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By Root 497 0

an empty table. Dr. Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr. Land was saying, ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said, ‘If I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like, they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it. I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’ Both of them had this ability to—well, not invent products—but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed, it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed. It’s a matter of discovery. Steve had huge admiration for Dr. Land. He was fascinated by that trip.”

During television and magazine interviews, Jobs often invokes innovation as Apple’s secret sauce. He’s talked about innovation several times during his keynote speeches. “We are going to innovate ourselves out of this downturn,” Jobs declared in 2001 when the PC industry was in recession. “Innovate,” he boasted at Macworld Paris in September 2003. “That’s what we do.”

Under Jobs’s leadership, Apple has earned a reputation as one of the most innovative companies in technology. Business Week in 2007 named Apple the most innovative company in the world, beating Google, Toyota, Sony, Nokia, Genentech, and a host of other A-list companies. It was the third year in a row that Apple had earned the top spot.5

Apple has brought to market a steady stream of innovative products, including four of perhaps the most important innovations in modern computing: the first fully assembled personal computer, the Apple II; the first commercial implementation of the graphical user interface, the Mac; the iPod, an Internet appliance for digital media disguised as a humble music player; and the iPhone, a versatile finger-controlled mobile computer that also makes phone calls.

Apple produces blockbusters like the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, but there’s also been a long list of smaller yet important and influential products like the Airport and AppleTV. Apple’s Airport is a line of easy-to-use WiFi base stations that enabled Apple’s laptops to be among the first wireless notebooks, a trend that later went thoroughly mainstream. The AppleT V is a streaming set-top box that links the TV in the living room with the computer in the den.

Apple has an unmatched reputation for innovation, but has historically been regarded as little more than an R&D lab for the rest of the PC industry. It may have created one innovation after another, but for many years it appeared unable to capitalize on its breakthroughs. Apple pioneered the graphical desktop, but Microsoft put it on 95 percent of the world’s PCs. Apple invented the first PDA, the Newton, but Palm helped turn it into a $3 billion industry. While Apple innovated, companies like Microsoft and Dell made the big bucks. In this respect, Apple has been compared to Xerox PARC, the copier company’s legendary research facility that more or less invented modern computing—the graphical desktop, Ethernet networking, and the laser printer—but failed to commercialize any of it. It was left to Apple to bring the graphical desktop to market, but it was Microsoft that really cleaned up.

Jobs, in fact, used to have a reputation for reckless innovation. He was so busy turning out the next groundbreaking product that he was unable to capitalize on the last one. Critics said he was charging ahead so fast, he recklessly failed to follow through on what he’d built. Take the Mac and the Apple II. By the early 1980s, the Apple II was the PC industry’s most successful computer, with a 17 percent market share in 1981. But when the Mac came out three years later, it was completely incompatible with the Apple II. The Mac didn’t run Apple II software,