Apple without Steve?
There is a continuing fear that if Steve leaves Apple, the company will fall back to past failure and near death as it did through a greater part of the 1990s. There are multiple flaws with this viewpoint that make it unlikely. While Apple did suffer deeply without Steve driving the ship, Apple did innovate, however with poor directly. Apple did lack any real leadership during the Steveless era. This accounts for the majority of Apple's failures. Apple's product line was massive, including a deep line of professional models, consumer models and educational models. In addition, Apple produced their own hard drives, printers, digital cameras and of course the Newton line of PDAs. Some of these products were groundbreaking, most were not. In 1996, prior to his return to Apple, Steve was asked what he would do if here were running the company again. He stated, the first thing he would do is cancel all the products that were not best of class and fire the teams that worked on them so Apple could focus on working on what it did best relying on their most talented people.
So with Steve gone is there a risk of Apple branching out into products they would be better off leaving to others? This is less likely since Apple has experienced its greatest success in recent years and now has a rich history of success and failure to look back on for direction and guidance.
A second and vital key to Apple's success in recent years must be attributed to the improvements to hardware technology. Many of the software solutions that are helping Apple to succeed today, were being developed in the early 1990s but required levels of performance out of the hardware that was just not affordably available. Hardware limitations are almost completely a thing of the past in 2009. If anything is a technological barrier it would be the current limits of battery life. With the freedom to design powerful and elegant software solutions that run well on existing hardware, far fewer of Apple's software innovations are forced to languish for a decade before ever seeing the light of day.
The final reason not to fear a post-Steve Apple is the fact that Steve has had time to think about how he wants to leave Apple. This time he is not being unexpectedly booted out in a power struggle. For several years he has been working to prepare Apple to operate effectively with less of his direction and attention. Steve has been preparing Apple to be self sufficient in its future, bringing design of the hardware on which they will rely for future products in-house so they will never suffer as they did at the hands of Motorola and IBM's inability to produce the faster PowerPC G4 processors that Steve promised back in 1999.
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