Leadership, Innovation, Vision & Courage
It would seem that we will never be able to satisfy the never ending queries regarding who was more innovative or creative MS or Apple. It's not who innovated or created more or first, they both did and they both stole from each other and everyone else. Rather it is what you do with it.
While the automobile was not invented in the US mass production was and changed the land scape of the automobile industry forever by making cars more affordable.
In the same way Jobs took ideas and re-formed them into something that the originator never thought of, Jobs was an innovator more then anything else, OK you could put in a dictator as well.
Leadership is found in people who have a vision of where they are going, usually because they have greater discernment then most and are not afraid of making mistakes. One would have to be confident in their own abilities and supporting staff to move a company; corporation or whatever to lead people through the quagmire of bringing a new product out the door in perfect working condition or as close to it as possible.
Finally Courage is absent in the Corporate world these days or at least it seems to be. It's easy to make a product that already has a known quantity, PC; Phone; TV; Radios; Cars; Trucks; Planes; etc. These are products with known quantities, in other words we know what they are and what they should do. However introducing something that has never been known or heard of is a very difficult thing and requires Courage. While both Apple and MS showed some courage in the pass they show little of that today and the same is true everywhere else.
What we need to realize is the limited playing field and the pieces needed make a product. Most of the smart product for consumers will have the need for Memory, CPU/GPU, Touch Sensitive or regular screen, WIFI interface, LAN port, Cell connectivity, Bluetooth, I/O Ports. and the list goes on but it is a basic list of materials needed for a MP3 Player, Phone, Tablet, Laptop & PC how you put the various internal components together and what you use for an OS is what separate the various devices, even when they are all the doing the same thing.
So bot Jobs and Gates had some parts of Leadership, Innovation, Vision and even some Courage and so did many others in the Computer Industry and we are all beetr for them.
Now Lets get to working on making all platforms able to communicate with each other ... that would take great courage on the part of the present leaders (Apple & MS) ....
