The question popped into my head today of, "What is the most important strategic decision Apple ever made as a company?" I wasn't looking for anything obvious and high-level like, "To build the iPhone." I was looking for smaller decisions about a product attribute or brand positioning perhaps that caused a massive ripple effect throughout the entire company. As operationally brilliant and strategically sound as Apple is, you can point to a thousand different examples: the choice to adopt a single multitouch display on the iPhone, to build an elegant casing for the Apple II, to color the plastic of the iMac G3...
But the card that stuck out highest to me was the choice to migrate iTunes onto Windows in 2003. It's easy to forget that the original iPod, as revolutionary as it was, was a relative commercial failure upon launch. iTunes was exclusive to the Mac, so you needed a Mac to have an iPod, and that meant the total market for the iPod in the US was no greater than the total Mac market share, which was still only 10% at best in the US. There was a fundamental flaw in the company's philosophy: people inside Apple, including Steve Jobs, viewed Apple as a computer company that used iPods to sell computers. Not even Steve Jobs had the faintest whiff of the floodgate he opened by creating the iPod. To him, it was an extension of the Mac, and the Mac remained the center of Apple's business model.
Jobs eventually allowing a Windows version of iTunes to be developed turned this philosophy on its head. All of a sudden, Apple was treating the iPod as a standalone creation, not an extremity of the Mac. Apple was no longer a computer company that used iPods to sell computers; it was a consumer devices company, and the Mac was one of its many products. Creating the iPod was the first step in this direction, but porting iTunes to Windows was what truly pointed the business model at a completely new North Star, which ultimately led Apple to the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and everything else created in the 18 years succeeding. This decision shaped everything we see in the company today, and I'm not sure they've made a more critical decision since.
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