Apple and Steve Jobs never cease to amaze me. Today Apple reported earnings and they exceeded the revenue and profit expectations by a wide margin.

Look at the attached graph that shows the iTunes song downloads chart that I made up from publicly available information.

If you observe closely, you will notice that it took about 14 months to sell the first 100 million songs. However, the last 100 million songs will be sold in less than 90 days. The key here is the fact that Apple was able to see this long ago. Steve and Apple have been innovative at a breathtaking pace.

Look at the simple counter that they put on the Apple Home Page (iTunes Music Store 500 million song countdown) and you can see that songs are being downloaded every second and the race towards 500 million songs is ON.

I saw this interesting post by Rory Blyth bashing innovation. Rory talks about innovation being useless if enough attention is not given to quality, support, stability, relevance and value. I agree with Rory there but I disagree with the approach in the article as there are companies like Apple who are innovating and are giving attention to all the other stuff that they should normally give attention to. We don’t want to send a message to organizations that Innovation is useless. Everything has a place and I think in these current times Innovation has an important place in organizations that want to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.

Hats off to Apple for providing an example for corporate resilience.