Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world. When the first iPod was released in October 2001, industry analysts couldn’t see much more than “a nice feature for Macintosh users” that “doesn’t make any difference” to the rest of the world. Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people. One look at the company’s stock chart shows the harvest of this multi-year plan:
