Then some little computer company in California moved in on their territory and began making beautiful, simple, well made upmarket products.
I appreciate Apple in a completely different way, I think how they have created their following in nothing short of amazing. The spot a market potential and they make it work, really well.
The iPod worked really well but it was really the iPhone that did it for them, they brought Apple to the absolute masses. I am still not 100% sure if the iTunes store was a fluke, I don't think it was on the first iPhone. If it was planned in it's entirety then hats off to Steve.
Look at the market share now, Microsoft should be scared. I don't think Microsoft has ramped up it's game much either, Ballmer is a bit of a joke so I'm going to find it hard to take him seriously but I think I will always be Microsoft at heart.
You probably meant the App Store, which wasn't on the very first iPhone and was, in fact, a bit of a lucky strike. Jobs didn't want anyone installing anything on the phone (classic Apple control-freakery at its finest), so he insisted for months after launch that extensibility would come exclusively from sandboxed web-applications. Eventually they did release a SDK and establish a process to publish apps, but only after encountering overwhelming demand.
It's the same sensible that means Apple shouldn't have started iTunes (we aren't a record company) and Amazon shouldn't have done Kindle (we aren't a computer company) !
Look at the PSN's movie rental store - perpetually hamstrung by limited selection. Why would competing studios want to get into bed with one of their biggest competitors on their closed service?
Similarly, it creates internal conflicts of interest. Sony's electronics are constantly crippled when it comes to content, probably at the pressure of owning their own content themselves. For the longest time it was impossible to get any movies on a memory stick, forcing PSP users to buy them on expensive and battery-murdering discs instead. It took years to fix that mistake, but of course, by the time they did, public interest in mobile movies had basically all but disappeared.