Apple: Best Whatever of the Decade, Year

The Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog offers a great list of Apple Bests around the Web, including Best CEO, Best Brand, Best Marketing and Best Advertising Campaign.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt compiled the list, which included honored Apple executives (not just Steve Jobs), products and company.

I enjoyed the analysis by Engadget's Nilay Patel on the 2001 releases of Mac OS X Public Beta and Microsoft Windows XP.

If you had found me right after I'd installed OS X Public Beta for the first time in 2001 and told me how dramatically the OS would change over the next decade, I'm not sure I would have believed you. There was a gigantic difference in feel between installing Windows XP and OS X Public Beta -- with XP you got that fun sense of having a whole new computer, fast and ready to take on whatever you could throw at it, while with OS X you just sort of stared at the huge icons and wondered, "Now what?" It was clear Apple had a lot of work left to do -- although by 10.3 or so I'd deleted my Classic partition and wasn't looking back.

But hold up: OS X 10.3 looks and feels dated by today's standards, while XP looks and feels like... XP. Where Apple did an fantastic job of relentlessly improving and iterating OS X over the past decade, Microsoft set the bar so high coming out of the gate that the biggest threat to Windows 7 is the installed base of XP users who are still happy with their machines. That's pretty amazing.