At 30, Apple has colourful past and uncertain future

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: There's a poem posted on a wall at Apple Computer Inc.'s headquarters that starts like this: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes."

The poem, once part of an Apple commercial, is an ode to people who, to use Apple's term, "think different." But it could be just as much about Apple and its founders, who started the company on April Fool's Day, 1976 - kicking off the personal computer revolution.

Three decades later, founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are billionaires. Apple's sprawling campus here, with its bright white buildings and a certain air of superiority, is a far cry from the local Homebrew Computer Club where the two nerdy hippies showed off their first PC to their friends. Apple nonetheless remains the round peg in the square hole of the computing industry, and —to the surprise of many who once predicted its demise—is in better shape than ever.

"Today they're arguably the strongest company around in terms of their technology ... their customer base and their brand name," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research, which advises institutional investors. "They're a little bit like the new Dell for the next five years" in terms of potential growth and competitive position, he said.

That said, Apple at 30 faces some unique problems that aren't easy to solve. Despite its roots, the company that can legitimately claim it invented the personal computer still only has a measly 4% of market for PCs. For every computer Apple sells, market leader Dell Inc sells almost nine. Acceptability of Apple computers may improve given its recent shift to Intel Corp processors, the same ones that power most PCs, but nobody is expecting Apple to take much share away from Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co and other market leaders.

Of course, Apple's most important business today isn't computers, it's music. The explosive growth of its iPods —in last year's fourth quarter it sold 100 per minute —has won the company 80% of the market for digital music players. Meanwhile, Apple's stranglehold on the digital music business is facing growing scrutiny from regulators, most notably in France.