Why Apple beat the world

These days the financial media is all over themselves talking about Apple; the company and the stock valuation (over half a trillion dollars) But what made Apple ''off the charts'' successful?
One man with a vision is part of it but the biggest reason is that the one man had the power to implement his vision. Steve Jobs took a bankrupt company in 1997 and within  15 years  made it the most valuable public corporation in the history of the world. No committees, no second guessing on strategy or products; Steve's word was the law to Apple directors, shareholders and employees. He, like Winston Churchill and Paul of Tarsus had the big advantage of publicly failing early in life.
I have no doubt there are other young or middle aged executives that have  vision but the nature of medium and especially large rich companies  is to not take any risk. You only take risk when you have not much to lose. (i.e.a small independent company)
Henry Ford had the power and the vision and to an extent so did Thomas Edison. Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard had it  but after they left it was downhill for this company now run by suits who no doubt graduated with honours from Wharton or Harvard but you cannot teach imagination or learn vision. So for Apple the combination of time and events and place all came together for the ''perfect storm'' of business creativity with SJ to move it thorough these new uncharted waters.
You will note one constant in the successful examples. They were engaged in new mediums where there was no historical evidence to plant fear of failure.
Lots of successful companies eventually fail because they DO NOT take risk. That is perceived risk. Xerox, HP, DEC once the behemoths of wall street now skeleton organizations on life support . They were all in position to do what Apple did, what Microsoft did, but had leaders whose talent seemed to be getting to the top rung of the executive ladder for the sole purpose of prestige. Their journey ended with being crowned CEO but that should have been the beginning.