“Fred Wilson is one of the smartest guys in venture capital. He’s made a fortune backing Twitter and Tumblr, among others, at Union Square Ventures. But when it comes to Apple, Wilson has a blind spot that’s almost as big as as his bankroll,” Mark Rogowsky reports for Forbes. “Asked which tech companies would be the most valuable by 2020, Wilson dismissed Apple’s prospects out of hand at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, questioning the company’s competence in the cloud. Yet despite some visible failures, Apple’s overall cloud achievements would compare favorably with anyone’s. And the company seems to have just gotten started.”
“Maybe Wilson can’t see it because he just doesn’t trust Apple,” Rogowsky reports. “He dumped all his stock 5 years ago after he suspected Steve Jobs wasn’t being straight about his health, as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt recalled. Apple traded at $91 back then; yesterday it closed over $600.”
MacDailyNews Take: Being “one of the smartest guys in venture capital,” obviously isn’t the same as being a smart investor.
“With a click or two to set it up, your contacts, apps, photos, et al. are not only easily restored to a new iPhone, they’re also on your iPad, your Mac, as well as safely duplicated in an Apple data center. This all happens so seamlessly that more than 1/3 of a billion people use iCloud backups regularly without even thinking about them. The experience using Apple’s iWork apps is equally transparent. Create a document in Keynote on a Mac and it just appears on your iPad when it’s time to present. That you don’t need to do anything fits the Apple “it just works” model nicely,” Rogowsky reports. “Maybe that’s why the achievement is lost on Wilson?”
Much more in the full article here.
Horace Dediu writes for Asymco:
“Not getting the cloud” means that in the last 12 months Apple obtained:
• 800 million iTunes users and
• an estimated 450 million iCloud users spending
• $3 billion/yr for end-user services plus
• $4.7 billion/yr for licensing and other income which includes
• more than $1 billion/yr paid by Google for traffic through Apple devices and
• $13 billion/yr in app transactions of which
• $9 billion/yr was paid to developers and
• $3.9 billion/yr was retained as operating budget and profit for the App Store. In addition,
• $2.7 billion/yr in music download sales and
• more than $1 billion/yr in Apple TV (aka Apple’s Kindle) and video sales and
• $1 billion/yr in eBooks sold
See the usual excellent charts in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related article:
VC Fred Wilson: By 2020 Apple won’t be a top-3 tech company, but Google and Facebook will – May 5, 2014