Jobs was the consummate capitalist

[bbinacan]

He gave us products we needed/wanted. "Wall Street" helped Apple accomplish this. When I was an Investment Advisor at Morgan Stanley, I began asking clients to buy Apple when the first Ipod came out. Those that did, paid about $20/share and have made a pile of money since.

aapl is at 377/share!

[BillyJack]

1. What do you ASK clients to buy now?

:evilgrin:

[TomClash]

6. Dead pools of ossified mortgages nt

[bbinacan]

13. You'd be wrong

I made a brief foray into MCB, CMO, etc. in the early 90s. Back then you could get 9%. Though my clients got their principle back plus interest, they had to reinvest at a lower rate. Rates were coming down at the time and there was a lot of refinacing at lower rates. Corporate bonds or higher dividend stocks were a better way to go.

[TomClash]

26. It was a joke

I'm sure you are NOT doing that. :)

[Snotcicles]

8. Lunch. nt

[bbinacan]

9. I left the investment world

about 5 years ago. If I were still in the business, I'd still like Apple and would add any company in the natural gas industry. Though I've never gone short on an investment, I'd most likely do it on a solar company that only exists from government funding.

[JI7]

2. but he actually made things people needed/wanted as you say

and we see people are buying it.

but this is not true of many others who just want some get rich quick and ripoff people.

[arcane1]

3. Bars on dormitory windows helped too

Of course, that's not a uniquely Apple phenomenon, but it's definitely a signature capitalist phenomenon.

[bbinacan]

20. Bars on dormitory windows helped too?

Please explain. Thanks.

[arcane1]

25. They solved this problem by putting bars on the windows:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/7773011/A-look-inside-the-Foxconn-suicide-factory.html

Again, it's not just an Apple issue. Several years ago, 2002 or 3, I got a pair of Nike's from my parents for my birthday. I caught a world of shit for wearing them. But Apple and the rest operate on the same model, except Nike doesn't need all the rare compounds used in electronics, and the hell that comes from extracting them.

Apple makes great products, ones that are much more useful than most who operate under this paradigm, but they play the same game.

[Tom Ripley]

39. Nicely done!

[marmar]

4. The same Wall Street that "helped" along the tech and housing bubbles.....

..... that blew up the economy.

[bbinacan]

17. Please take the time

to review Fannie and Freddie. Beyond that, you just demogouging. That's all.

[rfranklin]

24. sure, it was all Fannie and Freddie and Wall Street had nothing to do with it...

If Fannie and Freddie hadn't been writing those subprime loans to poor people and selling trillions of dollars of credit default swaps none of this would have happened, right?

[marmar]

28. ........

:rofl:

[girl gone mad]

32. Next you'll be blaming the CRA.

[bbinacan]

45. Canada Revenue Agency? n/t

[MrSlayer]

5. He would stand a lot taller if he had manufactutred in America.

Everyone wants to make those American dollars but actually give back to the country that allowed his enormous success? Not on your life.

[bhikkhu]

10. Apple's payroll is 50% american, and its sales are global

I think things balance out to the good.

[MrSlayer]

12. Yeah the minimum wagers working in the Apple stores.

Too bad they don't support the middle-class manufacturing sector. After all, giving people those kinds of jobs would cut the profits from gargantuan to merely obscene and we can't have that.

[Amonester]

36. "would cut the profits from gargantuan to merely obscene"

Yep. Tell it like it is Mr., for them it's always more, and more is never enough.

We've Got To Make Them Stop Before Their Endless Greed Annihilates This Entire Planet's Species.

[Tom Ripley]

40. Thank you MrSlayer

[Ellipsis]

14. You mean Ireland?

[Brickbat]

15. Yup.

[Old and In the Way]

7. Back in 77 or 78, I had a buddy who bought an Apple IIe

He was an instrumentation guy who built industrial controllers for his dad's business, making honeycomb rollers for the paper industry. He was such a fanatic...he was used his Apple to build his own module interfaces to control these industrial products. I had just taken a BASIC programming course so I could get up to speed with this new technology and went down the Tandy/Commodore/IBM PC path. But he was such an Apple disciple that I ended up suggesting to my uncle, an investor, that he should buy 100 shares of Apple stock. Of course, he thought I was foolish and never acted on my suggestion. I've often wondered what those 100 shares would be worth today....

[bbinacan]

11. Wow

I can only imagine what that'd be worth.

[banned from Kos]

16. Very sad. The 'C' word condemns the great Jobs here.

He deserves the best.

[bbinacan]

18. I agree. n/t

[joshcryer]

19. Nobody has ever had more contempt for customers than Mr. Jobs. Nobody. - Moglen

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_and_Open_Software:_Paradigm_for_a_New_Intellectual_Commons

[JVS]

21. He wasn't that good at it until Bill Gates bailed him out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#Microsoft_deal

[Ellipsis]

23. hhhahaaahaahha haa.

