Is the Apex of Apple Computer Now in Its Past? :: Monday Eluding-My-Grasp Weblogging

One of the many, many issues that I see is supremely important, but where my personal VAR is very limited: how the fact that Apple Computer’s leadership keeps score by current profits and stock price rather than by changing the world for the better greatly limits its utility for humanity considered as an anthology intelligence, may well even limit its long-run profitability, and leads there to be a good chance that its apex is now in the past…

Share

I am now up to a list of six different things that modern corporations are, or, rather, can be:

  1. Technology forcers,

  2. Production networks that create value for stakeholders—from raw material suppliers all the way to ultimate users—and so provide them with wealth and social power

  3. Investment vehicles for transferring wealth through time and building it,

  4. Strategic actors that manipulate the situation to grab the lion’s share of the surplus from the current production network for their investors, their executives, and (some of) their skilled workers,

  5. Bouncing balls in financial-market-casino roulette wheels, and

  6. Meme-stock pledges of allegiance to some utopian, technological, or political-cultural movement.

In its history, Apple Computer has been all six of these. Its most important use for humanity, considered as an anthology intelligence has been, of course, (1). Its second most importance has been as (2). It’s third most important has been as (3). As (4) and (5) it has been a significant minus. And what utility it has had at (6) has been a result of that aspect’s providing it with a runway for (1), (2), and (3).

Today, I am thinking about (4): Apple Computer as a strategic actor that manipulates the situation to grab the lion’s share of the surplus from the current production network. How that may bring the whole thing crashing down over the next decade. And I am wondering whether the extraordinary success at (1) and (2) of the Apple Silicon hardware project may turn out in retrospect to have been a true catastrophe. By masking the emergence of other weaknesses, it may turn out to have been a truly catastrophic success. That will turn out to be the case if the past decade has seen them grow to such a degree that by the time they became visible to those with the power to change them, they were too set in stone for that to be possible.

What were and are those weaknesses? I see them as twofold:

  1. A belief that Apple Computer deserves to continue to see its profits compounding, via the squeezing of every single possible dollar out of Services revenue.

  2. An enormous fear of losing control of the situation and thus becoming once again, as in the late 1990s, dependent for its very existence on the goodwill of other companies—companies that could and would squash it like a bug if not for the vicissitudes of short run, profit-potential and long-run antitrust-enforcement fear.

I see John Gruber and company as our best current guides to these issues:

What is the bottom line from this?