[ufmace]

I'd say that "running out of time" is probably over the top, but there's some truth behind the idea. Their huge margins and huger stock price and market cap are based on the perception that they're the company that can produce industry-changing smash hits over and over again. But Jobs was really the one doing that. Can Cook's Apple produce the next big thing, something that takes the whole tech world by storm, like the iPhone or iPad did? How long will investors wait if he doesn't make any big hits? It's not hard to imagine Apple losing some of it's luster if they keep churning out modest revisions on existing products and uninspiring duds for new products.

On the other hand, even with no more hits, they do still have incredible customer loyalty and a massively profitable product line. And a lot of people have predicted Apple's doom over the years, only to be proven wrong later. Betting on Apple for the next 5 years seems safe. I wouldn't bet on Apple for the next 20 years right now though.

[roksprok]

Isn't Alphabet's P/E twice that of Apple? 13 vs 25 if I remember correctly. Doesn't this imply that it's Google, not Apple, that people are counting on to 'produce industry-changing smash hits over and over again'?

[ufmace]

Interesting, I didn't know that actually. Seems GOOGL has a market cap almost as high and 2.5x higher P/E. Would make me wonder about Google a bit too. In my opinion, they don't really innovate at the market level like Apple does. They have the Search cash cow, Gmail was moderately innovative at the time, and most of their other stuff comes off as well-executed me-toos. Technically innovative, but not exactly opening up new markets for things that nobody knew existed.

It's also a narrative problem. Apple has the narrative going - Jobs is gone, can Cook really replace him? Google is mostly boring crickets as far as management narratives.

[sangnoir]

> Gmail was moderately innovative at the time

Say what now? Perhaps you do not remember that most free email providers had a 2 or 4 MB mailbox limit and you had to delete emails as soon as you read them. When I signed up, Google was offering a whooping 1 gigabyte of storage - an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude. Gmail allowed attachments of up to 25MB which only served to make Hotmail's 4MB mailbox look absurd.

Other email providers (free and paid) struggled with spam filtering (and still do). GMails spam filters are magic, as far as I'm concerned - I never get spam and I also don't even bother checking my spam folder for false positives.

These 2 innovations alone can't be "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination.

[ufmace]

I suppose it's debatable. I'm talking about stuff like the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionizing the touchscreen mobile market, and the iPad essentially creating the tablet market from scratch - they existed before, but were pretty much uniformly awful and I can't remember anybody ever wanting one.

It's not like email or webmail didn't exist before GMail, but I suppose you could argue that the revolutionary at the time use of AJAX plus gigabyte standard storage space, plus great spam filters was enough to transform webmail from a handicapped second-class citizen to something that tech experts would be happy to leave desktop email clients for.

But then, Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference? I'd say no. But where do you draw the line between a good refinement of a pre-existing class of application to something that qualifies as revolutionary?

[sangnoir]

> Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference

When Google announced turn-by-turn navigation in maps, Garmin's stock price took a tumble. Also, Street View hadn't ever been done before, surely that qualifies?

[aedron]

Most IT/technology companies trade above 20x P/E. That Apple is so much lower simply reflects how little confidence investors have in the company at the moment, as evidenced by the huge slide in share price.