The power of a name

Imagine if:

the iPhone had been called the iTouch Mobile
the iPod Touch had been called the iTouch Express
the iPad had been called the iTouch Pro
and the iPhone OS had been called the iTouch OS.

And if in January 2007, Steve Jobs had introduced the revolutionary new "Apple iTouch" platform and the first device to run it- which happened to also be a mobile phone.

And if later that year, Apple introduced the second device on the platorm: the iTouch Express, which is what you can accomplish with thickness and lower price if you drop the legacy cell phone functionality and 20th century mobile network concept completely.

You see where I'm going with this.

By calling the iPhone the iPhone, Apple set in motion a chain of events that- intentionally or not- allowed Steve Jobs to reinvent the entire personal computer in plain sight.

Microsoft would have gone the other way, promoting the platform. Which is pretty much all they could do, since they can't contol the entire platform down to the hardware level.

So the ultimate irony is that while Microsoft is known as the platform company, it's really Apple with it's OS X and touch device platform that's created the next mass market computer platform to follow Windows. They just did it one product at a time.