When Steve Jobs returned to Apple he had lost the paranoia and said that the reason Apple was losing not that it was copied by Microsoft but that it had stopped innovating. He said that Microsoft did not need to lose for Apple to win. Before his death though he had upped the ratchet again with more vitriol than I ever saw in the 90s.
If Apple really had learned its lesson it would be: don't do something great and then spend all your time feeling like a victim and forget about the bigger picture. It makes for a very small-minded company.
And that's the mentality that some people have, like John Gruber for example, who somehow seems to think the world's most valuable company needs constant defending. A bigger way of looking at things will ultimately lead to longer term stability. Apple is successful but I don't know how stable it will be. Google is a very broad, non-angry, interesting company. Apple now reminds me of a child who has amassed a great deal of cookies and is going to keep them locked in a closet so no one else can have any, but eventually they'll rot. Not the best analogy I could think of, but the feeling of it applies.
Apple did something great with the iPhone in 2007. And Steve Jobs was right that it would take competitors about five years to catch up. And they have. So, they still had the 5 year lead as a benefit of being innovative. Isn't that enough? Or do they want to be entitled to be the best forever because at one point in time they were the best? Both iOS and Mac OS X need some innovation. It's sad to say this, but as someone who has been an Apple customer for over 20 years, I'd actually like to see Apple take a little dive only because it will help them be the company they were in the early 2000s when they were really stepping up with OS X and how they were with the iPhone in 2007. Now it's all business strategy and buying up flash chips, etc, which is what Tim Cook was always good at and still is, but to me, they haven't done anything that equals the original iPhone in the last 5 years. Granted, that's a high standard. But I say go for it rather than sitting on your winnings and trying to keep anyone else from winning.
