“If you want a brilliant lesson in focus and discipline, watch Tim Cook right now. Some investors are dissatisfied with Apple. I think it’s more a case of their being dissatisfied with their own lives and expecting that Apple’s next product will fix everything,” Dan Pallotta blogs for The Harvard Business Review. “The constant refrain is that Apple has not introduced a disruptive product since Steve Jobs passed away. It’s as if they want Apple to unveil a happiness device and they won’t be happy until it does.”
“We don’t know what Apple has in store for us. Over the past 10 years, it reinvented the telephone, music players, the way we consume music, and mobile computing itself — actually, with the iPad, Apple invented mobile computing,” Pallotta writes. “It has changed the world. It is now selling the products that define that new world to the world. Even if it has nothing more up its sleeve than beautiful new iterations of its existing products, the fact remains that this is a company that last quarter had profits of more than $8 billion. Compare that with Amazon’s performance: Amazon lost $247 million in its last quarter. Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio is now 2,767. Apple’s is 13. And Apple’s profits are growing substantially year over year.”
Pallotta writes, “The critics that are screaming right now are intellectually lazy. They’re throwing temper tantrums instead of looking at the big picture. Like two-year-olds, they don’t really know what they want. And they’re not happy when they get it, anyway. Apple could unveil a new car and they’d say Apple’s days are over because it’s just bet its future on an industry it knows nothing about. Not unlike, say, Apple’s entrance into the mobile phone industry. I bet that if Apple did unveil a time machine, they’d claim it wasn’t fast enough.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Underestimating Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Co. is a fool’s errand.
Exactly!
Somebody gets it
If Apple started to walk on water, the analysts would say that Apple can’t swim.
If Apple healed the sick, the analysts would say that Apple used slave labor.
If Apple called itself the inventor of consumer computing, the analysts would say – crucify!
If Apple rose from the dead, the analysts would say it was a myth.
“Compare that with Amazon’s performance: Amazon lost $247 million in its last quarter. Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio is now 2,767. Apple’s is 13. And Apple’s profits are growing substantially year over year.”
If that doesn’t put things into perspective nothing will.
Does anyone have a similar comparison for Google.
Yeah, but Amazon’s share price is rising despite those facts. Apple’s is falling and not just the share price but the P/E is also constantly compressing. I’d like to know why. Except for the fact that Wall Street dictates it, I’d really like a fundamental explanation for it. A few people merely predicting that Apple has no growth doesn’t really cut it. They shouldn’t keep saying something they have no clue about. To me, that’s just defamatory talk. If I were a CEO and those statements were made about my company, I’d want to challenge them.
On paper, I see no reason for Google to have a share price considerably higher than Apple’s if higher at all.
It’s enough to give any long-term Apple shareholder the willies reading the nonsense written about Apple.
I think the pc industry and others that are negatively affected by Apples success are working to depress the stock and cause as much problems as they can since they have nothing else to do because of Apple.
WallStreet is pushing the story hard that Amazon will take over all retail and make boatloads of money in the future. They are selling the anticipation of future riches. Apple is making tons of money right now. The feeling is one of fear that this will end at any moment. People tend to be more risk averse than desirous so may are susceptible to any hint of a downturn for Apple. Amazon hasn’t made money yet so this is still the ground floor as it were.
This has nothing to do with actual financials or future prospects. This are my observations of public opinion.
this article is a good read.
Last sentence is awesome:
Why waste the beautiful sight of it by casting your gaze on a group of misbehaving children who have never accomplished anything remotely close to it in concept or scale and don’t have the faintest understanding of how something this remarkable operates and grows in the first place?
I don’t know. Perhaps the way the product was introduced by Steve Jobs brought a magical quality to it. Steve was a consummate salesman, par excellence, and had a way of presenting products that brought a collective gasp from the audience.
I thought the iPad mini, in and of itself, was quite revolutionary. Not as revolutionary as the original iPad launch, but revolutionary in its own right by maintaining the proportions of the larger iPad in a smaller, sleeker form factor.
Tim isn’t bereft of skills to manage a product transition. What he lacks is that unmatched Steve Jobs factor of wowing the audience at a product launch just by speaking about it.
Are product launches really that important? I mean how many people actually watched the things? The vast majority of folks just saw brief snippets of Steve walking across a stage on the news the day of product announcements, or pictures of him holding the product in tech blog summaries of the events. The introductions weren’t a big deal, it was all about the product.
Product launches are important because they create a meme in themselves. How many times have you watched snippets of Steve Jobs product launches on YouTube vs how many times would you want to watch a repeat of Tim Cook’s product launches.
The image of Steve Jobs sitting on a sofa while playing with the iPad was indelible. And how many news photos do you see of Steve holding up the iPad on stage during its introduction. That photo defined the iPad in the minds of millions. Steve’s charisma did the rest.
This is the very thing that the article talked about. The lack intellectual critique of post Jobs Apple.. Basing a product value and business value and stock value on a product presentation that seemed less exciting. Lazy and anti apple sentiment equals current analysts. Maybe add in stock manipulators to this group as well.
You know these idiots were all around before, but kept their heads down during Job’s reign because from time to time he would respond and just rip them a new a$$hole. Tim has to learn to grt the timing right and let these intellectually bankrupt morons have it. I think that might just be next week!!!!!
