“The onetime chief executive of networking firm Cisco Systems, John Chambers, was once renowned for prognosticating on the health of the world economy,” Tiernan Ray writes for Barron’s. “So pervasive were Cisco’s products in every corner of the globe that people used to hang on his every word as if he were some kind of central banker, in hopes of divining clues from him as to the state of the universe.”
“Chambers’ role has been taken up by the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook, who last week told Wall Street that the company’s sales growth is being constrained by ‘an environment now that is dramatically different from a macroeconomic point of view’ than a year earlier,” Ray writes. “There was all manner of hand-wringing about Apple following Cook’s performance, much of it panicked and silly. Any outfit that can sell 74.8 million of anything in three months — in this case, iPhones — is a formidable company, even if that number was slightly disappointing compared with the most exuberant expectations. Apple generated a staggering $27.5 billion in cash from operations in those three months, but the focus was on a tiny shortfall in iPhone sales.”
“Apple continues to innovate. Its products continue to have features no one else has and to serve as useful tools. The iPhone will persist, having increased its share of world smartphone sales last year to 16.2% from 14.8% a year earlier. It will have better years and worse years, but it will endure as a franchise,” Ray writes. “In the meantime, there is an area of technology where Apple badly lags behind its peers, and where it can and should make more meaningful progress, and that’s cloud computing… And Cook is an able leader to direct those efforts.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Amen.