Disclosure: I neither own any Apple product nor have any financial interest in the company.
Apple Computer Inc, thats what the company was called when it was incorporated in 1977. Flash forward 30 years, Apple Computer Inc has become Apple Inc. Whats changed in Apple is more than the removal of the word "Computer" from its company name. Apple raised the bar in any industry it has set foot in, and is not afraid to take on the titans of the industry head-on. Apple has consistently been ranked among the top companies providing the best customer support and its no wonder Apple enjoys a strong base of loyal and happy customers. Apple's marketing is impeccable which goes hand in hand with its brilliant product design. Apple employs such ultra high secrecy in developing products, that even the spy agencies would be proud of (thats kinda an overstatement). Apple makes the innovation, creates a category, other companies follow suit. Apple is in a class of its own. It has created a revolution in design, usability and user interaction; Apple's competitors are no where near.
Back in the 1970s, computers were visualized as huge equipment only affordable and maintainable by large corporations. Step in Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, checkmate IBM and Microsoft. IBM was the largest tech company in the world and had complete monopoly over the business computing industry and had plans to step into the consumer computing. In 1980s Apple competed against IBM and later against Microsoft, which was only in its early existence then, a software provider for IBM Personal Computer machines. Apple would be the first to create the first GUI based consumer computer (albeit with some help from Xerox). Apple entered new arenas, rather created new categories in computing, portable computers which are like the heavy versions of the laptops of today. Apple was at its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it could do no wrong. Then the fall began, Apple made some costly strategic errors, it lost out to Compaq, Dell, Intel and Microsoft in the consumer desktop market. Intel and Microsoft established a virtual monopoly in the Personal Computer industry after Apple's decline in the 1990s.
In the late 1990s, Apple's rise coincided with the return of Steve Jobs. A year later Apple launched a new range of aesthetically designed Personal Computers iMac, running Apple software. What followed was large scale consolidation by shutting down divisions and projects which were looked as excess baggage for the company and streamlined processes which focused on only few core technologies.
The beginning of the new millennium was the dawn of a new era, not only for Apple but for the whole world. In 2001, Apple launched a game-changing portable media player, iPod, which would go on to sell more than 220 million units. It was a sensational hit and instantly displaced Sony as the market leader in portable music player segment. Currently iPod has a market share north of 70%. In the same year, Apple also replaced its old Macintosh OS with a new Operating System, Macintosh OS X, competing against Microsoft's Windows. Apple made a slew of takeovers to add to its imposing portfolio of hardware and software products which would make Apple one of few Tech companies which is vertically integrated, i.e., design the computer hardware, accessories, operating system and much of the other software like iWork and iLife. Apple released updated versions of iMac Desktops and MacBook Laptops with cutting-edge design and impressive hardware specs.
In 2003, Apple achieved what no other entity had dared to even think about - change the whole landscape of the music industry and for a change, dictate the terms to the big Music Labels. The result was the birth of the iTunes store, which broke the monopolistic pricing of the music industry with each song sold separately for as little as one US Dollar. Even though Apple made only pennies from iTunes, it completely dominated the sales of music and later other multimedia as well. Soon the movie industry followed suit. Within a year of operation, iTunes had a market share of over 70% of legal music downloads online.
In 2007, Apple set sights on the mobile phone market and released yet another ground-breaking product, the iPhone. The iPhone, when it was released was like a generation ahead of its competitors in terms of its awe-inspiring design and industrious hardware specifications. Apple captured the smartphone market by storm. As of December 2009, iPhone had a 25%* market share in the smartphone segment from having nothing just two years prior. Apple's iPhone is ahead of the likes of Nokia, Microsoft, Palm, Google and only behind BlackBerry in terms of market share. Another innovation that Apple created was the iPhone App Store, which has more than 185,000 apps, which were downloaded more than a billion times in less than three years.
In 2010, after months of spinning the rumor mill, Apple debuted one of its crown jewels, the most anticipated product of the year from Apple, iPad, a tablet computer. iPad was yet another grandiosely designed product with high priority given to user interaction and usability. Tablet computers have been around for years, but people took notice only when Apple entered the fray. Analysts expect 2010 to be the year of the tablets, with Apple's iPad leading the way.
Apple is unfazed when it comes to taking on the big guns. Adobe Flash is a highly popular multimedia platform for the web. Its so popular, that is used on more than 80% of the world wide web. But Apple, being as adamant as it is, did not add support for Flash in both iPhone and iPad. Apple thinks Flash, being a propreitary technology, should not control the web and instead lent its support for competing vendor-neutral technology like HTML5. In another nail in the coffin for Flash on the iPhone/iPad platforms, Apple has changed the guidelines for application developers on the iPhone SDK such that, no Flash development can be added to the Apple app stores. There is no stopping this relentless juggernaut of Apple.
* ComScore
