Jobs comes back from his utter failure at NEXt and launches Operation Barbarossa against the Clone makers, the PowerPC consortium and CHRP, like Hitl . . . erm . . . Napole . . . ummm . . . some tin pot dictator or other!
Note: this is NOT Steve Bashing OR Apple Bashing, it's egregious exaggeration in trying to make a point.

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Uh, my first-quoted sentence seems to indicate it very much *IS* Steve bashing.

I agree with most of your diatribe in principle. Apple was foundering before Steve's return. Bleeding money, sinking fast, making MANY bad moves. The trick is that it really needed a VISION of where to go. That is what Steve brought when he came back. His vision was a return to the days of the original Macintosh. That is what he did. FIrst with the iMac, then with OS X, then the iPod, iPhone, etc.

I would love it if there were hardware competition. Potentially had hardware competition been real back in the clone days, there might have been a serious possibility of OS competition with Microsoft; and IBM/Mot may very well have been able to keep competition up with Intel. But, with Apple being the only real "desktop" use of the PowerPC platform, it just made financial sense for IBM/Mot to abandon the high-end.

But, it is also very possible that the clone market WAS killing Apple. That Apple didn't couldn't have survived the transition to a software company. In which case, the quoted article would have been a death-blow-dealing pipe dream.