Apple's Decade: In Position to Win

Editor's note: This is the first excerpt of an e-book by Jason Schwarz, an analyst at Lone Peak Asset Management in Westlake Village, Calif.

There has never been a company more prepared for a particular generation than Apple(AAPL Quote) is for the 2010 decade. It was only three years ago that mobile phones were used merely to talk and it was only 15 years ago that we were tethered to a wall by a copper wire.

My purpose in writing this book, Apple Revolution, is to open your eyes to what lies ahead, not just for purposes of investment decision-making but to help you come to grips with the large scale societal changes on the horizon.

When the history books look back on this generation, they will view our progress as we view the Transportation Revolution of the early 1900s and the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Who is bringing to market the contemporary steam engine? Who is building vehicles to take advantage of the new roads? Without question it is Steve Jobs.

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Somehow Jobs sees things that nobody else does. Apple is leading our global culture into uncharted technological waters. His most recent contribution has been underappreciated by the media, but its significance has propelled Apple into its current leadership role.

Back in February 2008, just as the fear of economic recession was beginning to take hold, Jobs told Fortune's Betsy Morris the following, "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last things we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding.

In fact, we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."