rogifan_old

foggyhill said:

anantksundaram said:

I have not read the prior comments, and look forward to doing so later today, but my 2¢ is that Apple has currently no narrative or vision to offer the market, and the market is making up its own. As it always does.

Cook just does not appear to be comfortable creating, managing, massaging, reinforcing such a narrative, and I think the Board is utterly useless/absent at this point (it's a bunch of mediocre people and has-beens anyway).

I find it particularly puzzling, given how passionate Tim Cook can be on matters that concern him personally. Why can't he bring the same passion to addressing his shareholders' genuine concerns? (And I am not talking about -- I could care less about -- the fly-by-nights and the drive-by shareholders here). Weird....

So, you're mainly worried about communication. I do think that they may need a better communication from Cook (not sure it is possible), but I don't think anyone right now would be doing better in other sphere of what a CEO needs to do. That's the problem; few people, not even Musk, had Jobs ability to inspire, to make you believe you know what the future will be. Maybe have someone promoted internally that's the best at this; there must be 1-2 in Apple's upper sphere.

Operations people and most engineers are hopeless communicators, especially when it comes to a lofty future.

Scientists/Inventors are much better; they have a twinkle in their eyes that cannot be reproduced.

Google make due for no real good communicators by essentially publicizing their R&D as it goes and hyper-diversifying,
Amazon does it by pushing so hard on revenue development that they always use that as an excuse for not having decent profits.

Apple will generate 200B profits in the next 4 years even if they coast, adding it to their current haul, they are in a better position than any company out there to weather macro economic problems and go do whatever they want.

I do think it's a bit unfair that Cook is put in a position where he can't really win. Last year's gangbuster results (that one, especially analyst expected made it so) made it very hard to duplicate the following year, especially with the currency rise.

Jobs had a lot less expectations put on him, the Ipod took 3-4 years to really be a hit and even the Iphone took 2 years.
It's only when Jobs came back to Apple that he had this level of expectations put on him; and at that point, just surviving was a success.

I don't think even Jobs could manage this kind of massive expectations, though Wall Street would likely prefer his aspirational messaging, even if it were pure BS, than the current crew of not so adept communicator of straight reality.

flaneur said:

sog35 said:

Apple needs to make their products SEXY again. And sweat the details. There has been a lack of this.  Look at the Watch, the iPhone6, AppleTV4, and iPad Pro.  All 4 are handsome devices but not sexy at all. In fact competing devices like Samsung Galaxy look nicer.

Add bad vision, bad taste, and numb nuts to sog's growing list of deficiencies.