“Shareholders of Apple Computer Inc. put down their holiday iPod nanos for a moment this week and glimpsed a Christmas yet to come without Steve Jobs — and they didn’t like what they saw,” David Callaway writes for MarketWatch. “An unconfirmed report in a law journal that said Jobs had retained his own legal counsel amid the ongoing investigation into Apple’s use of backdated options triggered a 5% drop in Apple shares in minutes after trading started Wednesday. Indeed, the story on MarketWatch reporting the drop leapfrogged all other stories on the site to become the most-read piece less than 20 minutes after it was published.”
Callaway writes, “By the end of the day, cooler heads had prevailed and Apple shares had rebounded. Several analysts stepped forward to say that the concerns were overblown, and the fact that Jobs had hired his own lawyer — not confirmed by Apple — was just the normal course of business.”
“Perhaps. But the scare did briefly unwrap worries among Apple’s famously cultish users and shareholders of what the company and its stock might be like if for some reason the 51-year-old Jobs did resign or retire next year,” Callaway writes.
“Are the shares, having tripled in the last two years on the power of the iPod revolution, still reflecting the phenomenal growth story of a reinvented company that changed the music industry like it did the computer industry 30 years ago? Or are they hanging by a thread on the future of a hard-charging, arrogant leader who could blow up at any time? The answer depends on whether you believe Steve Jobs is Rupert Murdoch or Frank Perdue,” Callaway writes. “Is he an empire builder, or a pitchman?”
Full article here.
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“What woud Apple be worth without Steve Jobs?”
Jobless…
Apple is bigger than just Steve Jobs; however, no stock holder or board member would vote to strip Jobs of any exceutive power and banish him from Cupertino. This is certainly one of the enduring benefits of being a cult leader.
Let us open our texts, brothers and sisters, and read,”In the beginning…”
Apple will do just fine post-Jobs. There are a lot of capable people at Apple.
The only way to “screw the pooch” is for the board to hire a dud CEO. On second thought, with morons like Al Gore on the board they probably will “screw the pooch!”
What’s the point of this guys story – he’s an idiot. He paints one scenario and then the opposite. What a waste. Jobs did nothing wrong – he’s too tied up in the creative product and market development of new products. He hired legal and financial people to do the right thing and they witheld information and they will pay the price.
Money is not importrant to Jobs – he wants to beat MS and Gates by putting them intpo a lose – lose situation. He’sa been planning this strategy for years and the so called analysts simply don’t get it.
Posting this on my Nintendo Wii through the built-in browser!! Pretty sweet surfing the net on my high-def big screen!!
–mAc
Ah, yet another “What if Steve Jobs was out of the picture” articles…
It must be MacWorld season!
macbones, you’re off your rockers. Apple is a hardware company. They’ll never license the OS. That would break the end-to-end “entire widget” strategy they’ve been building.
“Frank Lloyd Wright was an over-rated hack? On what idiotic non-sense would you base that on? Dipstick?”
“I base it on my opinion of his work. Or did you think there was actually some real measure of architectural aesthetics? “
A sense of aesthetics is embedded into our DNA because as there is a universal order from which we all come from and can relate to. Whether architectural, industrial, or simply nature’s aesthetics, we can sense what is good design and what is bad; otherwise men would chase hairy, 250lb women that look like gorillas, and women would long to mary the elephant man.
It is also true that some people’s sense and appreciation of aesthetics is not as highly developed as others. It is called “talent.” But just because I do not have the talent of Fred Astaire, that does not mean I cannot enjoy his dancing, which can be measured in terms of speed, grace, and coordination, when compared to a klutz like me.
As with anything one brings to the table for evaluation, there are as many metrics as one chooses to select to determine its worth within any given context. And it is because of our human ability to alter the context on which we choose to see things that discrepancies arise. This leads to the belief that aesthetics is something that cannot be measured. But it can of course, if we all agree on its context. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.
Take architecture for instance, styles come and go, but good architecture always conquers the test of time. That’s why people from all over the world travel, and pay good money to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s great buildings. That’s why we get on a plane and travel throughout Europe to enjoy its architecture and urban fabric.
As for Frank Lloyd Wright, once prompted by a call from his client and his impending visit to check the progress of his house design, Frank sat down to draw, in about four hours, a set of beautiful plans and perspective drawings of Fallingwater; only the greatest and most influential American house in the history of our Country. Frank could do that because he could see it all in his head; he knew where everything in the landscape was and how his house fit the land; he could see the building’s spatial sequences – vividly in three dimensions. If any over-rated hack can do that, I’d like to see someone with ‘real’ talent.
But what is really interesting about Frank Lloyd Wright, is that residential design today often incorporate poor replications of architectural concepts first championed by Wright’s work.
…why, that’s just like the computing world today, in which crappy pee cees, are nothing but poor replications of Apple computer’s work. As in architecture, some talent-less hacks cannot either see nor appreciate the elegance of the Mac OS, the elegance and simplicity of Apple’s software, nor the beauty of the mac hardware. But at least some of us do, who understand the significance that Apple Computer has played to advance civilization under Steve Jobs’ tenure.
I make my living as a public speaker and presenter. That is NOT the best of what Steve Jobs brings to Apple. It’s the vision thing. Apple + Jobs equals something no other combination can bring. To think otherwise is to forget the past and is just wishful thinking. Let’s enjoy these years while we have them. 99% of what Jobs does, we never see or hear about.
Apple will be just fine without SJ, if the next CEO is as good as SJ in terms of vision.
True vision, no coke snorting like Ballmer.