You would be foolish to say Apple will never get it wrong just because Jobs is doing a good job now. We’ve had great companies run by great men in the beginning, only to have future leaders run them into the ground.
“If they keep it up”. That’s a big if. If anything is certain, people who take over companies that are ‘doing well’ but have little to do with them getting there in the first place, take for granted what it took to get them there in the first place, and get greedy and stupid.
The founders of a company put everything into it to make it big. The next wave of people aren’t as vested but make expansions but are more concerned about maintaining. the third removed executives are even more removed from the founders and it’s just a job and stock options and such. They’re more concerned about dividends to pised off shreholders, domestic partner benefits, and if everyone’s taken the latest sexual harassment class.
You see the same behavior in the families that have amassed large fortunes, you see it in monarchies, you see it in unions, you see it in certain religious groups. You see it in all sorts of business. The ones who come down the road after the founders rarely wnat to put everything they have on the line and into the business. They rarely take the same kinds of risk or have the same kind of skin in the game. It all starts into maintenance and preservation and status-quo-ism as you mention, and the further away you get from the initial founder, the more it sets in.
As far as I read it, Microsoft is one step ahead of Apple. Gates is still there but not running day-to-day anymore. Jobs is THE FOUNDER (only remaining founder) at Apple and once he’s gone, they will most likely run into the same problem most other companies do. Stagnation and maintenance mode.
You would be foolish to say Apple will never get it wrong just because Jobs is doing a good job now. We’ve had great companies run by great men in the beginning, only to have future leaders run them into the ground.
Well, I've done quite a bit of "reading" over the last 25 years about Apple and Macintosh and how they were either "beleaguered" or "going out of business soon" or would never increase market share and on and on.
These were so-called business pundits and/or tech pundits who -- apparently -- were a whole lot more stupid than the consumers who were buying the products that Apple Computer (and now just "Apple") made.
And when we see today, that Apple has no debt, has billions of dollars (that's with a "B" for "billion"), is expanding the marketshare, has 70-75% of the iPod business in the market, is the largest retailer of music in the U.S., has the largest marketshare of online music sales in the world, brought a radically new and different type of phone to market from never having it before and in the face of almost all "pundits" saying that they were going to fail -- I have to say, after all that, after 25 years of seeing what has gone on -- that if anyone were to fail in the future -- it would be long after I'm dead and gone and basically don't care any more... :-)
As it stands now and has stood for over a decade of excellent performance and great success with the consumer -- I don't have any doubts about how Apple is going to do in the future.