Two Good Articles from last weeks Economist about Apple before the launch of the iPhone:
Things other companies could learn from Apple: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=9302662 FOR a company that looked doomed a decade ago, it has been quite a comeback. Today Apple is literally an iconic company. Look at your iPod: the company name appears only in the small print. Some of the power of its brand comes from the extraordinary story of a computer company rescued from near-collapse by its co-founder, Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after years of exile, reinvented it as a consumer-electronics firm and is now taking it into the billion-unit-a-year mobile-phone industry (see article). But mostly Apple's zest comes from its reputation for inventiveness. In polls of the world's most innovative firms it consistently ranks first. From its first computer in 1977 to the mouse-driven Macintosh in 1984, the iPod music-player in 2001 and now the iPhone, which goes on sale in America this month, Apple has prospered by keeping just ahead of the times.
Apples Third Act: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9298983 IN ANY other setting, it would have been corny to quote from a Beatles song to sum up a three-decade relationship that has encompassed partnership and alliance, rivalry and enmity, as well as defeats, triumphs and reversals on both sides. But not when Steve Jobs of Apple was talking to Bill Gates of Microsoft after reminiscing about the old times on a conference stage last week. ??You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead,? he said. And there were moist eyes in the audience.