From in the Australian paper TheAge, Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit by Clayton Christensen and James Allworth (Reuters):

Steve Jobs retires as the CEO of Apple with a reputation that will place him amongst the pantheon of history's great global business leaders. Many people have written about what makes Jobs and Apple special, but I think they're missing what truly set him apart. Jobs has succeeded by eschewing the one thing that most people view as the raison d'être for companies — profit.

When I left the industry to come to academia 22 years ago, it was driven by a set of questions that had troubled me for some time. Why was it that the best run companies in the world — companies that have had incredibly smart leaders, following carefully detailed plans and with tremendous execution ability — reliably seem to come unstuck? The answer to this question is what has become known as the theory of disruption.

via theage.com.au

It's not often I argue with Christensen -- one of his books on disruption is a cornerstone of a class I've taught at the University of Washington since 2003.

But.

The headline is wrong and so is some of the reasoning.

First. Jobs did not "ignore" profit. If he had, we would not be looking at charts like this one:

Or this one:

Second, "profit" and "disruption" are two very different concepts. I'd argue that you can't focus on "disruption" any more than you should not focus on "profit." By focus, I mean singular goal. The authors don't define what they mean by "focus" but deep in the op-ed Christensen suggests it's the stereotypical Wall Street focus:

When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what's best for the customer or making the quarter's numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers.

Apple never has.

And there, there I agree with him. It's not possible to be "visionary" and take risks and simultaneously worry about quarterly milestones.

The development of the iPod is a perfect example of why the argument that Jobs ignored customers is fallacious. The market for mp3 players was "established" in the sense that there were several products on the market prior to the iPod. There were lots of "personal computers" on the market in 1984, too, but none of them put the focus on the person using the computer like the Mac did. And no mp3 player put the focus on the person listening to music -- the person who needed to easily load and buy music -- like the iPod and the iTunes store. There's a reason the iTunes store brings in more than $4 billion a year.

Boeing is a perfect counter-example. In the late 90s, when I worked there as a contractor, I attended an all-hands meeting where the veep stood in front of the gathered masses and asserted that Boeing's reason for existence was to provide ROI for its shareholders. I kid you not! This was at a time that Boeing's stock was at a historical low (well below $40 IIRC).

I wanted to run from the room, screaming.

A company exists to provide something -- a product or a service -- that is needed by its customers and to do so in a way that treats the customer with respect, as though she has both a mind and a pocketbook.

Apple does that.

Christensen closes with a graph that I can wholeheartedly agree with:

Steve Jobs' legacy isn't the Mac. It's not the iPhone. Or the iPad. His legacy is in the creation of Apple itself, reminding us that profit is not the ultimate goal, but rather a consequence of something greater.

This is a great product, which seems to be sold in the U.S. only at Best Buy. It is NOT on the Belkin US website.

It's not obvious from the URL that this is the Belkin UK site (the country is identified in the upper right corner in light grey), but if you click "buy" you'll be taken to a form that thinks you are in the UK.

I've run a search on Belkin's US site by name and by product number: this product is not there. 

Really weird.

A sample group of more than 120 students and 16 teachers at the [Singapore] school have been given iPads, at a cost of over $100,000. By 2013, every student in the school will have one....

Murdoch said his News Corp group is to push into the education technology market in a speech to the e-G8 conference of Internet entrepreneurs and European policymakers in Paris last month.

He described education as the "last holdout from the digital revolution" and outlined a vision for personalised learning with lessons delivered by the world's best teachers to thousands of students via the Internet.

Twitter has gone further than any of the other big online organisations in sticking up for the privacy of its users – and has received virtually nothing but opprobrium for its efforts. It's not yet clear why it only emerged this week that Google and Wordpress had also been approached for user information. Both Google and the user concerned have yet to confirm whether the user was notified ahead of any personal information being disclosed.

The same happened with the Twitter WikiLeaks subpoenas. Twitter was asked for the details of four users by the US grand jury investigating the whistleblowing site. The subpoena barred the site from informing the users of the existence of the order. However, Twitter fought a battle to "unseal" the court order, allowing the users concerned, who included Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir and online activist Jacob Applebaum to fight their case in court.

Any organisation that receives such a subpoena but chooses not to have it unsealed can quietly pass over details of its users without any blaze of publicity. If Google or Facebook were to receive identical orders and not fight to have them unsealed, their users would never even know their details had been passed over.

Google receives over 4,000 requests for user information each year from the US government, and a further 1,300 from the UK. It has so far refused to disclose how many it complied with, and how many – if any – it fought to unseal. Facebook does not release even the basic information that Google puts out. By taking a principled stand, Twitter brings bad publicity down on its own head.