“Apple Inc. is crushing it, but its success is disrupting the technology sector in ways that could hurt the stocks of many other players—friend and foe alike,” Dave Kansas writes for The Wall Street Journal.
“Often a hot company helps drive its sector,” Kansas writes. “For instance, Apple’s 1980s success with the Macintosh sparked a personal-computing revolution that spawned many successful companies.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple was ripped off by Microsoft who foisted an upside-down and backwards, productivity-sapping, inferior clone onto the world. Apple is finally getting their just rewards now, decades later. The world has finally awoken from The Dark Age of Personal Computing.
“But Apple has become so dominant that is becoming more a threat — rather than a sentiment booster — to the rest of the technology sector,” Kansas writes. “That isn’t to say investors should ignore other tech players—they just aren’t as likely to see the same kind of upside that Apple enjoys. To be sure, plenty of companies, such as Qualcomm and Arm Holdings, ride the Apple coattails. But that can be a dangerous game. Apple has become a sort of Wal-Mart of techland, able to drive tough bargains with suppliers as it builds dominant positions in key device markets.”
Kansas writes, “Research In Motion, which essentially invented the smartphone market, has taken a beating. Trading at near $70 in February, the BlackBerry maker is now in the mid-$20s. Nokia’s shares have been halved since February.. Tablet makers aren’t faring much better. CLSA, a research shop, estimates that Apple sold about 9.25 iPads for every Google Android tablet in the most recent quarter. This, despite a proliferation of new tablets coming from Research In Motion, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and Motorola Mobility.”
MacDailyNews Take: Innovate, adapt, or die.
Kansas writes, “Perhaps the most disruptive aspect of Apple’s strategy is the way it is reshaping the personal computer space. Apple’s various Mac products are selling decently, but the emergence of the iPad has changed the PC calculus… Mobile devices, chiefly the iPad, are rapidly eating into the segment. And that will likely continue, perhaps faster than expected… 86% of Fortune 500 companies are ‘testing or deploying’ the iPad… Not surprisingly, PC-centric stocks have not done as well as Apple.”
MacDailyNews Take: PC-centric stocks don’t deserve to do well. Apple shifted the paradigm right out from under the bastages grown fat and lazy from years of sucking off the Wintel teat.
Kansas writes, “As Apple races to become the biggest stock in the land, it is swiftly becoming a sector unto itself. The non-Apple tech world is on its own.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Where was the concern from the “rest of the tech sector” back in the early 1990s when Microsoft was taking advantage of a poorly-written contract signed by an unprepared sugared water salesbozo to screw Apple nearly to death? There was no concern, just gleeful profiting amidst the joy of taking Apple’s innovations and the trillions it was worth and dispersing it to Microsoft, Intel, and their millions of leeches; companies and investors alike. This time, there is no poorly-written contract. And the “rest of the tech sector” deserves exactly what’s coming.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “NuBee” for the heads up.]
If Google hadn’t released Android Apple would have already taken over the world.
This is how Republicans think: protect what we know (Wintel, oil, slow trains, small planes) fear the new (green technology, TGV, etc, especially if it isn’t cheap). Kansas knows this wave means trouble for his own rag. But at only 14 million laptops and desktops per year in a world market of 70-80 million per year, the old isn’t ready to bury yet.