“Apple investors have been served reasonably well under Cook’s care. The stock’s return including dividends has more than doubled over his five-year reign, up 103% in that time,” Rick Munarriz writes for The Motley Fool. “That’s slightly behind the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s return, but it compares favorably to the S&P 500’s 86% gain.”
“His run hasn’t been a runaway success,” Munarriz writes. “The iPhone product line Jobs introduced nine summers ago continues to be the primary driver, here, accounting for 56% of Apple’s revenue and likely even more of its operating profit. Outside of the perpetual refreshing of the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac lines, there isn’t a lot that wasn’t around when Jobs himself was still around.”
“There’s a fate far worse than merely being unspectacular, and it is — it pains me to say — what may have happened under Jobs if he had been calling the shots over the past five years,” Munarriz writes. “He likely would’ve pushed through the high-def TV he was working on before his passing — he had ‘cracked it’ after all — even as the market was falling more in line with cheap set-top devices like the Apple TV the tech giant already had. He possibly would’ve resisted making iPhones larger — a move that caused a huge spike in business two years ago — or iPads smaller, a move that may have extended its fleeting success.”
MacDailyNews Take: Load of crap. Munarriz has no idea of what Jobs meant by “an integrated television set.” Jobs routinely killed projects and constantly stated things publicly in order to throw off competitors (for one example, saying that “nobody reads books anymore” months before launching the iBooks Store).
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oops, we just broke Betteridge’s law of headlines.
We’d take the visionary Steve Jobs as Apple CEO over anyone. Suggesting otherwise is just motley foolishness.