[botolo]

I like Tim's style and I think he needs some time to get adjusted to his role.

It's still not clear to me, after being an Apple user and fan since the beginning and after reading Steve Job's biography, how much innovation Steve really brought to Apple. What I mean is: was Steve really the one who gave the initial impulse for some of the most innovative products we have seen so far (i.e. iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.)? In this case, I think that Apple is doomed.

If, on the contrary, Steve was the quality checker, the one pushing everyone else to do better, I think that the current Apple's executive team can properly replace this role and do good at Apple.

[seunosewa]

Motivating a huge organization like Apple to produce brilliant consumer electronics products consistently is probably much, much harder than you think, else every one of Apple's competitors would have hired execs to do that for them.

[capkutay]

No one else claims they had the 'vision' for the iPod/iPad/iPhone while at the same time everyone credits Steve so he must have been more than a quality checker.

[nhaehnle]

Is that really a qualitative difference though? Clearly, MP3 players had been around before the iPod. What set the iPod apart was much better design. This is, in a sense, a matter of quality checking, but to an extreme extent.

Does the extremity of the quality checking turn into something qualitatively different? That seems to be a rather subjective judgement, hence why you had the back-and-forth.

[inthewind]

I don't think that is what set it apart. It was probably having a software program (iTunes), that could work with your hardware and manage your library. Not sure when they introduced the shop.

[MaysonL]

Given that most of Apple's products were implementations of ideas from Engelbart's lab and Xerox PARC, and that those ideas still have a lot of running room, I'm not too worried for Apple.