Company's invention, product selection impress with proven record of excellence
Wednesday evening, one of Apple's founders, Steve Jobs, stepped down from the helm of the company he created. His successes are well documented, inventing the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad in his time, all while generating an exponential return on the company's stock since his return in 1997. But, what hasn't been documented is his (Apple's) impact on the modern college campus.
There has to be a reason for Mac computers dominating college campuses nationwide, with 70 percent of incoming students adopting the platform over a PC. It defies logic. Stereotypically cash-strapped students flocked to a laptop line whose products start at $1,000. But, in what is now typical Apple fashion, their computers "just work," and for a student not majoring in information technology, that makes all the difference in the world.
Of course, there's the iPod. I dare you to go to the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center and find someone walking around with anything other than an iPod. Zune fell by the wayside years ago, and the rest of the competitors are so small I can't even remember their names. The mind-boggling fact is that the iPod wasn't the revolution; it was iTunes. Redefining the music industry, iTunes has left most college students wondering — with a stupefied look — what exactly a CD is.
The year before I came to South Carolina, Apple released the first widely adopted touch screen phone, the iPhone. At the time, it was just a touch phone. In the years since, it's morphed into a multibillion-dollar industry with millions of applications that we can't think of being without.
Blackberry's market share is now in a free fall, and Android and iOS are now in their own little arms race. Modern smartphones from competitors are all "answers" to Jobs' vision of mobile devices, ones that "just work." The iPad was a spawn of the iPhone, has effectively killed the "netbook" fad and is now starting to ever so slightly dent into the laptop market.
So what does this all mean to the college campus? In the short term, not too much. Apple is so innovative it's already developing products that won't see the light of day for two or three years. Beyond that time frame, it remains to be seen if Apple can continue to innovate in the post-Jobs era. Industry analysts and former employees (like myself) feel that Jobs has instilled the "innovative DNA" into the company, that the company breeds innovation purely out of the culture of Apple. Daring Fireball's John Gruber stated that "Jobs' greatest creation isn't any Apple product. It is Apple itself."
I couldn't agree more with his analysis, and we should all hope this claim rings true, for the sake of progress and innovation in the consumer technology world.
Steve Jobs dared the industry to "think different" and instead made the industry "think Apple." That alone is quite a legacy.
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