Here's a rather sad commentary on Apple, written since the pre earnings warning.
I disagree. The article makes at least one interesting point:
A temporary setback? Don't be too sure. Unlike, say, Hewlett-Packard, Apple has always been a company that deals poorly with failure. When things go bad at Apple, they go very bad.
On Jobs:
Why is he a poor CEO? Because he's mercurial, insufficiently engaged by the more boring (but crucial) operations like distribution, and ultimately, because he's a pretty nasty piece of work.
I don't know if this is still the case. However relaunching the NeXT as the new Mac cube shows that there is still a bit of the old stubborn I'm-right-the-customer-is-wrong Jobs in there.
Even after all the successes of the last two years, Apple is still where it was during the Spindler era. It is a niche player, with an anomalous operating system, trying to survive in a market dominated by giant corporations like Compaq, Dell and IBM.
Sure, but now the company has growing revenues and a beta version of what at long last looks like a decent OS (this is like eleven or twelve years after the new and improved MacOS was first announced). |
