“Fred Wilson’s prediction of Apple’s imminent fall and rumors of Apple’s purchase of Beat Electronics: These are both manifestations of what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, Misunderstanding Apple,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note.
“First, Fred Wilson. At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, the successful and articulate venture investor predicted that by 2020 Apple will no longer hold the #1 position in the tech world. They won’t even be in the top three. According to Wilson, Apple ‘doesn’t think about things they way they need to think about things.’ Specifically, the company is ‘too rooted in hardware… [which] is increasingly becoming a commodity’ and ‘Their stuff in the cloud is largely not good. I don’t think they think about data and the cloud,'” Gassée writes. “I’d be surprised by Wilson’s facile, insight-free truisms, except this isn’t the first time he’s shown a blind spot when considering Apple. Wilson is famous for dumping his Apple shares at $91 in January 2009; AAPL is now at $590 or so. (He also sold Google, which closed at $528 on Friday, for a split-adjusted $160. Perhaps there’s a difference between being a venture investor, an insider who watches and influences a young company, and an outsider subjected to forces and emotions outside of one’s control.)”
“I was still on the road when I read about the rumored $3.2B acquisition of Beats Electronics, the company that began in the headphone business and then spawned a streaming music service. I’m puzzled. If the rumors prove true, Apple may be guilty of misunderstanding itself,” Gassée writes. “I don’t see how such an acquisition would enhance Apple’s business model or reputation.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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Fred Wilson dumped Apple at $91 and doesn’t understand iCloud at all – May 12, 2014
VC Fred Wilson: By 2020 Apple won’t be a top-3 tech company, but Google and Facebook will – May 5, 2014