'What really made Steve Jobs so angry at Google?'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Sep 2012 14:51 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
Apple Written by Scott Cleland: "With so many fanboys spinning Silicon Valley history, it's sometimes easy to forget about the real chain of events that led to the ongoing Apple-Google thermonuclear war, how the romance turned to hate. This timeline presents an interesting case about why, despite patents and prior art, Steve Jobs had plenty of personal reasons to despise Schmidt, Page, and Brin." Cleland has a very, very good point; quite coherent and well-reasoned... That is, if you haven't got a single shred of historical sense and completely and utterly ignore the 30-odd years of mobile computing development that preceded our current crop of smartphones. It's hard not to be reminded of how certain groups of people dismiss millions of years of fossil records because this record inconveniences their argument. In any case, a comment on the article answered the question properly: "Jobs was a businessman. He was angry he was losing money. Simple."
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RE[4]: Losing money?
by rbenchley on Tue 11th Sep 2012 18:11 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Losing money? "
rbenchley
Member since:
2005-11-03

"[q]Make this comparison in another 10 years. If Apple still exists by then.
You do understand AAPL could lose 50% of its value and would still be 50% more valuable than GOOG, right? " AAPL's current market cap is approximately 600B. GOOG's current market cap is approximately 250B. If AAPL lost 50% of its market cap it wouldn't be worth that much more in the market than GOOG. Take a look at the historical graphs of these two corporations to see why Apple is in a 'bubble'. Google has been a publicly traded company for roughly seven years and has shown consistent and steady growth with only a single minor dip. Apple on the other hand has been a publicly traded company for 25 years and has shown only an incredibly rapid rise in value in the last three years. Historically Apple traded well below 100 and Google opened at 105. Apple didn't breach 100 until 2007 and in that same year Google was around 500. [/q]

I'm not a very big fan of Apple these days, but it's not a bubble. The P/E is 15.61 and their earnings are $42.55 per share. If anything, the stock might be slightly undervalued. Suggesting that they will be lucky to still exist in 10 years is pure idiocy (their market cap in GDP terms would put them at 18 in the world and they have $100 billion cash on hand). All of that being said, there's plenty of room for them to fall from where they're at and I expect they will. 10 years from now they'll most likely be like Microsoft is today; a very valuable, very profitable company, but not the cool kid on the block.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[5]: Losing money?
by TM99 on Wed 12th Sep 2012 02:40 in reply to "RE[4]: Losing money? "
TM99 Member since:
2012-08-26

I address the undervaluation in my previous to the post you are quoting part of. By 2013, they will reach ~1000. After that the bubble will burst, and yes, it is a bubble.

I never said they would definitively disappear in 10 years. That is actually a part of another poster's quote tacked on to mine. But it is possible that if they have bet too strongly on a single market and their stock bubble burst, which it will by 2014 at the earliest, then they could end up like other tech corporations that were tops and then went bankrupt.

If things go a different route, then yes, Apple could and would end up being like Microsoft. Check out MSFT's parabolic rise, then drop-off, and finally their flat but stable stock price for the last 7+ years. Either way, Apple is not destined to maintain this 'high' either creatively, financially, or psychologically with its 'customers'.

Reply Parent Score: 3