Randall Stross on Apple ("Cool")

NYT 1/16/05 After 20 Years, Finally Capitalizing on Cool By RANDALL STROSS
After 20 Years, Finally Capitalizing on Cool - The New York Times

But Apple has an absolute monopoly on the asset that is the most difficult for competitors to copy: cool.
Paul Saffo, research director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., says emphatically, "Hipness is the only asset that matters." Mr. Jobs had not been able to leverage it in traditional computers because technology in crucial areas had not matured enough to make cool affordably practical on a mass scale. To the extent that cool is based on exclusion of the uncool, Apple was too hip for its own long-term health.

APPLE is well positioned for the future. When consumers open their wallets to buy things that have machine intelligence, or provide digital entertainment, or link to the Internet - that is, just about everything in a household that is not edible - they are likely to be drawn to the company with cachet, offering the best-designed, best-engineered, easiest-to-use products, priced affordably thanks to Mr. Moore's old law and Mr. Jobs's new pragmatism. They'll turn to the company that best knows how to meld hardware and software, the company embodied in the ecstatically happy hipster silhouette. The company that is, in a word, cool.