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posted by LaminatorX on Monday April 27 2015, @02:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-tide-goes-in-and-the-tide-goes-out dept.

The New York Times published a story that states the obvious for anyone who has studied economics, that Apple's dominant position today is not permanent. They may be very clever and innovative thanks to the spirit (and curse) of Steve Jobs lingering around 1 Infinite Loop, but all fame is fleeting.

In a few short years, Apple has become the biggest company on the planet by market value—so big that it dwarfs every other one on the stock market. It dominates the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as no other company has in 30 years.

Apple’s market capitalization—the value of all of the shares of its stock—is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity—and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be—there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict.

Yet, IBM was once a huge computer company, the one to beat, not unlike what Microsoft became.

IBM thrived for years afterward, but just as [Steve] Jobs had predicted, it turned out to be vulnerable to disruptive change, as all big companies are. For decades now, IBM has engaged in a sometimes painful transition, and as it revealed in its quarterly earnings report last week, it is still hurting: Its revenues have declined and it has endured wrenching business shifts.

My take on this is pretty straightforward. I own IBM stock; I don't own Apple except in the form of an S&P mutual fund. While I use Apple computers and like them, I have little faith in Apple's long-term future, whereas I think IBM will be around and relevant for much longer once they get their business properly reoriented.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Monday April 27 2015, @02:41AM

    by arslan (3462) on Monday April 27 2015, @02:41AM (#175559)

    If you want to compare to IBM, really it should be Amazon. They are into all sorts of market segment. Apple is really just an above average retail brand targeting the middle class. They aren't even dominant in the lower middle class and below, the cheaper Android platforms eat up that segment.

    Amazon may have originally focused on the retail space, but they have expanded their focus in the enterprise level for quite sometime now (9 years?) along the "cloud" arena. The seeds they've planted around this space is slow and surely coming to fruition and it is at a scale none of the competitors even come close to. That and they continue to branch out to all sorts of retail segment, broadcasting, manufacturing, etc.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 27 2015, @02:55AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 27 2015, @02:55AM (#175564) Journal

    Actually, no tech company can be compared to IBM, simply due to longevity. All the big names today are upstarts in comparison to IBM. All of our grandparents - even mine - knew IBM long before any of us were born. No other major tech company can make such a claim.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @09:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @09:18AM (#175627)

      No other major tech company can make such a claim.

      So you think Siemens is not a major tech company?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @10:35AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @10:35AM (#175640)
        Conglomerate. Like GE.