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Apple Posts 4th Quarter Financial Results
theanonymousbrit writes "From the AppleInsider article: 'Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 fourth quarter ended September 25, 2004. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $106 million, or $.26 per diluted share.' This profit (on a revenue of $2.35 billion) apparently constitutes Apple's highest fourth quarter in nine years. In terms of actual units shipped, over 830,000 Macs and 2 million iPods were sold over the quarter. The strength of the new iMac G5 is also credited. Pretty impressive figures."
... about Apple's continued success is that there is no apparent successor to Steve Jobs. Back in the beige days before Jobs returned ... I seriously thought Apple was going to disappear.
What Jobs has done to re-invigorate the company has been amazing, but what happens if something happens to Steve? Is there anyone else who can whip up the "reality distortion field" with the same frenzy to make Apple stay the trendy, innovative company that they are now.
I know the talent will be there, but without the leadership, will Apple again drift like back in the Gil A. days and fade into obscurity?
It just makes me nervous to think that the sole success of this company might hinge on the availability of Steve Jobs. (It's not like people live forever, you know)
That's great, but what are they going to do with all their spare cash? They are already building a much better operating system than Microsoft's offerings with their existing budget. It doesn't matter how kick-ass their operating system is any more - it's ahead of the competition, and the only thing stopping them from taking a larger market share is the fact that they don't have the critical mass of market share there already.
What I would like to see Apple do is be more agressive in getting people to switch. Advertising is nice, but people who just use computers rather than having them as a hobby aren't going to pay much attention. They have a computer already, and they are comfortable with what they know.
How about a trade-in? People bring their old PCs to their local Apple store, and they get a big discount off a new Apple. Or perhaps a free training course (with certificate) when buying an Apple computer. The training course alone will ease newbies in and show them how easy it is, and the certificate will attract the people looking to improve their resume.
Apple don't have a problem building a better system than Microsoft's. They do have a problem with the network effect. When you ask your neighbour for help to fix your computer, chances are, he's only going to know Windows. When you walk into a newsagents, 99% of the magazines are focussed on Windows. When you copy a game from a friend, it'll be a Windows game. This is Apple's bottleneck; it doesn't matter how kick-ass their product is, they are only going to have marginal increases in market share as long as they think outperforming the competition is enough.
Actually, Apple's building market share on low prices but its in markets you're probably not paying attention to. Final Cut Pro won its position based in part on its low price. Apple's 1U servers and RAID farms provide incredible performance and storage density in their class all for competitive or downright low prices. As Xsan comes out and people realize they can take 20-40% off their SAN storage budget by using XServe/XRaid products and plugging them into their existing Filenet SAN infrastructure, Apple's going to start being a real presence in the enterprise. That growth is going to keep Apple alive during the transition when Jobs inevitably retires in a decade or three.