There’s not much I will miss about [the last] decade.
And to think it all began with such promise. At the dawn of the new millennium, optimism abounded. The U.S. economy was roaring, with gross domestic product increasing 6.1 percent in 1999. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 2,300 points in a year. Unemployment was at 4 percent. America was at peace and largely unchallenged.
It didn’t take long for things to get ugly. Terrorist attacks, two wars, the burst of the tech bubble; an all-too brief recovery that gave way to the near collapse of the banking system and the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. For a period that began with such high hopes, the first decade of the 21st century was by many measures disastrous.
There are a few exceptions. One of the biggest is Apple. If you worked for, held shares in, or bought products from the Cupertino [Calif.]-based consumer electronics maker, you had plenty to love about the past 10 years. The writer Douglas Coupland once called the band R.E.M. “one of the few things that didn’t suck about the ’80s.” And so it is with Apple in the Noughties, or whatever else we’re calling the decade that dare not speak its name.
Bleak Times
Ten years ago [lst] week, Apple seemed destined for irrelevance. Sales had dropped to $6 billion in 1999 from a peak of $11 billion in 1995. Apple’s share of the U.S. PC market plummeted to less than 4 percent in 1999 from 9.6 percent in 1991. And the company’s stock lost more than half its value in a single day at the end of September 2000 when the company issued a dour profit warning for its fiscal fourth quarter.
Then again, founder Steve Jobs had only recently begun reasserting his influence over the company he…