Apple's Long Road To $300 264
itwbennett writes "Apple shares inched over $300 for the first time Wednesday, nearly 30 years after Apple's initial public offering in December 1980. But it hasn't been a steady climb. In fact, says blogger Chris Nurney, 'Apple's stock history can be divided into two clear periods — the early years, from the IPO through Steve Jobs's long absence from the company after losing a power struggle in 1985, and the modern Jobs era, which began on September 16, 1997.' The bottom line: 'If you had purchased $10,000 of Apple stock the same month that Jobs again began leading the company, your shares would be worth $554,000 today. Not a bad return on the investment.'"
Re:Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
It's all about the platform though, and the mobile phone market is only half the picture given that iOS also ships on iPods and iPads; both markets where Apple's competition is still playing catch-up.
iOS, with version 4, is finally at the stage where it's 'complete' (which is more than can be said for Windows Phone 7 at least until next year). What Apple need to do now is actually start to think, can we make this better? Otherwise, improvements in newer Android and Windows Phone 7 will eclipse iOS which will be stuck in a user interface rut that Apple are too reticent to fiddle with.
By the way, congratulations on your use of the word 'lose' instead of 'loose', even if it still wasn't the word you were looking for.
Re:Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
...The ways of business are strange and inscrutable, but in the consumer market who is going to actually purposefully buy a windows phone?
With the blackmailesque death-grip that Microsoft holds over corporate America, do you really have to ask that question?
I didn't "buy" my last three Windows Mobile phones. They were issued to me.
Re:Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
Resolution independence has been 'coming soon' in OS X for years now. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be one of the features of Leopard, which was quietly dropped and still hasn't made it into Snow Leopard.
Apple are previewing [arstechnica.com] the next version of OS X next week, and I won't be at all surprised if resolution independence is mentioned. I'll be very surprised, however, if it makes it into the final product.
Re:Bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Maybe they can work on it after they decide on a standard for .docx, because I can't seem to get two copies (of the same version of word) to reliably display the same file in the same way on two different machines. I wish what I saw on the screen matched what people would see when they get it. I would personally use LaTex and .rtf formats for everything, but 'the world runs on windows' and when I send an .rtf to one of my bosses, they are so overwhelmed by the cascade of prompts and dialog boxes needed to tell Word that you want to use to open an .rtf, they usually just tell me that their 'computer can't read it' (seriously). User ineptness aside, I really don't understand how the world runs on windows. Most projects where I am forced to use Microsoft products because that is the only thing the recipient uses take 5 to 10 times as long as they need to. Despite it's excessive features, Word (and other MS Office products) seem utterly incapable of making small aesthetic changes to a document without throwing the rest of it in complete formatting chaos. As someone who witnesses and experiences this problem, I would estimate my academic department/ university would easily double if not triple it's productivity if we would start using more appropriate software for what we need to do with it. This would not outright exclude software like office, but it would certainly require us to use microsoft software as a tool rather than a standard. It's very amazing how many more problems a Windows user experiences on a daily basis.
I have stopped screaming at my computer since I started using a mac (with the exception of using office). Let me also say that I am no technological slouch, and my issues with Office are not a byproduct of my lack of understand like it can be with others. To put it another way, I actually run 4 operating systems on my computer (VMware versions of windows on a mac seem to work better than natively installed copies of windows on the same system, no joke, I was even able to register the machine to a Microsoft Active Directory to use an institutional copy of SPSS). When I got my current mac I installed windows on it in a dual boot with a mac partition (using a utility supplied by apple with the OS). I had purchased the Mac for the hardware (a MacBook Air) rather than the OS. I started out using windows for everything, but over several months I had naturally (not consciously) switched over entirely to the mac side. My point in all this, is that Windows is like an abusive boyfriend (I ripped this simile off of a post from a different thread, but it's more than perfect), you don't really understand how dysfunctional it is until to get out of the relationship and find a less destructive partner. It's hard to like Microsoft products, trust me, I tried. I really am not saying this as an Apple fanboi (because I am definitely not one). I am saying this as person who researches the efficacy of information technology in educational settings. In case you are curious about what I am figuring out (if you haven't already) is that technology tends to be selected for all the wrong reasons, and tends to fall so short of the mark, that no one ever uses it. I see classrooms with >$10k Smartboard installations that are completely unusable and collecting dust rapidly because there is a very poorly manufactured and barely functional Windows machine at the heart of it. When I was in 7th grade, my school system blew $15k a classroom into devices like laser disc players and Windows 3.11 boxes with token ring networks (which were obsolete before they were taken out of the box) by the time I graduated 5 years later, I had witnessed one actual use of anything but the television, and that was by a teacher who was responding to a student's challenge him on whether the laserdisc machines actually worked!
Re:News For Nerds??? Stuff That Matters??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Use your imagination! We're talking about one company that controls its hardware, its software, and increasingly the services you can use on them, and it's doing very well. What happens when they're not a minority player any more? What happens if they get pulled up for anticompetitive practices? What happens if the reliability of their stock turns them into a cornerstone of investment banking? What happens to the economy if Jobs then dies and Apple, almost inevitably, does a backflip? What if they get bought out by the government because they're "too big to fail"? MacUS?
That's off the top of my head.
Re:News For Nerds??? Stuff That Matters??? (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point of my comment was that stock prices is not "News For Nerds" as Slashdot claims to be.
I have news for you -- Nerds are not one big homogeneous mass, and you're not the sole arbiter of nerd taste.
But regardless, how can anybody be so blind as to not see the significance when a computer company that was nearly dead a dozen years ago now has a bigger market cap than Microsoft or Walmart, and is closing in on Exxon? No matter what your personal feelings are about their products, they've clearly tapped into something that's getting large numbers of people to fork over their hard-earned money. Whether you're interested in the money aspects or not, a company's success in the stock market is a measure of what is selling in the marketplace. Success breeds imitators, so it's a harbinger of what we can probably expect to see from other companies in terms of products, processes, and market strategies.
Re:You didn't even have to purchase it that early (Score:3, Interesting)
With restrospect, around 2004 the iPod was sold on its luxury, and the Mac on its friendliness. They flipped that around so that the iPod was friendly and massmarket (Mini), while the Mac was a capable computer (Macbook, new iMac). Yet they held an afterimage that the iPod was high quality and the Mac was easy to use. That switcheroo was pretty savvy, in hindsight.
Re:Now, where is the $300 laptop? (Score:3, Interesting)