Apple: Trillion Dollar Company?

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Yahoo Finance: Apple Will Become A Trillion-Dollar Company, Says Altucher — $1,000 a Share: Apple recently blew past Microsoft, Cisco, and other companies to become the most valuable tech company in the world. But that's just the beginning, says investor James Altucher of Formula Capital....... Altucher thinks Apple will eventually be worth more than $1 trillion, maybe even $2-$3 trillion. ...... the company's global market share in its key markets--smart-phones, tablets, and Macs--is still very low. Also, factoring out Apple's massive $65 billion pile of cash, the stock is trading at a low price-earnings multiple.

Apple is not going to be a trillion dollar company. That is too much extrapolation. This trillion dollar talk reminds me of the singularity talk, that is yet another case of too much extrapolation.

If I run five miles per hour today and six miles per hour tomorrow, then you could extrapolate that and say in so many days I could run 60 milers per hour and you would be wrong.

Android is already eating Apple's smartphone lunch. The same thing is going to happen to the tablet.

Apple could end up at 400 billion, maybe. But a trillion? I don't see that happening.

And then there is the elephant in the room: Steve Jobs. The guy is in frail health. Apple minus Steve Jobs is not the same company, it is not even Apple.

This guy Altucher obviously loves his iPad, he owns three of them. Many people love their iPads. But to go from there to three trillion? Come on, have some perspective.

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Murdoch's MySpace, Cisco's Flip

Image via WikipediaWhen Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, that was hot property. And he looked like a genius when he paid $500 million for the service, and promptly got Google to pay him $900 million to run ads on the property. And that was the pinnacle. It was downhill after that for MySpace. Murdoch's corporate machine killed the whole operation with the usual jujitsu.

How you do it is you put a corporate guy on top of the whole thing, and that big shot starts thinking he is some kind of a big shot, he fires a few key people, he reorganizes a little bit. After all he has to cast the impression he is actually doing something. And that messes things up. There is no one in charge. The emphasis is no longer on innovation. It is on pleasing the corporate guy who, by the way, wants yet more ads shown on the property, because there are numbers to be met. They don't realize that might take away from the experience because they don't use MySpace in the first place, they just want to be the boss of it.

And now what do we have here? Cisco is flipping Flip. Flip was also hot when it got bought. That is why it got bought in the first place. Flip was supposed to be Cisco's own little iPod, that signature device that everyone but everyone carries and makes Cisco look cool.

CNN: Cisco kills Flip, cuts 550 workers: The networking giant said its new strategy is to serve most consumers indirectly through its business customers, rather than making products that shoppers buy straight from Cisco...... As sales grow of smartphones with HD video cameras, the need for single-use devices is fading. Flip's sales last quarter grew 15% year-over-year, but Cisco had expected them to grow 30%..... the company will eliminate 550 positions in the next three months, most of which will come from the Flip division. The networking giant said it will take up to a $300 million charge for the divestitures and layoffs in the current and subsequent quarters. ..... "The Flip acquisition was unusual from the start. Cisco said there would be a push-pull effect on the network, but that turned out to be a tough sell." .....

Facebook took care of MySpace. The smartphone took care of the Flip camera. Pray your competitor gets bought by some big company.

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• Flip Cam Going Social Won't Make Investors Friend Cisco (blogs.forbes.com)
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• What would a revamped Cisco should look like? (networkworld.com)
• May MySpace Be A Lesson To Us (adpulp.com)
• Was It Google That Killed MySpace? (gigaom.com)
• News Corp. Is Still Trying to Unfriend MySpace (pcworld.com)
• MySpace loses millions of users (bbc.co.uk)
• MySpace Users Number Started Decling From Last Month (globalthoughtz.com)
• Three lessons on digital acquisitions from News Corp's MySpace misadventure (briefingmedia.wordpress.com)