Slashdot Mirror
Fake Steve Jobs Says 'Leave the Real One Alone'
Stoobalou writes "Dan Lyons, who has been lampooning Apple's Steve Jobs for many years, has posted his last item as Fake Steve Jobs and signed off. Lyons, who has been impersonating the messianic Apple supremo in the notorious tech blog since 2006 and even managed to maintain his anonymity for quite some time, despite being a well-known tech hack, has parked his vitriolic pen for the last time." Most people expect FSJ to return if RSJ does.
I thought that Fake Steve blog shut down 2 years ago. It was funny for a while but got stale real fast when he was unmasked and the whole book thing.
If true, I would suspect it was an automatic sale from a pre-existing stock divesting plan that's been in place for a year or more. At my old company, if you didn't use a long term plan for when to sell shares (either by naming certain times of year or certain stock prices, and amounts), you were limited by the company lawyers to a couple of weeks per year where you were allowed to sell.
Grew more? I guess it depends on how you measure this.
Here is a chart that goes back to Mar 01:
http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap#zoom=0
- From Mar 01 (beginning of this chart) to Jun 04, Apple's market cap grew from $7.64B to $12.37B. This represents about $4B a rate of 14.8%/year.
- From Jun 04 to Sep 04 (roughly the time Cook took over, Apple's market cap grew to $15.04B. This is $3B at a rate of 77.6%/year. The rate is impressive, but the total amount is less.
Similarly, From Jun 04 to Jan 09, market cap went to $75.87B This is about $60B under Jobs' leadership at a rate of 37.3%. For the 6 months after that Cook had the reins, market cap increased to $127.06B. This is a phenomenal rate of 124.7%, but again a smaller number, about $50B.
So maybe you are right if you look at the percentages, but you are not right if you look at the straight values. Also, look at the shape of the curve in the figure and think about the history of Apple. While you can't see a clear jump in market cap from the iPod, you do see profitability in that time period and people generally consider that to be a huge factor in Apple's success. Clearly, the iPhone was a great decision in 2008, as the market cap started exploding after the iPhone release.
Now I have no doubt that Cook is a competent business person. But can you really say (with a straight face) that his brief running of the ship in those 8 months total are the reason for Apple's success?
The latter half of your post I agree with. They will need to find someone with the confidence and vision that Jobs has, and the thing about Jobs is he seems to be the only one capable serving the market he's served. Most solid engineering/integration companies serving this market gradually have all their substance hollowed out with style until the whole thing collapses. This happens because it works in the short term. My biggest fear, if Jobs doesn't come back, is that whoever takes over for him will eventually hollow Apple out to nothing.
That said maybe its a good thing, because I've not been a huge fan of what Apple has been doing lately to computing. Of course its not just them; everyone to a degree wants to make computers entertainment devices and not general purpose computers... It is just that Apple is so good at actually delivering that entertainment product I am a bit worried the other stuff which has lingered around for so long for us geeks/nerds to play with might actually be (finally) threatened.
The last time he sold any AAPL shares, it was to cover the taxes for his most recent share grant. The last time he actually sold a significant number to cash out, Gil Amelio was still running the place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In 1999, when he and Phil Schiller announced the iBook with built-in WiFi, the term WiFi hadn't even been invented yet, it was called AirPort by Apple, and 802.11b by everyone else, and Apple products were the first to have it built-in. Apple worked with Lucent in the development of 802.11b.
(disregard if you were being ironic)