“In the fable, the cottagers are too impatient to wait for the goose to lay its golden eggs one at a time. So they open it up, thinking that way they’ll get all the gold at once,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“Apple is a little like that goose, says Asymco‘s Horace Dediu,” P.E.D. reports. “‘Here’s the problem,’ he wrote last summer in The Innovator’s Curse. ‘If a company produces a string of successes, the conventional wisdom is that the chances of another success are precisely zero. A company is valued based on its cash flows and foreseeable improvements to them. What it’s not valued on is its innovation flows (and foreseeable improvements to them).'”
P.E.D. reports, “The goose analogy came up again last week in an episode of the Cubed Podcast that brought together three of my favorite mobile industry analysts: Dediu, Benedict Evans and Ben Bajarin. The problem with Apple’s valuation, Bajarin said in ‘Cubed Episode 010: The Process of Innovation,’ is that the Street thinks Steve Jobs was the goose that laid the Apple II, Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. And now he’s dead. Not so fast, said Evans. Like golden-egg laying, making innovative products is a process, one that Apple worked out three decades ago.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What about iTunes? The iTunes Store? The App Store? Apple Retail Stores? There are many more golden eggs in Apple’s nest than are being counted.