I think Apple could have paid them back the same day. Microsoft had the installed base for Office software. Jobs wanted Microsoft to continue supporting the platform 'tis all.


Actually, the IBM, Motorola, Apple alliance (AIM alliance) was the significant relationship.

The AIM alliance was an alliance formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer), IBM, and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. The stated goal of the alliance was to challenge the dominant Wintel computing platform with a new computer design and a next-generation operating system. It was thought that the CISC processors from Intel were an evolutionary dead-end in microprocessor design, and that since RISC was the future, the next few years were a period of great opportunity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance


Microsoft never innovated they only "rode the bear"(IBM), reverse engineered and bought up the competition.

But hey, believe what you will.

[Whats_Happening]

22. Correction, he gave SOME of us products they needed/wanted -- as talismans of privilege,

as class markers, as the 21st-century technological equivalent of club ties and crested blazers.

And as we have rolled through this 21st century, with the economy bumping along on empty if not actually crashing, the upper-middle classes eagerly camp out year after year to shell out too much money to buy the latest talisman -- the iPod, the iPhone 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. etc., the iPad, and whatever hell next Apple will come out with. Who cares that, especially in today's economy, the vast majority of Americans can't afford to spend so much on technological do-dads -- who cares that Apple's Chinese contractors had to put "suicide nets" around their workers' dormitories.

I'm sorry people, a computer or a phone is just a tool -- simply a tool, like an automobile, a refrigerator or a lawn-mower. But obviously, Jobs and Apple were able to invest their particular tools with such status that it's no wonder that tonight, on DU and all over the internet, the upper-middle classes are wailing as though this was Good Friday, and Jesus Christ himself just expired on the cross -- "And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent."

[Ezlivin]

27. Bro, he was a 70s guy

And when someone from that time dies, especially someone well-known like Steve Jobs, the rest of us sit around and talk like old timers.

I've used Apple products since 1979, when the nuclear submarine I served aboard got an Apple II to use at the quartermaster's station. So just talking about Steve Jobs at all can bring back some old memories.

Don't confuse rumination with veneration.

[Ellipsis]

29. Well put. n/t

[Raster]

30. Don't confuse rumination with veneration.

Well said, thank you.

[bluestate10]

33. I agree with you.

Phones, computers, cars are all tools for me to accomplish goals. I don't give them a life larger than that and would never, never camp out to be one of the first to buy. My purchases happen when my existing tools can no longer perform functions that I need performed. BTW, welcome to DU.

[Whats_Happening]

35. Thanks!

:toast:

[Poll_Blind]

38. +1

PB

[Old and In the Way]

41. I liked this part of your post.

"I'm sorry people" Yes, you are. Perhaps if you had any kind of awareness in the 70's, you'd know just how wrong you are with your observations. Directly or indirectly, Steve Jobs created trillions in the world economy - directly with his products and indirectly from the innovations, jobs, technology changes that were the result of his vision. And I say this as someone who remembers life before there was such a thing as personal computers....and someone who has never owned an Apple product.

[girl gone mad]

31. Oh, please.

Wall Street drove him out of his own company and then nearly destroyed it with their greed and short term thinking. He embodied the owner/operator entrepreneurial spirit that modern day MBA programs have all but ruined.

[Ellipsis]

34. Spot on!

Sculley was selling it off piece by piece. When he came back he was tired of all the people making money off his coattails and much of the strategy today is a reflection of that.

[bluestate10]

37. I have mixed feelings about Jobs and Apple.

The personal computer and the freedom that it brought is indeed powerful change. Smart phones that Apple and Jobs largely pioneered have changed modern communication. I don't put Jobs as the modern head of Apple after his return in the same league as I put Jobs when he was sweating in his garage, working to launch a vision. In my mind, Jobs occupy the same rung as Henry Ford, a person that took existing ideas and figured out how to make them more accessible to everyday people. I put him several rungs below an Edison or Graham Bell, people that created life changing products from nothing.

[Old and In the Way]

43. I suspect, without researching it, that both Edison and Bell

built their achievements on the backs of knowledge gained by others. That's just the way it works. I really can't think of anything that was the sole, unique inspiration of one person.

[Tom Ripley]

44. That is certainly true about Edison; he had a genius for registering patents

that far outstripped his ability to create.

[Old and In the Way]

46. I think it's also true of Bell.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on AG Bell, it's pretty clear that telephony was being developed off of the telegraph and there were multiple people working on voice over wire. Bell did manage to get the patent, but it was a close race to the wire, so to speak.

Point is innovation always seems to follow on prior knowledge. Man may be capable of conjuring a previously uncontaminated idea/concept from the depths of the mind that is wholly unique and without precedent...but I can't think of any examples.

[pa28]

42. Well BBinacan I guess I'd listen to your advice.

I happen to remember that you called the 2008 oil bubble. There was a big discussion about oil being at "peak" and how it was "different" this time.

You put in a pretty forceful counter argument at the time and you were right.

I have my own opinions but I'd be interested in your stance on the market right now. Bull or Bear?