David says: If the news will be so great why doesn't Steve Jobs sign on and take his share options at an exercise price equal to the current market price. Maybe he's hoping to get those options at an exercise price of $13 or whatever?
I am not confident of my interpretation of the proxy (in other words, someone else who understands it please elaborate), but it is my impression from it that Jobs can be granted those options by the board even if he stays interim, and also I don't think from it that he can get any old excercise price. I might be wrong. Also, Woolard's and Campbell's recent comments to the press seem rather like they don't give a hoot when they have a bona fide CEO, and in fact would rather have an interim Steve than a permanent anybody else.
Personally, I don't get the excitement about the CEO. Everybody knows who's running the company, and IMHO when I read some analyst or journalist going on about how the presumed uncertainty affects the company, blah blah blah, I think they're just offering an excuse for reticence. (Imagine the future: "How did you miss out on AAPL in the spring of 98?" "Well, you know, they didn't even have a real CEO... I was worried"; or on the other hand "Boy, when everyone else was on the bandwagon about AAPL, you held back, and aren't you glad not to have taken that long ride down." "Yeah, well, it was pretty telling that Jobs wouldn't commit... I was concerned"). Not that I blame any of the analysts for reticence; I would not be thrilled, if I were in that position, to recommend AAPL in public at the going rate of 27.50 a chip, not because I don't expect it to go up but because I know the stock has defied levity, shall we say, in the past. This echoes David's point about people expecting another disappointment... would I want to buy today if I hadn't gotten in around 15? Hell no, I bought calls, and if AAPL heads down more than a little I'm buying puts, too. And nothing Apple could possibly announce between now and the 15th (short of telling us something about earnings) is going to move the stock, I expect (though I hope I'm wrong). Quicktime 3 and a curvaceous (lumpy?) all-in-one mac just ain't gonna get rid of any of the skepticism out there.
BTW, as a shareholder, I'm thrilled they're charging for Quicktime. And as a bigtime user of Quicktime, I'm thrilled they're only charging 30 bucks. Why the heck is there so much noise on the web Mac-rags about it? I think Apple should keep it up. I'll pay, and so will most people who use it. And the licensing fees that developers and Apple Recon (I'm ashamed to admit I read it) have been making noise about: a buck or two a copy? Waived if you include what basically amounts to an ad? Whoopee! If that kind of price puts any content developers out of business, they deserve it. I'd say of the 5 or 6 dozen CDs I've gotten over the last year for everything from software to games to junk that I find in my mailbox, excluding CDs from Apple, perhaps half had a copy of quicktime. Assuming that the licensing cuts that by half, and 3 out of 4 developers accept the waiver conditions, and further assuming I'm roughly typical of 5 million of the 25 million mac users out there with respect to software consumption, that means something like 50 million a year in licensing fees. Assuming maybe a third of the mac users out there hear about quicktime by seeing the little ad that developers have to include to get the fees waived, and if only 1 in 5 decide they want the pro version, that's another 50 million. I'm probably not the only shareholder who'd like to see Apple get another quarter million every quarter by charging for something that used to be free. Oh, and I completely forgot about Windows users. How many of them are there, anyway, and what's the penetration of Quicktime? I hear even Microsoft recommends it now.
- George |
