AOFM here.
As an old guy who has followed technology since cell phones resembled my BFF, I was more than a little shocked when the news broke that Apple had become bigger than Microsoft.
I really shouldn't have been all that surprised.
The three big things that Apple always did while Steve Jobs was in charge was innovate, innovate, and innovate. While Jobs has had failures both inside (Lisa, Newton) and outside Apple (NeXT), he always manages to learn things from them and, most importantly, to keep the good stuff. In other words, Apple doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Since Microsoft inherited its 800-pound gorilla status from IBM back in the late 80's/early 90's, it hasn't innovated as much as it has... ahem... "borrowed". Which isn't necessarily a bad business model - hell, it's how Apple got a little kick-start from Xerox. But innovation wasn't the most important component of Microsoft that got Bill Gates his billions upon billions. What was important was making sure Windows and other Microsoft products were an indispensable part of affordable computers.
That model worked great up until the computer became affordable and small enough to break out of its bulky box and take on myriad forms. Computer processors became a ubiquitous and almost magical raw material. The futuristic dream of electronic convergence - one device combining practically all communication, information, and entertainment functions you could want - was no longer so distant.
While Microsoft has done an admirable job trying to keep up with this rapid evolution, it suffers from having lost Bill Gates as its visionary leader and from its stuck-in-the-mud paradigm for devices. It got fat, happy, and lazy - an easy position for an 800-pound gorilla.
Apple and Jobs didn't have all that bulk to lug around, so when it saw alternate paths to profitability open up in portable music devices and "smart" phones - simply computers in different, specialized forms - it could easily make quick turns onto those paths and blaze their own wide trails. And now, thanks to the advent of e-books, they're paving the separate roads and merging them into a glorious new superhighway, right past Microsoft's gorilla cage.
Believe it or not, I'm telling you all this even though there's not a single Apple product in our entire household. That's how crazy all this stuff is.