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Yes, I agree. Steve Jobs refused to pay dividends, he built a war chest for a rainy day. He was opinionated. On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of
by yapcguy 13y ago
Yes, I agree.
Steve Jobs refused to pay dividends, he built a war chest for a rainy day. He was opinionated.
On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back.
Tim Cook was hyped up as a slick operator, an operations guy who built up Apple's supply chain to be super efficient. Truth is, he is/was no better than any other operations guy using an Asian based supply chain.
Look at the problems with the iPad Mini Retina screen which have yellow streaks, or the image retention burning laptop screens, or delay in iMacs, or sneaking a couple of Mac Pro units out at Christmas.
- jonknee 13y ago> On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back. Tim Cook has both pumped money into R&D and into dividends/repurchase... According to their filings, R&D spending (in fiscal years): 2013 - $4.48B 2012 - $3.38B 2011 - $2.43B 2010 - $1.78B He has also put a ton of money into operations (paying for factories, locking in huge volumes of components, all available air freight capacity, etc etc). And a ton of money into Apple Stores. At the end of the day $40B is a lot of cash to put to work. Apple could hire 1,000 engineers at a cost of $250,000 per year and it would only be 0.625% of $40B (and it's actually more like $50B because that would be pre-tax). 10,000 engineers is still not far off from a rounding error. Apple is waiting around until Democrats will let them bring back cash without a tax hit and then they'll make a special dividend. No financing magic needed.
- yapcguy 13y agoThanks for correcting me on the R&D, I was under the impression (based on product output) that nothing had changed and had in fact worsened. I still don't rate Tim Cook though - he allowed Maps out of the gate. Scott Forstall took the fall for that one, but Tim Cook was ultimately responsible.
- ghshephard 13y ago...And Steve Jobs let MobileMe out of the gate. If you rate anyone based on a few missteps instead of the aggregate of their performance, you are missing the big picture.
- yapcguy 13y agoThat's a fair point, although he did hire that British guy to head up retail... only to then fire him after just a few months. Let's see how he does in 2014.
- gress 13y agoMaps launched poorly, but the alternative - not launching it at all, or delaying it, may well have been considerably worse. That's why Cook let it out of the gate, but fired the engineering manager responsible.
- lostlogin 13y agoHeh, was talking about this today. A big MRI manufacturer's manager has been widely quotes in my little world as comparing their crashing/non functional MRI scanner software update to the Maps drama. Not sure how the two situations are related, but a crashing and non functional MRI scanner is kind of a big deal when you are sick. Mapping software not so much.
- kirtijthorat 13y agoI understand everything but "Apple Is waiting until Democrats will let them..." Really?
- jonknee 13y agoIt's pretty obvious... Republicans can't wait to give a corporate tax holiday. They did it in 2004 for example and it was largely a failure economics wise: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/business/05norris.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/business/05norris.html?_r=...
- drumdance 13y agoR&D spending is up 32% from last year. http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/30/5045894/apple-research-and-development-cost-2006-2013 http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/30/5045894/apple-research-an...