This is a picture of an index, an innovation-free monopolist, a zombie, and a company that regularly turns out innovative and exciting products that people want to buy. Apple several times a year releases one or more products that make you say, "wow, a lot of people are going to buy one of those". Microsoft pushes back operating system releases and pares down their content while announcing fifteen bogus cell-phone and media-viewer deals that turn into nothing before the ink on the PR dries. It's like they neither know nor care what they're doing. It's true they don't have to, they're a monopoly. But their stock has done exactly nothing for 5+ years, and they're sending jobs to India and making the portions smaller in the employee cafeteria.
When Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were running Apple, you could have made exactly the same statements about Apple that you make today about Sun: no products, bureaucratic paralysis, toxic historical baggage, broken "DNA", no future. The difference is the board washed them away and brought in an actual product guy who turned things around from famine to feast. It IS possible.
Apple at its nadir was like Microsoft minus the monopoly, and Sun is like that today. One of these days they look down, and that horizontal chart turns into a cliff...unless a product guy comes in. It IS possible. Not likely maybe, but possible. If Bechtolsheim is really just sitting there watching the clock waiting for some contract clause to expire, Sun is toast. But it IS possible that he comes up with some products.
--QS
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