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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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday April 27 2015, @01:11PM
I've been bleeding in six colors since 1986, but I'm at the point of giving up on it. I'm not even certain I want to ship the iOS App I've been working on; I expect I'll Free the source, but if I release a binary it may be through Cydia.
AppleTalk, Apple Desktop Bus, dual-forked files with the Resource Manager, the relocatable memory manager, AppleLink, 800 kB floppy disks all in many respects were far superior to their nonproprietary alternatives. But they were proprietary; if you had a shop with some windows or unix boxen, if someone had a mac it was a huge PITA for everyone, and expensive too.
Apple's success today is due in large part to its being rescued by the adoption of open standards - NFS instead of AppleShare, TCP/IP instead of AppleTalk, USB instead of ADB, vast quantities of Open Source and Free Software.
But increasingly - especially since the advent of the iPhone - the Mac is a locked-down system. For example I recently learned that one can no longer load a kernel extension - a device driver module - unless it is signed by Apple, at a cost of $99.00/year. They won't sign any driver, it has to be approved. Similarly with Safari plugins.
I have all kinds of reasons to want to edit the /etc/hosts file on my phone, but I can only do so if I jailbreak it.
IBM was this way, back in the day.
Apple is going to make a lot of money in the short term but unless it gets back to participating enthusiastically with open standards it is bound to lose in the end.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]