It's amazing that the Nano even made it to the stage. The story of the Nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod Mini and decided they could make it better. On the face of it, that wouldn't appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. "Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling product at the peak of its popularity," Gartner analyst Van Baker says. "That's what Apple just did." And it did that while staring right down the barrels of the holiday retail season.
It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups. But Jobs is a hardened gambler, and he doesn't scare easily. This is the guy who coolly poured millions of his own dollars into an unknown and direly unprofitable company called Pixar before anybody had even made a full-length computer-animated movie. "The more we started to talk about what this could be," Jobs says, "it wasn't long before I said, 'You know, what if we just bet our future on this? Is that possible?' And everybody immediately looked pretty scared. Including me."
"What's really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple's incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don't have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling," Jobs says. "And look at what's happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don't run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share."
Lev Grossman, "Stevie's Little Wonder," Time.com, 11 Sep. 2005
