🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Patrick O'Neil wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Jan 1996, Jim Derr wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > I remember a few years back when Compaq was having troubles.  They were 
> > laying people off and restructuring.  No one who bought Compaq stock at 
> > the time regrets it now.
> > 
> > I have seen many Apple-is-dying arguments come and go.  Despite all the 
> > arguments, Apple just kept getting bigger.  
> [...]
> 
> And now Apple is getting smaller.  I'm sure the employees who get dumped 
> will be understanding and realize that Apple is still a great 
> company...and the dorks at the top will get a pay increase.

I never said anything about human cost.  But this seems to imply that the 
human cost of restructuring at Apple is huge.

> On a related tack, I find it amusing that since Intel has recently seen 
> some similar financial problems, Apple-philes in particular are 
> predicting Intel's demise.  So, Apple has financial problems and has to 
> downsize and drop out of certain markets and it is perfectly OK, no prob 
> (those layed off will disagree) but the same for Intel?  NO WAY!  Their 
> DYING!  See? They're laying people off, the bastards.

Uh oh.  Now human cost is a matter of sarcasm.  :-)

The fact of the matter is that companies as large as Apple, or Compaq, or 
Intel, occasionally have problems.  Even Big Blue has had problems; I 
remember when their stock fell to 40 after remaining stable at 100+ 
for as long as I had been following them.  

When an Apple-phile reads the tea leaves, he sees the death of Intel. 
When a PC-phile reads the tea leaves, he sees the death of Apple.  The
point of my post was to say that when you're reading tea leaves, you
should see tea leaves.  There have been so many trash arguments about
who-is-dying posted that people might actually start believing some of it. 
I myself would rather see consumers making decisions based on the
usefulness of technologies than on often-wrong, much-hyped, trash arguments.

Maybe one of these days, the predictive value of a company's performance 
in one quarter will be greater than it is now.  Maybe the fact that the 
Earth seems to be warming up during this decade has some predictive value 
about weather trends.  Environmentalists may make a big deal out of this, 
and platform advocates may make a big deal out of short-term trends, but 
it may not mean much.  It may mean something; it may not.  The fact that 
this is the conclusion implies much about the predictive value of 
short-term trends.

All I know is that I can point to examples in the industry where there 
were short term, negative trends, and the people who bailed out lost money.
The predictive value of this kind of thinking is not stunning, IMO.  If 
this thinking had stunning predictive value, the computers which monitor 
trends in the stock market would inherit the Earth.
---
James Derr					derrj@essex.hsc.colorado.edu