Is it time to short AAPL?
If you have noticed recently the current market cap of apple is 70% of MSFT market cap. So is it time to short apple stock?
Recently at a poker night, somebody pointed out this interesting fact and claimed that it is time to short apple. This was starting of a religious fight between the mac lovers and others. Mac lover in this case was me. Here are some interesting excerpts from mail exchanges that continued for days to come. It is a long chain but please totally worth it…
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now to install requirements… I think that is a good point that apple never released this as general purpose.. I stand corrective on that.
Now that I think it has always been their strategy and from my perspective there is nothing wrong with that 
. As a product owner that reduces my suport matrix and increases upsell of other products.
Of course it is good for apple. But not so good for the customer. Another company doing the same would be seen as monopolistic practice and would attract antitrust lawsuits.
That brings up another point we discussed.
EU’s lawsuit against MSFT: http://www.pcworld.com/article/173253/microsoft_eu_reach_accord_on_antitrust.html
From this link, the main beef that EU had with MSFT was that MSFT gave IE unfair advantage over rival browsers.
“To address the browser case the software giant has offered to create a new ballot screen inside its Windows operating system that lists a maximum of 12 browsers and gives them all exactly the same visibility and ease of use as IE.”
Now, do we see a mac version with a choice of 12 browsers any time soon?
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I think it is great for the customer to have something that works well and is cheaper than all the pieces put together or may be even slightly expensive (apple is getting much better here)… and comes all pre packaged. As a consumer, choice is not improtant quality is and if I need to go to something else, I can always take the extra step to install that … so I think what I am saying is that the whole EU premise of anti-trust is something I dont agree. I am with MSFT on that as far as they let you disable IE which they did not and that is where it started 4 years back.
We should continue this over beer next time we meet…
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Now, I know apple fan boys don’t want to hear anything against their favorite toys, but the talk about quality of mac is over hyped. My macbook from work crashes very regularly, is heavy, gets overheated and sometimes cannot connect to wifi until I reboot and also, sometimes when it comes back from standby, the screen remains black, forcing me to reboot. May be some of these issues have been addressed with snow leopard, but it does not sound not much different from vista. And then, I don’t know of too many people who don’t run windows on their mac (either by boot camp or by parallels/vmware) to run applications that are not supported on mac.
beer will be nice…
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We stopped exchange emails on this topic and agreed to disagree… then something happened 4 days back which is very relevant to this topic… my mac died! There goes my claim for quality! It is not over though… What happened after that in the next blog entry.
