The man was a bright man who did very well for his shareholders.
Only if you bought their shares not too long before 2004.
He created lots of money for his shareholders by the unlawful use, world wide, of Retail Price Maintenance.
Very true.
How that is done, without getting into trouble, you can look at the electronic component distribution business. There are several ways. The most obvious one is that if you offer unauthorised discounts, your franchise/dealer agreement will not be renewed next year, or it will be renewed but on poor terms
Other ways include the use of arbitrary price support from the manufacturer, which can be used to support a co-operative reseller, or punish a naughtly reseller.
I think Job's biggest achievement is to make millions of relatively broke teenagers part with c. £30/month (at astonishing amount of money at that age, and in most cases their parents' money) for the benefit of having a smartphone. Not all smartphones are Ipads of course, but Apple's success in this area is something which HTC, Samsung, etc, etc, are more than happy to take advantage of
In my family we have an Ipad2/3G and an Iphone4. Both are pretty slick at what they do (except the Iphone is actually a rather poor
phone, and both have naff reception on GSM, GPRS, 3G and WIFI compared to just about everything else) and thus have found ample uses.
Apart from the aforementioned substandard RF performance, the hardware is of superb quality which nobody in the business has yet emulated. They could do so of course (there is no special manufacturing or electronics technology in an Iphone/Ipad) but the whole industry got caught with its trousers down, thinking that nobody would pay such a price premium for quality.
They will probably never catch up, because they have only one way to go (Android) and that market is deeply fragmented, and with little opportunity for product differentiation. And Nokia, desperate to do something different to the rest, will probably get stuffed by M$ with their pile of bugs called Windoze Mobile
Unfortunately, for all but trivial/dumb users, Apple have soured the package by a raft of irritating political restrictions, starting with banning all kinds of stuff from their shop.
As for Jobs himself, some of the
obituaries suggest he was less than a nice chap.