View my profile on LinkedInThomas Bangalter
Apple’s new pitch to investors | Felix Salmon
Felix really sums up the nature of the awkward adolescence that Apple is having. Any company has to eventually transition away from being measured on growth to being measured by different fundamentals. His penultimate paragraph is essential:
“Apple is trading at an astonishingly low valuation, with a p/e ratio in single digits, because it has now become that animal investors like least: a slow-growing tech stock. Either one is fine on its own, and both slow-growing stocks and fast-growing tech stocks can support much higher multiples than Apple is seeing right now. But conservative investors, who like slow-growing stocks with high dividends, are constitutionally uncomfortable with the volatility inherent in the tech world. And technology investors, who are happy taking that kind of risk, want to see substantial growth. Apple, notwithstanding the fact that it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world, is falling through the capital-markets cracks.”
externalities and solutions
Our economic system is designed to solve various friction points with incremental improvements — but there are limited equivalent mechanisms for stakeholders (rather than customers) to have their needs solved. It’s the purpose of regulation to adjust incentives to limit negative externalities. Perhaps what’s (also) needed is an infrastructure for identifying and solving externalities through non-regulatory means. Like Kickstarter for externalities.
Inspired by Dealing with a real life externality by @yegg
[the best sentence of which is the closing note: ”I wonder how many other small negative externalities are out there waiting to be solved.”]
TweetThe future according to Mr Google
Eric Schmidt, speaking with Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian:
“There’s a lot of discussion in the world about the two billion that are connected,” he says. “We spend all day talking about the issues of e-commerce and start-ups and globalisation and so forth, and we forget that the majority of people are not online and that they will come online, the majority of them in the next five years.
It’s going to happen very fast. It’s going to happen in countries which don’t have the same principles that we in America have from the British legal system – around law and privacy and those sorts of things. All sorts of crazy stuff is going to happen. Human societies can’t change that fast without both good and negative implications.”
