“How Apple is managed is one of its enduring mysteries,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco.
“The idea that a company with $235 billion in sales is managed with a single P/L is fascinating in many ways,” Dediu writes. “Not least of which is how it allocates resources.”
“The fundamental question of which great idea gets to be funded and which great idea gets to be ignored is the core of every manager’s dilemma,” Dediu writes. “The Apple problem is at scale when each decision’s consequences are so momentous. In the case of Apple there are so few projects that reach the market and their impact is so great that one wonders how they can be sure they are doing the right thing.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Keep the customer experience front and center and everything will take care of itself.
The assessment of analysts should therefore be couched in similar terms: “What is the impact of a new initiative in customer creation and preservation?” rather than “What is the impact of a new initiative in driving revenues and profitability”.
Get it Annalists?
In this article Horace is suggesting that analysts don’t understand what drives Apple. If they did, they’d use his six customer-centric metrics, rather than the usual revenue-centric metrics. This explains why analysts are so often spectacularly wrong about Apple. It’s like plugging the wrong numbers into the formula for a ballistic trajectory—you’re going to miss a lot of targets.
But..yet there are a lot of misfires and mistakes… Nothing Is perfect.
What the hell is a “single P/L” ? Read the article and
it sounds like voodoo business talk .