Apple - a founding member of the ‘Trillion Dollar Club’ or just an upstart attendee?
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets”
- Steve Jobs
“Discover the innovative world of Apple and shop everything iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV, plus explore accessories, entertainment, and expert device support”
Apple’s opening greeting, unfortunately, is its biggest criticism, its ever-present bane, the Achilles heel of its hulking elegance, yet this is what makes it the juggernaut it has come to be. Hence, it isn’t a stretch - we are going to be talking about perhaps the most misunderstood company ever seen in the Tech history. In the 40 years Apple has been around, never has it existed without creating ripples.. From absurd over-inflated prices harkening right from the early days of the Macintosh, to the brilliant strategic move of entering the smartphone market, Apple has been a maverick seldom seen in a game played by level-headed businessmen, which much in part can be attributed to the ethos of the company imbibed by the enigma, the erstwhile Mr. Steve Jobs.
For a company so adamant on being hell bent on forming its own rules, to defy common market practices and be deviant, it has developed an aura around itself, and somehow, someway it has defied naysayers and as the news flashes in the past week have trumpeted all-around, Apple has officially cut the red ribbon and inaugurated the Trillion Dollar Club.
But will this last? Will Apple be able to hold on this distinction for ages to come or will it fade away into nothingness, with only a record to show for it?
If we look 500 years back in history, we had the Portuguese conquistadors taking South America by storm, the Dutch East India company racking up its fortunes in India, and we witnessed the rise and fall of the Caliphs and the Chinese empires. The ebb and flow of time has caused the birth of many new entities and swept away a lot more and in the way things have gone in the past few decades, trends have become bygones faster than what anybody could have forecasted, with the average half-life of a company expected to be about 30 years(which is really optimistic), which means after 300 years i.e. after 10 half-lives in, only one in a million companies may survive.
And history has been an engaged witness to the vagaries of misfortune. Be it IBM, with its mind-blowing breakthroughs with its supercomputers, Kodak with its pioneering digital cameras or let’s say Motorola, with numerous patents under its belt, each of them was supposed to be relevant as the numero uno in their fields but somehow someway, they just faded from the radiance of the first place.
So, is Apple destined to just be yet another great of this era, waiting to be usurped? Will it fall on its feet, it’s myriad ways collapsing on itself, it’s Orwellian garden finally turning too restrictive, its niche products failing to find appeal. Will it like IBM, post steadily declining revenues year on year and eventually become smaller than its competitors, or would it just implode like Enron due to some massive unforeseen complication.
At the moment the iPhone maker faces a serious issue of diversification. With Mac PCs sales having declined, it leans more and more on its crutch, the insanely well-selling iPhones, but even the sales of the same would more or less stagnant as Apple fails to come up with ways to make its flagship product interesting year after year. On top of that, the company which prides itself over its workmanship and attention to detail, with the tagline “it just works” has been blasted by many in the tech space owing to its increasingly counter-intuitive operating systems and unfortunate hardware failures, case in point, the i9 throttling issue found in it’s recently refreshed, fixed deposits breaking MacBook pros.
And the areas, where it had always been an undisputed market leader, like brand image and sophisticated hardware and ‘the just works’ software, face heavy heat from the other One-Trillion-Dollar aspirants like Google and Microsoft.
So, are we staring at the end of the road for Apple, be it an end pretty far off in sight? It is hard to tell and would be foolish to comment upon. The One-Trillion-Dollar evaluation does prove the company has the chops to get out of sticky situations, with a purported 250 dollar billion free cash to spend. Perhaps Apple may not stay relevant as a tech company, but that hasn’t been a problem for this company which rose up from its ashes on the back of the digital animation brainchild of Steve Jobs, Pixar. Maybe Apple will choose to not have its financial performances reliant on just the iPhone and earn itself a severe wake-up call.
But one thing is apparent, it will be foolhardy to say Apple is at its peak, especially with so many patents being filed by it every once in a while. Who knows what is Apple’s next ace in the hole is going to be, how many mysterious products may be in development as we speak? For all we know, Apple may surprise all of us and go hands-on hands against Tesla. All I can bet on is, the coming years are going to be something special, and Apple will be a large part of it. Yes, maybe no company has stayed relevant for long, but with the kind of money Apple has at its disposal, combined with its sheer attitude, if any company is going to buck the trend, I will put my money on this nonconformist bohemian.
