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发帖数: 38600 | 1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2014/03/25/5-reasons-appl
1. Regression to the mean. Apple came up with the iPod in 2001, the iPhone
in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, in each case not only creating a blockbuster
new product but a whole new category. Like a football quarterback who throws
for 400 yards a game for a month, Apple is overdue for a slump. “Apple was
essentially in violation of business physics for an extremely long time,”
says Harvard management professor Gautam Mukunda in the book. Today,
portable music players are an aging product category and competitors are
stealing market share from the phone and tablets. Will Apple be able to pull
another rabbit out of its hat?
2. Tim Cook doesn’t think different. Cook may have been Steve Jobs’
handpicked successor, but “think pretty much the same” seems to be his m.o
. Remember those Mac/PC commercials? Cook seems a lot like PC guy. In fact,
he started his career at IBM, then got an MBA at Duke before starting at
Apple in 1998. Kane, like other reporters, sees Cook as an aggressively non-
disruptive force, a master of mundane logistics who “did not pretend to be
an innovator or a visionary.” His management style, says Kane, is to
delegate responsibility but then bring the hammer down on those who fail him
. “The danger with that approach,” she writes, “was people becoming risk-
averse and stifling innovation.” Jobs, by contrast, was perhaps the most
detail-oriented and hands-on CEO of his time, and his products bore his
personal stamp. If Cook has a stamp, no one has seen it.
3. Apple is starting to make unforced errors. An Apple executive was 30
minutes late to a meeting because the Apple Maps app guided him to the wrong
location. Greenland was confused with the Indian Ocean. Travelers in
Ireland were referred to an airport that didn’t exist. It’s hard to
picture Steve Jobs presiding over the Apple Maps fiasco of 2012, which led
to the departure of top executive Scott Forstall from the company and landed
the product on the Mad magazine list of the “Top 20 Dumbest People, Events
and Things of 2012.” Cook was forced to issue a humiliating apology two
days after the disastrous app launch, even going so far as to recommend that
his customers use his competitors’ products. The problem with Apple Maps,
as with the disappointing Siri voice-recognition system, seemed to be
bungled preliminary testing. Jobs’ knack for bringing fully market-ready
products to market was not, in retrospect, a knack at all. It was an
indicator of Jobs’ obsessive perfectionism.
4. Apple is becoming reactive and defensive. Apple’s exhausting suit
against Samsung (which counter-sued) over patents underlying the two
competitors’ smartphones is looking like a meaningless victory. Worse, to
Kane, was the symbolism behind the bitter legal action. “Why,” she writes,
“was the company wasting so much time, money and energy protecting its
older technologies if it had game-changing products up its sleeve?” She
quotes UBS analyst Steve Milunovich, who noted, “The real threat is not a
competitor beating Apple at its own game but instead changing the game. The
likelihood of Apple being leapfrogged or a rival creating a new category is
greater if they have to think outside the box.” The once forward-thinking
company is becoming backward-looking, digging in to defend past positions.
5. Apple is bunting rather than swinging for the fences. Incremental
improvements to the iPhone and iPad over the last several years have failed
to excite the tech geeks whose enthusiasm tends to create such invaluable
publicity-generating events as long lines outside Apple stores. (When was
the last time you saw one of those?) “In 2013, almost every one of Apple’s
new hardware and software releases refined something that came before,”
wrote Ars Technica. Apple’s much-discussed potential hookup with Comcast
CMCSA +0.93% to help use special broadband access to sell its TV set-top box
could be an exciting new breakthrough, but the deal risks regulatory
scrutiny and Apple will find the marketplace for set-top gadgets to be
crowded. It seems unlikely that this product will join the Jobs hall of
fame of the “insanely great.” | x****u
发帖数: 12955 | 2 Above article presented 4 reasons why analysts are dumb.
Other than #2, all other supposed "reasons" had all been there even while
steve job was alive. | e*****s
发帖数: 7359 | |
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