Elevation Partners Managing Director and Apple Inc. shareholder Roger McNamee discussed the iPhone 5 with Willow Bay [wife of Apple BoD member and Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger.] on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West” yesterday.
Some salient quotes from McNamee:
• I think Apple’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen in 30 years of covering the tech industry.
• [Apple] are the whole package… [It’s] an extraordinary thing for shareholders and, from a regulatory point of view, a little scary.
• Now [Apple is] trying to slow down Web applications on their platform; what’s called HTML 5… and you look at that and you go, guys, why are you doing that?
MacDailyNews Take: McNamee never gives any proof to back up his statement above and, we just checked, Web apps work just fine on our iPhones and iPads, thanks.
• When I look at Apple today, I see them doing crazy things like they laid off a ton of people who worked in the Apple Stores. The retail experience went down the toilet the next day, to the pint where there was this huge backlash and they were forced to rehire some of the people. And I’m sitting there saying, excuse me, why are you trying to cut costs? You’re the highest margin hardware business in the last 25 years, what exactly is wrong with your model? I look at Apple and… as a shareholder, it’s amazing, there’s nothing competitive with them at all today, but they are, already – it’s so quick after Steve died! – they’re already doing the things you would expect a dumb monopolist to do…. Which is to say, arbitrarily cutting costs on services that are part of your brand. I mean, they’re harming the brand by reducing the value of the Apple Stores… You always wonder, what’s going to be the end for a monopolist and you can see that Apple’s already doing the things They’re already doing the things that – it’ll take 5 years – but they’re doing the things that lead to becoming less successful.
• I have no regulatory concerns [with Apple] in the sense of… my impression is that the various regulatory bodies in charge of this, DOJ, etc., are just completely asleep at the switch, so Apple has nothing to worry about. I mean, I don’t this there’s a chance that anybody in Washington is going to look at this anytime soon.
• What I think is the greater risk is that Apple has created these massive silos within its architecture that the architecture itself is vulnerable… At the moment, Apple is standing in the way of [cloud computing] and that is a strategically bad idea for them. it’s abad idea for anybody whose products are as great as their to not do the best you can do.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, no explanation as to how Apple is standing in the way of cloud computing. What’s iCloud, Roger, chopped liver?
Direct link to the video here.
MacDailyNews Take: As for the retail stuff, while McNamee may be overblowing the actualities (down the toilet the next day, etc.), his point is dead on target. Mr. Cook et al. would do well to take it to heart and change their thinking. Think Different™, guys!
As we wrote on August 29: “This sort of thinking is a cancer that will eat away at Apple all the way to the core.”
This… type of “thinking” will kill Apple faster than 10 lines of beige Performas.
If Cook can’t see that clearly, he needs to go, too.
Concerned Apple shareholders might want to email CEO Tim Cook directly and ask him what exactly he’s doing… tcook@apple.com
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