By sheer luck, I found myself sitting beside a high-flying technologist on a flight last week from Silicon Valley to Seattle.
This strategist had been promoted by Microsoft five times in 18 months only to leave for an international position with another global technology leader.
He is about to go out on his own but is slowed by an internal debate about which of several ideas he wants to try to bring to market. The commonality in all of his possibilities?
The business has to disrupt.
There hasn’t been a bigger or better disrupter in this century than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who today announced his resignation.
iPod. iPhone. iPad.
Game-changers.
Jobs changed our behaviors. More importantly, he changed our expectations of personal technology, lifting a bar that few to none have been able to match.
He certainly didn’t hit them all over the fence. For one, Apple’s iAd network has been a large disappointment for many advertisers and others like me who looked at Apple’s move into mobile advertising as a milestone needed to move the industry along.
Will Apple disrupt without the King Distrupter? Time will tell.
