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An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes i

An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the largest non-governmental institution in history). What do we think its value would be today if it had been more developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower, the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake," from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we view as a huge mistake is probably not. Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge ethical mistake, but we'd have to make the case for that very differently.

Kye 5y ago
I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak. Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.
sixstringtheory 5y ago
> _An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this. Today, it hovers around $170_ And that’s after a 7:1 split in 2014 and a 4:1 split in 2020… money isn’t everything, but they are clearly finding some success via software, which is the fastest growing part of the company of late. Personally, I have plenty of my own gripes with Apple, but ever since switching to their ecosystem 13 years ago I’ve felt like I hopped off a creaky freight train and onto a high speed maglev.