[DANNY WOOL, SV411.COM]
Steve Jobs once famously said: “Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?” But that was long ago. Today he could just have easily added any other company in any other market, except maybe Exxon—and we all know what the future of big oil is. Apple’s market capitalization has officially surpassed Microsoft, making it the second largest company in the world.
As TechCrunch points out, the turnaround came in the last five years, as Apple’s stock went up 550 percent. During that same time, Microsoft’s stock went up just 4 percent, about as much as you might get in a high interest CD. That could possibly excuse [url=http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html]Michael Dell’s suggestion to Apple back in 1997[/url]: “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” He’s probably regretting that now.
The secret of Apple’s success isn’t just its desktops and laptops, even despite Justin Long’s cool persona compared to John Hodgman. No, it’s all the i’s, from iPods to iPads to iPhones. This worries Google, whose Android operating system for mobile devices is competing Apple. When launching their new system, Google’s Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra famously warned, “”If we did not act, we faced a draconian future. Where one man, one company, one carrier was the future.” That was man was Steve Jobs—saint or Satan, depending where you stand on the Apple/PC divide.
And for some, Apple is indeed Satan. The fact is that with size comes scrutiny, especially in high tech, and Apple has been getting a lot of that. It has recently been subject to a series of antitrust complaints, not least because of the strategies adopted by its iTunes store to knock Amazon out of the running.
Then there are the bizarre stories, like how the company’s Chinese manufacturer Foxconn has been subject to a spate of suicides. It has gotten so bad that employees there are required to sign a no-suicide clause in their contracts, and the American packaging highlights “Designed in California” over “Made in China” (a strategy Walmart should probably adopt).
Then again, just about every high tech giant becomes the subject of bitter criticism as it grows from big to ginormous. But Jobs is a resilient man, and Apple will weather that storm too. And Apple today is indeed number 1 in the Infinite Loop of success.