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I was trying to make this point to one of our longtime Apple trolls. He didn’t seem seem to want any of it.
But stocks [companies] have their day and then fade away. I’ve spent my whole life in the stock market and one sees it firsthand ... stocks go up ,,, and then go down.
That’s for all you trolls out there. Apple won’t last forever.
Have an iPhone 5.
But it will be a cold day since Indiana.
I owned many Apple machines for the first twenty years. Today I find the company and its products a bit cultish.
Actually, IBM is still doing OK, much better than in the Akers years. IBM never really had mass consumer market penetration. Even the IBM PC/XT/AT breakout product was effortlessly fumbled away by IBM, which couldn’t at the time make a good playbook for its hot shot players (PCjr, PS/2 models, anyone?). Apple should be likened more to General Electric or RCA.
At the same time IBM started its slide I worked for Honeywell. It was a wonderful company and in most ways I have never worked for another company that was as professional and ethical. In 1987 Honeywell was sliding downhill fast and I suspect IBM suffered from the same malady. Honeywell’s top management were all good engineers but you didn’t get into the top slot until you were advanced in your career and in age. The management took into their new roles the extreme and well deserved feeling of competence they’d earned at lower level jobs. But whatever view of the world they had when they entered their top job was frozen in amber at some point in the past. They failed to adapt to changing circumstances. In Honeywell’s case we were desperate for a means of automating the office. The secretarial pool and typing pool worked only for top managers and, yet, the rank and file were forbidden to type their own memos. So memos and letters took weeks to cycle from typing pool and back to the author and then back to typing where yet more errors were introduced. Honeywell bought a tiny division from Boroughs (sp?), which had itself been bought recently for about a billion dollars. Honeywell paid nearly as much for WANG Computers as the other company had paid for all of Boroughs. Wang’s only product was office automation on mainframes. The first Apples (The Apple II if I recall.) were being pirated out of budgets into every department in Honeywell as test equipment or repair parts as we were only allowed to buy Honeywell or IBM computers. The direction of office automation was obvious to us and we were horrified at the Wang purchase as it would be like buying a one horse surrey as your town vehicle in 1925.
Apple managers are more conscious of change but they will eventually suffer a similar fate because highly placed managers suffer from what I call Caesar Syndrome. They make a bad call and everybody knows it but nobody has the stones to correct them or point it out. I understand why as I once tactfully pointed out a huge misapprehension to my boss at another company. He reacted with anger and doubled down on what he was doing which caused exactly the fiasco I had warned about. Rather than saying thanks or promoting me he sidelined me in a pigeonhole to suffer career death. Call that a lesson learned and the reason nobody tells the emperor he has no clothes.
Could be the $20B was an accounting gimmick bubble. Mark Cuban recently deemed IBM a "financial engineering" company rather than a tech company. Hard to say if IBM's problems are terminal. Another house cleaning of the magnitude visited by Gerstner may be in order. The layers of stifling bureaucracy he excised have crept back in over time.
Apple has defied the critics several times. Looked like its PC market share would languish forever in the single digits. Meanwhile, the PC industry settled on a core set of capabilities that either Apple or Windows could deliver. Fewer people are worried that a new card or I/O device supported only by Windows will matter. Meanwhile, prices have kept coming down. Suddenly, paying 40% more for the ease of use afforded by a closed operating system makes more sense. And the iPhone is an amazing convergence of technologies.
There may, however, be a lot of folks like me who get a phone that does enough (5S in my case) and aren't going to spend $600 every 18 months to chase new features. Many of us aren't dropping similar coin on a watch either.
So Apple may peak and fall back again. There may come a time when their ability to continually introduce revolutionary products may stop. Then they'll switch from "bubble" mode to a long-term sustainable model. Like Microsoft before them.
Apple has made a wonderful business out of taking less-than-leading-edge technology, packaging it in a snazzy chasis, and selling it at inflated prices to its rediculously loyal (yet very small as a percentage) fanbase.
That can’t continue forexer.
Very true!
And Apple went through a lot work and trouble before it finally made it to the top.
But IBM had a looong run. Maybe Apple will, too.
Even a big dog like Google can’t seem to live up to its founding ethos: “Don’t Be Evil.” We’ll see if the core principles that drive Apple will keep it at the top.
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” - Steve Jobs
The New York Times: They know “past one’s prime.”
Of course a company’s fortunes will wane and wax if you are talking in terms of decades or longer. Hell if you look back at Apple shortly before the turn of the century, prospects looked pretty darn bleak. However, in the short term, I just don’t see Apple as being a stock to short. If they can keep their focus on design and integration, I don’t see why they can’t keep things rolling along for a while. Given their cash reserves, they can ride through a lot of stuff that would kill smaller companies.
This whole thing is in a way kind of like ‘climate change’. Anyone with a brain knows the climate changes. 60k years ago there were glaciers covering Canada and major parts of the U.S.. The real question is: what is causing it?
In the case of this article, I think it’s mostly just click bait.
People are always announcing Apple will fail. Maybe not. Smart companies change and diversify their product line. Large companies start with one type of product line, let's say motors for factory conveyor belts, and over time may be producing breakfast cereal as well as building airplane components. IBM did not always build computers. Look at a company like Honda, building bicycles, then motorcycles, then cars and now their building robotics.
Someday Apple might be building space destroyers and Moon bases (their new campus building may just be the kernel of such an idea). People can predict their demise, but only time will tell us what happens next.