How Apple Helped Create the Connected Economy
Apple slipped the surly bonds of earthly economics during intraday trading on Monday (Jan. 3), becoming the first U.S. company to achieve a $3 trillion valuation before slipping back down.
Just months after the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011, the company he founded, quit, then went back to and made a humanity-changing force of ingenuity and commerce is, in many ways, the progenitor of the connected economy we’re living in now.
Critics of the company today say it’s no longer the innovation engine that Jobs built, while proponents hold that Apple laid the groundwork — some of it perceptual through groundbreaking marketing — for the connected economy, particularly the mobile internet.
Jobs grasped the technological efficiency and vastly improved user experiences that platforms and ecosystems can provide, and that’s debatably the inspiration that set it all in motion.
A favorite of graphic designers,…
