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Originally Posted by CommonReader
Unlike other companies of that size their product portfolio is incredibly slim. They can't say things like "tablet sales are flat but medical equipment was strong and we received major orders for our new trains".
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Indeed.
They got extremely big and rich off essentially one product line; iOS.
(Mac revenue is just noise compared to iOS.)
Interestingly, at the same time Apple is coming under scrutiny for its limited product line, another much-maligned company is starting to be better appreciated for its diversity of healthy businesses.
Microsoft.
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-no-lo...589&ttag=e589\
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Financially, Microsoft is in good health. Business wise, it's in fantastic shape. It's only from the public's perspective that things aren't going all too well. And Wall Street has woken up to the fact that Microsoft is — at least from a shareholder and investor's point of view — stronger than it appears to be.
Microsoft isn't "just that Windows company" anymore.
Most will look at Microsoft and see it as a "multi-billion dollar, multi-national software company." Perhaps it was once. Nowadays, it's not so much. Actually it's like a cluster bomb of financial goodness.
People should start looking at Microsoft as a "series of many billion-dollar divisions under one corporate roof." And it seems that Wall Street has finally woken up to the fact that when Windows 8 suffered consumer and enterprise resistance, investors still began to pile their cash back into the company.
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Amazon, too, is a highly-diversified company with revenue from online hosting, dry-goods retailing, degital content, consumer electronics, and logistics business-to-business services. They keep plowing their profits into new lines of business and the financial types approve by sticking by them.
Google is another Single-product (online ad sales) company that has been trying to diversify like crazy (with mixed results). They have generally kept naysayers at bay with the churn of betaware and newsworthy R&D efforts (Glass, self-driving cars) that reassure investors that Google is trying to diversify. At some point (soon?) they too will start feeling heat over their reliance on a single revenue stream but so far not even the Motorola fiascoes have really dinged their image with the financial types or the media but the day when the hounds turn on them isn't all that far off.
Apple's problem right now is just perception.
For year they relied on hyping the latest incremental tweaks and service packs to dazzle the media into overlooking the fact that, yes, they were (and are) making money like crazy but it was all coming from a single *consumer-focused* business.
Now, the hype machine in the media is turning on them even though they're still making money like crazy because their reliance on (traditionally fickle) consumer buying.
Hence the farcical question of whether Apple is still cool.
You don't need to be cool to make money, just competent and useful.
But the media has built Apple up into a giant based on cool. A ready source of "news" and rumors and commentary. Hyping a new Apple rumor is easier than going out and looking for real news, after all.
Cool is important to the media and if Apple isn't cool then they stop being useful to them and they'll find something cool else to hype.
Like, maybe, Google Glass.
