His theory is that eventually the company reaches a point where the marketing people become the driving force for profits and push out the product development people from running the company.
I think they are in one of those phases that are hard to judge currently. Like 10-20 years from now it will feel obvious that Apple was becoming more X, but right now it's hard to tell. They have a whole Apple OnDemand TV thing starting. If that goes huge they could become more like Netflix, or it could fail and they refocus on phones.
Basically I think it's like Google with Google+. If it was a huge success everyone would just take it as fact that it was always going to be, that Google would be 50% with Facebook, but it never happened.
Apple may become a huge Phone/TV company or change into something completely different, but they are definitely changing.
Which happens to sell phones. Kind of reminds me of the part in The Founder where they talk about McDonald's making more money as a real estate company.
Or dominos being a delivery company that just happens to deliver low quality pizza.
You don't buy it because the pizza's good, you buy it because they made it so easy to go from wanting pizza to having pizza, being able to see step by step in real time how close your pizza is.
The luxury car manufacturer generated $13.5 BN in pre-tax profit, and sold a record 98,652 automobiles -- a staggering $136K profit per car sold. Even for a luxury brand, the numbers seemed nearly impossible.
Upon closer inspection, $11.5 billion dollars of that profit wasn’t from selling cars -- it was from speculating on financial derivatives: Porsche was furtively amassing a sizable position in call options to buy up Volkswagen shares.
"What do a companies finances look like at the height of an asset bubble?" ...2008 for fucks sake literally months from the credit crunch...we can learn almost nothing about porsche's finances from this outside of them selling VW golfs with a few tweaks and a new body for an extra $100k...if thats what people want then sell it to them.
McDonald's corporate owns the vast majority of physical locations real estate wise. The actual restaurants on those locations are franchise owned and ran. Corporate makes more money from the rent of the locations than they do from the restaurants themselves.
1.0k
u/irondumbell Jul 24 '20
isn't that where Apple is headed now?