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31 months is a long time though.

Steve Jobs at 31 months hadn't got to the iPod yet.

Yeah. At his 31 months back at Apple, Jobs was getting ready to launch the Power Mac G4 Cube and the Flower Power iMacs... The investment community thought he had lost it, and Apple's stock price collapsed. (There was also that dot-com bust thing, I know.)

At the same time, Apple was building the iPod. When product cycles are long and vision spans even longer, current performance may not be indicative of what's coming.

That's a little uncharitable. The original iMacs were ridiculously successful, you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing one.

Sure. But by 2001, the 15" CRT form factor was getting stale. Apple tried to refresh the design with patterns named "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian":

http://apple-history.com/imac_cdrw

These got, um, mixed reviews, and didn't sell well. (Even the famous taste of Jobs+Ive failed sometimes...)

Apple makes hardware though, which takes quite a bit more time. I don't see that as a relevant comparison.

I'm not sure that's true. I think a lot of problems we have with software is that we don't think it out like we do hardware (the I can always deploy a new version mentality).

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