WIRED:Steve Jobs returned to Apple and won in spades. What lessons should others learn from this? asks DANNY O'BRIEN

IT’S HARD to believe that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was probably just weeks away from collapsing in ignominy.

Jobs himself had been ousted a decade previously, just a year after the Macintosh was first launched, and a millennium away in computing terms.

Jobs left when the average Mac had less than 128KB of RAM. When he returned, even his old friend and competitor Bill Gates wondered what he was thinking.

“What I can’t figure out is why he [Steve Jobs] is even trying [to be the CEO of Apple]?” he pondered to journalist Robert X. Cringely. “He knows he can’t win.”

Well, he did win, and in spades. It’s a comeback that will be studied by business students – and business leaders – for decades.

But what lessons should they learn? I’ve been pondering that myself as I watch Apple build up to another mysterious press launch on September 1st, and find myself once again contributing to the acres of newsprint that will examine the company’s every move. What could anyone else copy to become the next Apple?

The question comes into greater clarity when you think about the last decade, which has been filled with technologists asking the same thing about Google. What would you copy from Google. Where to begin? If you want to be like Google, go the trite answers, work with the Internet, not against it; exploit open-source software; hire smart; build an engineer-friendly corporate culture; don’t be afraid to fail; “don’t be evil”.

It’s not easy to be any of these things. But it’s pretty easy to try and follow these strategies. And, lo and behold, even though few of them compete with Google in its primary markets of search and online advertising, Silicon Valley is full of mini-Googles that have adopted its culture in their own companies.

Compare that to the Apple model. Building a business model on closed, proprietary but exquisite computing systems is an approach that many thought had been chased away in the 21st century. But Apple excels at it. It’s a truly masterful deployment of a strategy that seems to have been seamlessly lifted from the Apple of 1985.

What’s particularly impressive is Apple’s success where literally thousands of companies have failed. No one has managed to execute the combination of control and high-profit margins in what might be called “consumer computing” since Jobs was ousted, despite it being the most obvious approach, pre-Google. Apple has succeeded where Sony, Nokia, Pal, General Magic and other challengers have failed.

I just don’t know how to replicate that genius and I think that many people are in the same position. You can aspire to be a smart nerd but who can even imagine being the combination of smart nerd, business strategist and aesthete as Jobs.

I’m not saying this out of some sort of exaggerated worship of the guy. I just think that, to copy the Apple way, you’d have to start with “copy Steve Jobs”. And that’s a much taller order than simply “hire super-smart geeks”.

Perhaps that’s the Apple lesson: in a world of endless, low-cost copies, be inimitable. But if that’s a strategy for Apple, I do rather wonder what happens in the world after Apple. Because, like the setting of the sun, eventually companies do fade away.

Microsoft is no longer the power it once was. I don’t think that Apple’s culture necessarily depends on Jobs’s genius, but when Jobs does go, I can well imagine the company settling on a more rote path.

And all those failures that have tried the high Apple road suggest that it’s a very narrow route, with plenty of chasms on either side.

Google will also stumble. Perhaps it already is. One day Google will cease to be the unassailable monolith it once was. But, unlike Apple, even after it goes, its cultural echo in thousands of start-ups will continues. The very fact it works in such an open way means more people copy it. The Google approach, even if it’s not the best approach, will outlive the company.

I think if anyone was to bet which company has a better vision of its own future and a strategy for getting there right now, most would pick Apple over Google.

But whose vision will truly dominate the future, 10 or 20 years down the line? I’d bet on Google and its derivatives.

Cheap rip-offs of the Apple way are just cheap rip-offs. Cheap rip-offs of Google are embodiments of its very philosophy.