Just for giggles, what do you think may happen with Apple stock and what components of the business do you think will drive that result?
For Microsoft, I see no decisions to the better and a continued slide in oblivion as Visual Studio gets worse and does not provide incentive to use it, therefore no incentive to use Windows or Office products.
Apple will sell a lot more iPhone7s this year than the pundits think they will because they are not just a little incremental upgrade. A survey taken yesterday showed that 29% of iPhone owners are planning to upgrade THIS year. If that is the case, then that works out to over 220 million on just upgraders alone.
I think the new Apple Watch 2 will take off. The 15 million sales so far of the last model may turn into double that this coming year with the Apple Watch 2. New designs in the MacBook Pro with interactive touch screen Function Key strips are coming soon. Lots of people are waiting for that.
Apple Services hit $20 billion in revenue in 2015. That by itself would make it number 140 on the Fortune 500 if it were a stand alone business. At the growth rate Apple is making in Services, it may make the 113th on the list by the end of the year.
Next year in 2017, with the tenth anniversary of the iPhone and a complete redesign, we could see a huge resurgence in interest which is pent up.
I really doubt that. As the buzz about "the cloud" has grown in the business world, Microsoft is shifting to software as a service for applications, as well as migrating an awful lot of data centers into "the cloud," including web apps and MS SQL, and using AD and Azure. It still has a way to go, but I see an awful lot of drive to that direction in s lot of businesses.
Mark