The truth of the wider history of the personal computer - the chapter in which Jobs’ dots have inscribed a few of the great sentences - is that it has been intricately shaped by policy, and specifically anti-trust policy. Apple failed after 10 years - the failure that Jobs describes in the Stanford speech as crucial to its resurrection and second coming - because Microsoft had won the business desktop market with an inferior product. Microsoft had won that market because IBM,mired in anti-trust litigation, decided to cede the market to what it hoped might be the weaker rival. Microsoft itself became embroiled in anti-monopoly litigation at just the time when the Internet would re-revolutionise the PC landscape. The re-birth of Apple and the rise of Google have brought both of them into the line of fire of the Federal Trade Commission and US anti-trust. The important point is that anti-trust has created an environment - however imperfectly - that limits the operation of the technology companies that have become too big for the health of the wider economy. And the personal history that Jobs describes - one in which it is possible for a driven visionary like him to keep at his work because he “has faith that the dots will join up” - is made virtuous by the institutional setting in which it operates and not because of the rightly dismissed mantras of Western Rando-Bhuddism.
(via azspot)
