"Solving" the Innovator's Dilemma

James Allworth (HBR Blogs) suggests that Steve Jobs solved the Innovator's Dilemma.
Quick Note - This refers to how highly successful companies fail to adapt to disruptive changes in their core area, i.e.

The best professional managers — doing all the right things and following all the best advice — lead their companies all the way to the top of their markets in that pursuit... only to fall straight off the edge of a cliff after getting there.

He makes a couple of good points, the main one being that Apple is Mission based, not Profits based.

Everything — the business, the people — are subservient to the mission: building great products. And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn't know they had with products they didn't even realize they wanted.
By taking this approach, Apple bent all the rules of disruption. To disrupt yourself, for example, Professor Christensen's research would typically prescribe setting up a separate company that eventually goes on to defeat the parent. It's incredibly hard to do this successfully; Dayton Dry Goods pulled it off with Target. IBM managed to do it with the transition from mainframes to PCs, by firewalling the businesses in entirely different geographies. Either way, the number of companies that have successfully managed to do it is a very, very short list. And yet Apple's doing it to itself right now with the utmost of ease. Here's new CEO Tim Cook, on the iPad disrupting the Mac business: "Yes, I think there is some cannibalization... the iPad team works on making their product the best. Same with the Mac team." It's almost unheard of to be able to manage disruption like this.

I quite agree with the core precepts, but have a minor quibble - I feel that this is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.  History is littered with companies that had great products that didn't succeed for one reason or another.  Sheer evolution dictates that AAPL would end up where it is.  Or to put it another way, if the Beatles hadn't come together, some other band would have...