People in IT can debate the merits and disadvantages of using Apple's technology in the Enterprise, but there is little debate about the company's explosive growth in the consumer market. How did Apple become so successful? You certainly need to credit the vision of Steve Jobs, the company's understanding of what consumers want and their ability to be innovative, but there's another ingredient that a former employee cites and that's its management style.

 

Sachin Agarwal, a former Apple engineer who worked at the company for six years before leaving to start the blogging platform Posterous in 2008, credits the company with teaching him valuable management skills. Here are the eight key lessons this young CEO learned from the iEverything company:

Users have to be careful about the way they hold their new iPhones lest they lose reception, but that's hardly putting a crimp in the device's blockbuster start. From June 24 -- the day the iPhone 4 hit stores -- to June 26, Apple moved 1.7 million phones.

In a press statement Monday, Steve Jobs called it "the most successful product launch in Apple's history," and he apologized for the fact that the phone is in short supply. Had Apple been able to meet the line-inducing, site-crashing demand, that 1.7 million could have been significantly higher. What Jobs didn't mention is the antenna issue that has been causing a stir among iPhone owners.

Multi-tasking? Check. Hi-res display? Check. Zoom and flash? Check. Video calling? Check (sort of).

On Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the wrapper off the latest iPhone model at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, but the new design and features were more or less what everyone had expected, thanks in part to the prototype that fell into the hands of tech blog Gizmodo earlier this year.

I very much doubt that going into 2010, many people had Adobe vs. Apple pegged as the most colorful tech feud of the year. Microsoft vs. Google, sure, or even Apple vs. Google. Oracle vs. Salesforce? Why not. But the escalating war of words between Steve Jobs and Adobe over Flash has proven not only to be intellectually engaging, but also darn entertaining.

Today, Adobe stepped up the fight, as the company's co-founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warcock, posted an open letter that takes aim at Apple's locked-down mobile platform. By blocking Flash and controlling what iPhone and iPad users can see online, Apple "has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the Web," they argued.

The idea that Apple's tablet would be more Apple TV than iPhone officially can be put to rest, with the announcement this morning that 1 million of the devices have been sold in its first 28 days of availability. Even the iPad's harshest critics would struggle to call that a bomb.

Apple reached its iPad milestone in 28 days, which CEO Steve Jobs pointed out is significantly quicker than the 74 days it took the iPhone to hit that number. "Demand continues to exceed supply and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers," added Jobs, who now seems more than justified in using the word "magical," which got him some merciless ribbing when he introduced the tablet in January.

In the latest move in the battle between Steve Jobs (err ... Apple) and Adobe Systems, Adobe announced today that it will cease development work on its Flash-to-iPhone conversion tool.

That tool -- Packager for iPhone -- had been a big part of the Flash Pro CS5 platform, designed to allow developers to take Flash Web content and recompile it for iPhone apps. But Jobs slammed the door on Adobe's efforts earlier this month with the release of a new iPhone developer license. One of the requirements? Applications must be written originally in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript -- sorry, Adobe.