The conventional wisdom seems to be that Jobs forced Apple to focus their product offerings down.
You seem to be saying, "Jobs' Apple didn't so much 'focus' as simply kill bad products".
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle; the strategic shift wasn't so much from complexity to simplicity as it was from niche to mass market. Some things were killed because they were crappy, others because they didn't have mass market appeal (for instance, custom-branded printers and digital cameras).
Apple seems to have been on a trend towards escalating revenue and improving margins long before the iPod was released; see for instance the historical 10Q's on "Wikivest" (whatever that is).
High margins and a mass market strategy tend to be antithetical though.
I think by Apple's standards, anything that doesn't surpass the competition is a crappy product; at the very least it's not a product worth making. Apple had digital cameras and laser printers; what they didn't have was a way to do either product better than everyone else. Focus is certainly part of it, but Apple is less focused now than they were in 1999. Admittedly, compared to any other company, Apple still has extraordinary focus.
It's more my point that it's easy to imagine a world where a minority of Apple fanboys have all the Macs and iPhones and iPads, while Windows and Android rule the mass market. It's execution, not strategy--operational, marketing, retailing, and engineering execution--that makes the difference.
You seem to be saying, "Jobs' Apple didn't so much 'focus' as simply kill bad products".
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle; the strategic shift wasn't so much from complexity to simplicity as it was from niche to mass market. Some things were killed because they were crappy, others because they didn't have mass market appeal (for instance, custom-branded printers and digital cameras).
Apple seems to have been on a trend towards escalating revenue and improving margins long before the iPod was released; see for instance the historical 10Q's on "Wikivest" (whatever that is).