Steve Jobs as Moses:
"Where's your God noooow Moses!?"
If Jobs wants to deliver Apple from the angry Romans, or Egyptians, or whatever this twisted analogy requires, he should do something Insanely Great with Apple's big warchest of $15/share in cash and investments.
How about announcing a dividend of $0.50/share per quarter? There is no excuse for a company owning more than half of its market capital in cash and investments, unless they're a mutual fund, in which case they're quite overvalued. Obviously Apple is incapable of investing its cash in R&D, because its R&D charges have been miniscule lately. So maybe they should give that cash back to the investors rather than blowing it by the billion on high-flying Internet bubble stocks like Akamai.
Or has that changed? Is the big surprise awaiting us on October 18 that Apple HAS been reinvesting its riches in Apple? Is Apple's surprising earnings shortfall, despite its 40% revenue increase, due to unannounced spending on an AppleWorld theme store, an AirPort-equipped touchscreen MacSlate with wireless Firewire, a DVD authoring package, and a purchase of Motorola's PPC chip fab? I sincerely hope so, because it's going to take surprises like that to lead this dog from to the Promised Land. But we'll know in a couple of weeks. |
