Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which one did Microsoft buy?
MS-DOS.
didn't actually buy it initially just licensed it. The underlying company tried to sell the license but Microsoft stopped it.
Apple becomes the first $1T company
211–220 of 352 posts
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#212Good for it. Becoming a trillion dollar company selling quality products people love. Not data mining everything about your life and using it for advertising (Google), ruthlessly destroying competition (Microsoft), or destroying the environment (Exxon). How old fashioned.
On the other hand. I think Google creates way more value for the world, they are just not as good as Apple at capturing that value. Android, Maps, Docs, Gmail, Navigation, Analytics are all (mostly) free.
Google's products are not free as in you don't give them something. I don't like Google's price, so I give actual 'merican dollars to Apple.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except, you know, all the sales tax collected in their retail channels. And employment taxes on their 80,000 domestic employees. And property taxes. And real-estate fees. And government testing. And the obscene amounts of duties they pay importing every single thing they make. That's just for the U.S., in every other country they do business those apply as well (with exception of perhaps the import duties for busines…
The tax deal Apple made with Ireland between 1991 and 2015 allowed them to avoid tax on almost all profits across the EU, booking the profits in Ireland rather than the country of sale and paying less than 1% corporation tax (0.005% in 2014). Given that most of their tech stack comes from publicly funded research, the system is clearly broken.
Given that most of their tech stack comes from
publicly funded research, the system is clearly broken.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#214Market cap is number of shares times share price. Is this equivalent to total amount of money that went into AAPL? Did investors put in 1 trillion dollars?
No - imagine if you had bought 100% of Apple shares for $1 at incorporation, and then sold 1 share for $207. That would make the market cap $1T and the total investment would be only $208.
It's more that the investments into Apple + the amount of money made by shareholders equals $1T.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in Windows Mobile at the time. He was just quoting what the best market researchers had told him. We were given a LOT of market research papers with in-depth customer surveys where lots of people said, repeatedly, that they would "never pay money for a phone". If you think back to then, phones were "free" with a 2 year contract. The idea of getting someone who was used to free to switch over to $600 overnigh…
It’s not that the market research was wrong in saying that no one would pay $600 for a phone, it’s that we reached an inflection point where smartphones were no longer primarily phones but became portable internet terminals. Msft should have understood that given the existence of PocketPC devices like the iPaq.
From Microsoft's perspective, they were winning.
They had strong YoY gains on Blackberry, and Windows Mobile was set to overtake them eventually. By offering lower cost devices that didn't need to pay an extra per user Blackberry fee to the phone companies, MS was out competing Blackberry on price, while executing on their traditional strategy of having multiple partners flood the market with a variety of devices to fit everyone's needs.
(Where everyone was defined as business users.)
There were groups at MS experimenting with consumer focused designs, and even exploring app store types of business models (though they hadn't yet evolved into what Apple eventually released), people did realize that opportunity was there, but it is hard for successful incumbents to change.
Windows Mobile 7, which never saw the light of day, had just gotten a new kernel, support for higher screen resolution, and was setting out to be a really nice OS to use for business users.
Apple also did something else, it showed that the relationship with carriers could be improved. Microsoft had a very hard time getting past carriers testing requirements, they had a very hard time pushing out patches and updates. Apple showed a way by which carriers could be strong armed into being less customer hostile. The same way Apple showed that the music industry could be dragged into the 21st century.
Apple also dramatically brought down the cost of certain technologies, as they have continued to do. A single manufacturer making a huge order for one part drops the price of that part for everyone else. The OEM model Microsoft used for Windows Mobile, with the myriads of device form factors, was not able to create those types of market efficiencies.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
DuckDuckGo looking nicer every day.
DDG is essentially just a reskin of Bing.
not exactly https://duck.co/help/results/sources
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dave Cutler and his team of OS designers from DEC integrated with Microsoft software engineers to create the NT kernel. Cutler was a crucial figure in DEC, but was waysided by management so he jumped ship, and built the design he wanted to build at DEC (but never got management buy-in for) at Microsoft. All outlined in the book Show Stopper! THE BREAKNECK RACE TO CREATE WINDOWS NT AND THE NEXT GENERATION AT MICROSOFT…
And if I remember correctly, NT's kernel was a microkernel. It seemed to be the best choice for the future, back then.
Windows NT was a hybrid: the graphics and windowing system is in the kernel for performance reasons (try running X on commodity hardware in the early 1990s) whereas Windows CE was all microkernel.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#218Everyone talks about Apple as the best possible investment, but an investment in XEM or XRP (Nem or Ripple or Stellar Lumens) in early 2017 surpassed all of Apple in its 30 year history. My money is on Google, Facebook or Amazon eventually surpassing Apple though
Oh, you want to play "cherry-pick the cryptocurrencies" while comparing to AAPL's performance? Let me know when it's my turn to pick.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#219Is Samsung Electronics ridiculously undervalued or what? It generates more profit than Apple https://wccftech.com/samsung-posted-higher-profit-than-apple... yet is valued at only $290 billion instead of $1000 billion. What the heck.
Samsung's consumer electronics division isn't anywhere near as defensible as Apple's - they have little differentiation from other Android device makers which can be seen in the constantly fluctuating leaderboards of Android manufacturers (see Oppo and Huawei jumping 40% YoY).
If Samsung had their own OS + software technologies that differentiated them from any other electronics manufacturer, and offered their own services on top of that that made billions, and had a large developer base that was all-in on building software on their platform to further differentiate them from others, they might have a stronger business. As it stands, Samsung is just treading water in a zero sum smartphone business.
Re: Apple becomes the first $1T company
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the case of Microsoft they directly acquired the original DOS and the designers of Windows NT - so they've perhaps done that twice?
I didnt know this about NT - Where did they come from?
Show Stopper! is a great read. My copy is always lent around the office, especially to interns: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1416925.Show_Stopper_