The excellent UK edition of Wired magazine boasts as its cover story this month “37 lessons you can learn from Steve Jobs.” Many of these will be familiar to Apple-watchers: the obsession over design and detail; the marketing of premium products; the ability to whip up a media frenzy and so on. But one point struck me as particularly pertinent following Apple’s latest software announcements this week: you don’t have to be the first at something, you just have to be the best.

For all the talk of Apple’s “vision” and “innovation” it’s often overlooked that the firm is rarely first-to-market with anything. The most obvious case in point is the iPod: when the first version of the iconic music player was unveiled in 2001, mp3 players had already been around for years. No matter. The iPod was such a great leap forward in design terms, that it effectively re-launched the market again on its own terms. Even the iPhone offered little new outside of its (admittedly revolutionary) touchscreen; on the first version you couldn’t even forward a text message. And yet the iPhone once again redefined a market almost overnight by creating a product that was infinitely more desirable than any of its competitors.

Which brings us to this week’s announcements. By Apple’s standards it was a low key event, not least because Apple broke with its usual method of not announcing in advance what was to be unveiled in order to whip up the hype. Still, even though the assembled throng in San Francisco knew about iCloud before Jobs stepped out and announced it, Apple didn’t disappoint in sprinkling some of its trademark gold dust on what had previously been a rather prosaic concept. On Monday morning, cloud computing was something very dull men in your IT department talked about; by the end of the day it was all about accessing your entire music catalogue on your iPhone.

With no word on when iPhone5 will arrive, we had to make do with a preview of iOS5, which boasted some 200 new features. As before, the ones that stand out are not original, but suddenly seem a lot sexier now that Apple is doing them. Firstly, the new notifications feature is an unashamed move to copy one of the (few) things the Android OS does better. Integrating Twitter isn’t breaking new ground either, and yet the prospect of iOS developers now being able to embed the social network service deep into their apps appears to create a world of possibilities that didn’t exist a week ago. Elsewhere, Newsstand – iOS5’s magazine publishing platform – is not much different to Apple’s existing iBooks (or, for that matter, Yahoo’s Livestand), but it is already being talked about as representing a seismic shift in digital magazine publishing.

But the most significant new feature in iOS5 is likely to be iMessage, an instant messaging service for iOS devices. It’s such a startlingly simple concept that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. And, of course, it has. By RIM. The firm’s BlackBerry Messenger – or BBM – is one of its most popular proprietary services, and – arguably – its most important USP in the key consumer devices segment. The announcement of iMessage appeared partly responsible for a 3 percent fall in RIM’s shares on Tuesday (falling below US$37 for the first time since 2007). For a firm already in some trouble, Apple is the last competitor you want to see rapidly advancing in the rear view mirror.

So, as Wired says, there are at least 37 lessons we can learn from Apple and Steve Jobs. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, RIM and the rest have just learnt one the hard way: whatever you can do, Apple can (probably) do better.

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