I hold a few shares of aapl (~200) from working in the PowerPC division for 5 years. I would love to see the stock get up to what I paid for it. But I've seen so many bone head moves from the inside that I have lost all confidence in their management, especially Gil.
I was there when Apple was designing the PowerPC architecture. They dragged a two year project into 5 years. In that time, the 68000 Mac engineers took a PowerPC chip and slipped it into the old 68k architecture, which created two PowerPC platforms. This caused the OS group to waste two years developing copland for the wrong platform. That is why Next won't be able to run on the first versions of the PowerPC Mac hardware (which should never have existed in the first place).
Instead of creating an emulation environment for the 68k world and developing a native PowerPC version of the operating system, which they had plenty of time to do if they started in 1990, they created an emulation environment for PowerPC and kept the 68k OS going on a road to nowhere. Which is why they are where they are today. Unfortunately for Apple, there has never been a high level manager that understands a lick of technology, despite all the hype from the press about this or that CEO being a visionary. Gil et al are groping in the dark. They remind me of most government bodies that think you can throw money at a problem to make it go away. Apple has already lost a large amount of experienced engineers (another reason copland is dead, nobody left to work on it). And hiring new low skilled people and waiting a couple of years until they are properly trained is a bad way to save money.
All I can say is I've not seen a single bit of news that would make me think Apple knows what they're doing. My prediction is Gil will leave in late 1998 when it becomes obvious his straegies didn't work. If I had $400 million, I could gather a crack team of engineers and develop a native PowerPC OS in two years maximum without even sweating. I love the Mac platform, have several macs at home, but I still think Apple stock is never going to get back to $50 a share.
I remember when I jioned Apple in 1990 and the stock was $55, Intel was $30, IBM was $123. IBM took a dive and is now fully recoverd, Intel is up in outer space, and Apple has lost more than half it's value. Good luck on selling long shots. |
