Except...there’s a strong correlation between the timing of the success enjoyed by Apple...and the presence of an employee named Jobs.
The interesting thing about the late Steve Jobs is, he had to be gone from Apple and take a lot of lumps for his stupid personal habits in order to reemerge as the effective and successful leader of Apple that he was in the final decade or so of his life.
The original iMac, which was the first big rollout after he returned (on an interim basis), was going to ship with a 33K internal modem, which was just idiotic; Jobs reacted by pulling the plug on that idea and going with the 56K. Up until he did that, the diehards defended the 33K, claiming that buyers wouldn’t even be using dialup — a foolish argument, because in that case, why include a modem at all? That’s when I started to realize that Jobs had changed during his exile.
He’s been gone a while, but he was always years ahead of the market, and years ahead of the technology, and his vision will be good for a good while yet. In addition, there’s engineering depth and creative depth at Apple that doesn’t get the big headlines, and that’s probably a good thing.