More Boneheaded Financial Punditbottery

If you want to get it wrong, go over to Seeking Alpha and read a story by Daniel Agramonte saying that Apple is on an innovation treadmill. His basic premise is the same as all of them. Apple has matured. The growth is going to stop soon.

He analyzes the growth numbers for the past year, plugs them into Microsoft's business model and decides Apple can't keep doing that.

'Course, everybody has been doing that for years without learning anything from their failed predecessors. I guess it was just Daniel's turn in the barrel.

Daniel. Muh Man. Dude. Listen up. I'm an Apple fan boy not because Apple is wonderful. Apple isn't wonderful or magical or magnificent. Apple is as dysfunctional as any family can be. Okay? I'm an Apple fan boy because the rest of the tech industry completely forgot about customers. You know? Users? The people out here who actually spend the money?

Apple has decided to court my money with products I want to buy. Microsoft holds a gun to my head and forces products on me.

With Apple I'm still getting screwed, okay? But it's seduction. With Microsoft, it's rape.

Apple currrently has a snippet of the personal computer market, a smidgeon of the cellphone market, and a dab of the movie download market. Their share of the computer industry is growing. Quickly. Every quarter for the last couple of years, their sales of Macs have been larger, and by a larger percentage, than the same quarter the previous year.

When Apple owns 60-70% of the PC market in a few years – THEN you can say their growth is stunted.

At the moment Apple's rate of growth is increasing in an expanding market that already has plenty of room.

They OWN digital music.

Apple has released the only real improved operating system for non-geeks. Vista has been on the street for over a year, still sucks, and has no finite expectation of getting fixed. SP1, which should patch numerous problems, is still in Beta. Leopard, on the other hand has had two major upgrades in four months.

Apple's hardware and software look cool. Not hypey flashy ooh-look-at-me cool; sleek, minimalist, functional, solidly-built cool. It's the kind of cool that never goes out of style. Look at the products of Apple's competitors in the hardware market. They look like souvenirs from Adam West's Batmobile.

Software? Apple has no software competitors. None. At. All. Nobody builds iLife but Apple. There is no comparable suite anywhere at any price. I don't even think you can put together software that mimics the individual functionality of all the apps in iLife, much less find the interoperability. It comes bundled on a new Mac. And iWork has no equal for anything like $80.

Apple's growth hasn't even started. By the time everybody figures that out it will be waaaaay too late to do anything about it.

With all that said, I still think Apple is less than it should be. They should have ditched the Apple II in '84, or at least no later than '85. And a Unix-based operating system on Apple boxes would have killed Windows in its infancy. His Steveness knew that.

Speaking of windows (not Windows), I hope Apple ditches this antiquated cluttered mess of an interface before somebody else does. For crying out loud, this is almost a quarter of a century of looking at big white rectangles and little pictures. It's boring.

So, Daniel Agramonte, your analysis is almost completely hosed. Your grammar and spelling seemed okay, but other than that, well...

How the hell can we be out of cashews?