[stupidcar]

While I don't think Steve Jobs necessarily deserves the near-deification he's received posthumously, I do think that Apple benefited from having someone who was able and willing to push through particular design decisions no matter how difficult they were to achieve or whether they stepped on senior people's toes. I get the impression that, within Microsoft, the best interests of new and innovative products always came a distant third behind the vagaries of internal politics, and the desire of the Windows and Office teams to protect their turf.

I also think the success of their desktop monopoly in the 1990s and early 2000s caused Microsoft make the classic mistake of forgetting what business they were really in. They stopped thinking they were in the technology business, and started thinking they were in the PC business. Other devices and products like smartphones and tablets were OK, but only so long as they respected the PC's place as the centre of the computing universe. The idea that a new type of device and OS might eventually supplant the PC and Windows as the dominant consumer computing platform was heresy.