Apple: America's Last Great Company

As Steve Job's take another health related sabbatical, it is a good time to reflect about what Apple represents to America. Apple is, in fact, America's last great company. Started in a Cupertino, California garage in 1976, Steve Wozniak's engineering genius partnered with Steve Job's art and marketing savvy created the second biggest company, by market cap, in the world.

And this may be the last time we will ever see a company like Apple again.

Or sure, America will breed more giant companies from scratch. We will have more faceless tech giants like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon. There will be more financial behemoths and hedge fund hustlers who will play God with the dollar. And we will see more commodity based companies built out of leverage and monopolistic practices. However, the days of one or two people in a garage with an idea and a few tools, creating something that will change the world, is over.

Why? Chalk it up to a couple of factors. Apple is able to create "things" that people love - computers, music players, tablet computers - that are designed in America and then mass produced overseas. However, as the world becomes "flatter" and as cost go up, it will be impossible for powerful companies to make a fortune from innovations that you can hold, covet and buy, in its ever evolving generations.

It's hard to point to one American who invented the idea of tinkering in a garage or barn with aspirations of owning the world. If you look back to before America, companies were built by partnerships between the rich and the powerful. And they used their partnership to spread, Imperial-like, around the planet. The idea that anyone can create a world-changing business, from one's home, is a uniquely American concept.

Sure there were innovators in other countries. However, they didn't have the opportunity to scale their simple idea into a business that could stretch across countries, continents and the planet.

In the late 1800s, as the industrial revolution allowed one man access to machines and ideas, there were many "garages" or more accurately, "carriage houses" in America, working quietly to change the world. You had Thomas Edison, with his hundreds of inventions. You have Edison's rival, Nikola Tesla and his earthquake machines and wireless electrical dynamos. You had Henry Ford preparing to mass produce the automobile.

These garage innovators offered life changing products to Americans. And they became insanely rich and powerful. This trend continued well into the 80s. However, as the financial world seized more influence, and as the world became flatter, the ability to create "things" from scratch - with aspirations of changing the world with them - simply became harder to accomplish.

Sure, there will be that teenage girl who will design purses, in her bedroom, that will spawn a billion dollar fashion empire. However, these companies will create "niche" products that can only survive by creating high margin products, immune to the increasing manufacturing costs.

There will never be another Apple. And there will never be another Steve Jobs. If Steve Job's never steps back as CEO of Apple again, we will lose one of the most important Americans in our country's history. It will be the end of an era.

Apple made its fortune by making the personal computer simple and beautiful. Then they extended that idea to the personal computer/internet with the iMac. After that, they did the same to music, with the iPod and iTunes. And then, the smart phone - iPhone.

And that focus came from the mandate of one man. Quite simply, one man will never have that kind of power and influence over a global company ever again. His judgement would not be trusted. Shareholders would not stand for it. The CEO of trillion dollar companies will be recruited, not born.

Apple is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is the American Dream. The American Dream is not dead. But it will never be the same.