Why is Tim Cook the only person on the planet being compared unfavorably on a daily basis to Steve Jobs? There is not now, nor shall there ever be, another Steve Jobs. Ask Bulbhead over at Microsoft…. You don’t hear about him being critiqued in every media’s tech section every day…
Steve was a trailblazer. Every other Apple CEO that comes after him will be compared to him, just like every other president will be compared to George Washington.
Steve’s dead, move on. Cook will succeed or fail. Has nothing to do with who preceded him. Edison is dead but the lightbulb still thrives. It’s just another crutch for weak people to use as an excuse when Apple doesn’t do everything perfectly. No one does everything perfectly. Not even Apple. Quit living in the past. It’s disgusting. Jobs would tell everyone to quit with the pity party, it’s pissing him off! And he wouldn’t be nice about it either. So man up, move on.
Well said.
Or compared constantly to Bill Gates either…
Lol…..he called him bulbhead
A thoughtful reply, and accurate in every particular.
I like the writer’s analogies. I’ve long pictured the ignoble confederation of dismissive sycophants as being like sullen reform school children—resenting their lot in life, all of them bullies, getting the free lunch they think they deserve only because they robbed you of yours.
A lot of Apple’s magic derived from Steve’s personality. In fact ask any man on the street who Apple’s CEO is today. Would you get an answer that it’s Tim Cook? I doubt it.
Steve was worth billions in advertising dollars. Samsung outspends Apple 5:1 in advertising for a reason. They don’t have a Steve Jobs symbology, a shorthand for cool, sassy and sexy.
I couldn’t give a crap if a turd presented the keynote, I’d still buy Apple products. Apple fans typically know what’s going to be announced, long before the keynote takes place. They’ve practically already added the product to their shopping cart.
The general public doesn’t watch Apple keynotes, but they account for the majority of Apple’s sales.
See, the thing is marketing is a funny thing. It’s funny because when you’re positioning yourself as a premium seller of expensive products, you need to create an image of exclusivity. Not so exclusive as Tiffany’s for example because at the end of the day you’re still wanting to sell products numbering in the millions per quarter.
And so shaping the mindset of the people who buy your products is as part of the selling process as the product itself. That’s why Apple offers a very controlled experience, from its stores to the way you interact with the OS.
Steve was the public face of Apple. People associate him with a nous for smelling out technological turning points and that made Apple cutting edge, in their minds.
Don’t discount the effect of psychology on the buying habits of consumers. A brand projects an image and buying that brand projects that image on the consumer.
“intellectually lazy”
plus vanilla ice cream is making me chuckle.
Apple think’s I spelled vanilla wrong.
Kudos to the author. Someone finally gets it.
I hope they call it the Wayback machine.
Amazon, Goggle, Facebook are all Crap companies with limited profit grow potential. Amazon almost always loses money. Facebook has tons of users but, makes and will always just make peanuts. Google is so depended on sucker advertisers paying them for nothing and desperately afraid that the suckers will wise up and stop giving them money for nothing that they are losing money on everything else that they do in an attempt to find something that might stick to the wall that they can say makes them money.
Apple is the only Tech company worth anything and the only one that actually is making a really good profit by making really good products that people want to buy.
chuckling more…
“…Amazon, Goggle, Facebook are all Crap companies…”
I should be a part of such crap.
Amazon, hard to justify the price earnings ratio. Been waiting years and years for that company to take off. And frankly, when the big box stores do fail, Amazon will feel the pinch as well.
Google however is even more hard to understand. In my view, they are a one trick pony, search. At least Apple has Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. and they all make money. If someone outdoes Google on search look out below. While I understand Apple has a limited product scope, from the money making perspective, Google is even more lopsided. I’d love to see some kind of a tieup between Apple and Yahoo, and develop a search disruptor that really goes to the heart of Google.
For many of us, this is a cliché. But the current world of business is compromised and corrupt specifically because of ignorant spoiled brats at the helm. This is entirely parallel to the BS that went on in the leadership of the Roman Empire. IOW: Yeah, it’s the fall of western civilization:
The critics that are screaming right now are intellectually lazy. They’re throwing temper tantrums instead of looking at the big picture. Like two-year-olds, they don’t really know what they want. And they’re not happy when they get it, anyway.
Ignorant spoiled brats.
And yes, this can be halted and turned around. It requires the equivalent of SPANKING THE BRATS. Obviously, corporate welfare is ENABLEMENT of ignorant spoiled brat behavior. Forcing a controlled bankruptcy of the ignorant spoiled brat companies is both punishment and an enforcement of what we really Really REALLY need:
DISCIPLINE.
So, of course think of mid-life crisis Apple without, then WITH Steve Jobs. Disciplined AND creative Apple kicked every other company’s butt out of town. Discipline the little babies of biznizz and get the world back to work making things again instead of parasitizing everyone.
Are your ears burning Samsung?
Well said.
GOOD PIECE.
AMATUER HOUR IS OVER !!!
A Time Machine? Is that in the works? When is the anticipated launch date? WIll it go backward AND forward in time? Is there an app for that on the iPhone? Can we just see the past or actually interact with it? Can I not get punched in the nose in 6th grade, so that guy won’t get expelled, and I won’t get that nickname that stuck with me for 6 more years?
Amazon is just a joke .
Apple investors are the biggest crybabies on the planet always complaining that their precious AAPL is being unfairly manipulated. These people have no idea how the stock market works and deserve to lose their money for having so much blind faith in a corporation that doesn’t give a rats ass about them.