I'm glad you're not my lecturer then...
I think you are maybe in denial about your Fanboi status, I'm afraid...
MP3 was already becoming the de-facto standard for digital music files before Apple brought out the iPod. There were also many MP3 players available and their numbers were always going to rise. Digital music players were always going to be the successor to the portable CD player which succeeded the Tape Player (the Walkman was 'The Big Thing' years ago).
What Apple did was brought in branding - they combined a great touch sensitive dial, fairly simple UI, and great branding and marketing to make it ubiquitous. They didn't have an amazing vision, they just inserted themselves nicely into the already growing arena.
The comment about floppy disks is a very poor example. Floppy disks were always seeing the end of their life. They were slow and limited in capacity. Everyone involved in IT knew their weaknesses, Iomega were actively trying to create successors (e.g the Zip Disk) as were others. However floppy disks were useful. They were dirt cheap, could hold a few documents, you could mail them in the post and not need it back.
It was many, many years after Apple stopped putting floppy drives in their Macs that the decline really happened. I can't see that Apple in any way influenced that decline in any significant way. It was the rise in cheap networking, the internet (especially it's broadband), e-mail and to a small extent USB drives that finally saw off the floppy drive. There were also many years where Apple users suffered for the lack of a floppy disk. They also seemed to miss the rise of the USB for a long time, sticking with the Firewire interface believing that to be the most likely standard.
You could argue that Apple has managed to heavily influence a market sector by good marketing, design and targeting it, but I can't think of times where they have been highly successful in creating a sector from scratch - an area that no-one had delved into or even thought about, true inventions and visionaries.
Apple have used their success with the iPod, the iPhone and their designs of the iMacs that got people to like Apple again, and got people to accept Apple as an influential player outside of their Graphics department niche. They are now able to exert their influence enough to make people jump when they say jump, their customer share is big enough for developers not to ignore, but they aren't unique in this.
Consider Microsoft and Internet Explorer, when that was dominant everyone developed for that platform - good or bad, standard or not. Doesn't mean that Microsoft were truly great or visionary in their thinking. They even failed to spot the trend and impact of the Internet early on. Microsoft just forced the hand of the developers to write websites their way.
Apple are doing the same. They are not saying we support Flash and HTML5 but everyone should use HTML5 as Flash is dead. They are saying "we only support HTML 5, you will not reach our customers otherwise", so of course major sites are going to try to support it when it is easy to do so and every other browser is also heading in that direction.
HTML5 seems to have be pushed and been the vision of Google and others far more than the vision of Apple.
Just remember also the failed vision of not multi-tasking and the 'visions' of non-standard SIM cards, the vision of no USB, no external storage, non-printing, etc that we are due to evaluate in the coming years.
(BTW the tagline of 'Lecturer in Computing' - is that a pretentious way to try to validate your opinion or just explain that you might not understand computing in the real world?)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
