3. egoistical altruist The «think different» company has been reactive to consumers’ demands for sustainable products. Apple seems more interested in profit than having a positive impact in life quality or nature. http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/procreate-submissions
4. imitator original Jobs excels at improving recent ideas. Most Apple products are significant improvements of existing products. The graphical user interface comes from Xerox PARC, the first portable media players appeared 5 years before the iPod. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player
5. opportunistic visionary Apple’s strategy includes an annual launch of improved versions of their products. Some of these ‘improvements’ are really fixes to technology or plain marketing buzz. http://planobsolescence.blogspot.com/
6. change enabler change preventer Apple leads change by introducing truly new products continuously; however it also prevents change by others through both legal and market strategies. «Between January 2008 and May 2010, Apple, Inc. filed more than 350 cases with the US Trademark office alone» http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation
7. bottom-up top-down «The Apple purity law presents publishers with a fundamental dilemma: How many limitations must it accept from Apple and how much censorship is to be expected in the future?» http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,679976,00.html Apple is a paradigm of a “garage company”, emerging from the initiative of a young and unlikely couple of partners. But today Apple is a powerful and dominant player in the market who uses its leverage to censor content and control new initiatives. The app approval process is in place to ensure that applications are reliable, perform as expected, and are free of explicit and offensive material. We review every app on the App Store based on a set of technical, content, and design criteria. http://developer.apple.com/appstore/guidelines.html
8. negotiator radical Many perceive Apple as a radical innovator but often their users demonstrate more disruptive thinking. http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/itox.html http://www.apple.com/hotnews/agreenerapple/
9. simple complex Apple has always distinguished their products as “user-friendly”, demonstrating that less features have more value. http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/u/user_friendly.asp
10. persistent impatient Jobs had to wait more than 10 years for the right conditions at the company that he co-founded to return and lead their change strategies. http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/4929905153/
11. diverse focused Jobs transformed a computer-centered niche company into a multimedia dominant player. A few years ago nobody expected Apple to become one of the three top mobile phone companies. http://www.google.com/trends?q=iPhone%2C+Nokia&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
12. newcomer experienced Jobs helped create the PC industry back in the 70s. Recently his strategies have shaped the music industry and the mobile phone industry. Apple has consistently transformed fields where they were not experts. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonmichael/5350834814/
13. solo collaborative Jobs has always adopted proprietary platforms, has dismissed user-centered approaches and is quoted as saying that “he is the best focus group” for his company. http://books.google.com/books/about/Inside_Steve_s_Brain.html?id=390ISyA-CUEC
14. People disagree (of course) http://innovation.fleishmanhillard.com/index.php/2010/04/02/whats-steve-jobs-innovation-style/ http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1873486_1873491_1873530,00.html http://www.slideshare.net/cvgallo/7-innovation-secrets-of-steve-jobs http://allaboutstevejobs.com/blog/category/steve-jobs-personality/ http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,953633,00.html