume with very high margins.
This is one of the reasons long-term investors are wary of Apple stock - it's leadership doesn't seem to be concerned with growing the company & expanding the company's market cap, and as a result, the stock is just much more likely to go way down than way up. (Trying to catch trends in stock by watching the daily ticker is like trying to determine whether or not global warming is happening by watching the weather forecast every day.)
And you think that Apple's decline in sales in the last couple of years is because of Steve? Get off of it! It's "obsolete" hardware, high prices, and the economic recession that has made sales decline. The products that Apple makes are truly astounding; they just need some major upgrades (and this is not Apple's fault, it's Motos). The prices on Apple hardware is high, but that's because the manufacturing costs of Apple's suppliers is really high.
When I read posts by PC users on this and other boards, the #1 comment I see is "I'd love to buy a Mac, but they're just too expensive." It is obvious to me that the Macintosh market share would rise SO MUCH if Macs didn't cost so much. Look at the entry-level classic iMac. $799 for a machine that can't be worth $400 in parts! The Power Mac: Over $1500 for an entry-level tower! And the PowerBook: A $700 price difference between two CPUs that have a 133MHz speed difference, on top of a very high price to begin with. It's ridiculous. The manufacturing costs of Apple's suppliers are
not high. Apple designs its own motherboards and enclosures, but almost
everything inside an Apple system is manufactured and assembled by the same Taiwanese companies doing business with Compaq and Dell. The margins on any given Mac are enormous, and the reason for this is that Apple knows it has a loyal fan base which will stand to pay such high prices. It's obvious that Jobs doesn't care about market share - I blame about 80% of Apple's low market share solely on the high cost of their machines, and the other 20% on Motorola and IBM's slow chips (although Apple is not without fault here, either).
