Living in Europe I am not a happy owner of the iPhone yet. On the contrary... I own a N95 that is the next best thing to a Swiss Army Knife, for mobile communications that is. Who wants a BB?
For many years I was taken by Bill Gates and Microsoft but I gave up on them for long now, at least since Ballmer took over. I hate anything that's reminiscent of IBM in its market approach.
Apple is a whole new game since Jobs launched Apple II. They've got a way to put the customer at the center of the universe and address his/her needs in a smooth way that has never ever been replicated yet, by anyone on the planet. They are a unique organization that has given the real meaning to the much sought concept of Branding. Their Brand, chracterized by minimalistic, aesthetically superior, multifaceted (as much in soft as in hardware), user-friendly, elegant, classy designs, actually is not confined solely to their products but also runs through their own processes, from Marketing to Order Processing. Ordering an item at an Apple online store is a wonderful user experience. I have stopped buying any of their products above 50 euros from anybody else than from their online store, for years now. I like to visit reseller shops where I play with their products but I'd only buy serious stuff online.
We all witnessed recently (unless hidden under a rock) the US launch of the iPhone and AAPL's stellar performance in the weeks that followed. We saw people dreaming of Apple into becoming the first company ever to reach a trillion dollar valuation*. We have seen investor behavior reflecting the broader market sentiment last June and July that would motivate a retired Greenspan to invent a stronger term than 'irrational exuberance'. In the meantime the dust settled and the market is coming back, as I predicted long ago but was actually wrong on its timing. Now is the time to sell them short... I was too early, driven by my own personal bias.
A stupid rumor that Apple was halving its iPhone and iPod production plans sent the stock downhill at the speed-of-light a few days ago. How stupid can you be to believe this, but it just happened. When things are vulnerable and a stock's technicals as well as its fundamentals somehow justify it, even a leading analyst breaking wind would suffice to send the stock downhill. And it won't stop here, trust me.
Nevertheless, the financial markets are too incompetent to seriously impact a company's long term progress and especially a company's success. I remember not so long ago when the rumor that a new iPod model was prone to surface scratching sent the stock tumbling. When you hear things like that either buy at the day low or sell them short and cover yourself real quick. It's fun and you can make some diddlies at least if you got the balls.ChangeWave has recently published results of a survey about US consumer intent to buy new cell-phones and about the satisfaction of current owners of any cellphone available. The table here above from last July passes a serious message to Motorola. As a current market leader at 33% of the US market they are facing a serious challenge in the years to come. To their credit, they tried to jumb in bed with Jobs a few years back but that bed had no mattress...
El Jobso would be real stupid to let go such a lucrative market segment to a partner suffering Alzheimer's... he serves consumers and his company's interests a lot better with the iPhone, or, doesn't he?
Another stat shown by ChangeWave is even more frightening to the competitors of the iPhone, but nevertheless not too surprising to us. This is about customer experience. At Apple they know all about it. Think of the legendary saying by His Jobness each time he verifies a prototype that is not to his liking... "People are not gonna buy that!" Jobs himself is the guardian angel of our needs and wants as far as Apple products are concerned. I wish they could clone him somehow and pass those Jobsoids over to Sony, PG, Toyota, Nokia, Microsoft, Philips and so many others... but when they made him they broke the mould, unfortunately.At the end of the day, contemporary consumers are smart enough to know what they want. Much more difficult to fool a buyer nowadays. Info about things is available at a heartbeat. Info is free and uncensored. Consumers are asked to use their brains and judge for themselves. It's a global democracy that's omnipresent today. You got to respect that and only those who are serious about respecting the masses will be successful. At the global level truth and integrity supersedes everything else. And companies like Apple steal people's hearts by offering real value for money. Value in terms of functionality but also style, aesthetics and... why not... status!
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* Only four companies have ever managed to reach (and pass for a short while) the 500 Billion USD mark in market valuation, during the stock market's hay days not too long ago. These were Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and General Electric. I think that Microsoft was the one that reached the highest valuation... it was then that Gates was worth one fifth of that... the first man on this planet to be (paper) worth of more than 100 B dollars (he's half that nowadays - still OK for a convenient retirement).
Apple is in the 110B$ range nowadays, the highest they ever achieved in their 30 year history. Some people expect them to multiply that tenfold in the years to come... Who knows?
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