How Apple nearly collapsed | Inside The Storm | Full episode

[Music] for nearly a decade Apple has been the most valuable publicly traded company in the world they were the first to make computers look sexy with its revolutionary products and services it's transformed the way we live and shape the culture of the 21st century you can't walk down the street without seeing someone wearing an Apple watch or using an iPhone or iPad but things haven't always gone to plan for Apple Apple was dying they weren't making it at all it was a company in great turmoil he destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for apples on the verge of bankruptcy anybody could tell gee there's a lot of liabilities on this balance sheet they were bleeding money they couldn't compete with cheaper competitors it's just losing astronomical amounts of money this is the story of how Apple very nearly crumbled told by people who witnessed the company's fall firsthand and were close to the man who managed to turn it into one of the world's most valuable brands with an annual turnover of over 200 billion US dollars 123 thousand employees over 500 stores and over a billion products in use globally Apple is one of the world's most successful businesses it's genius for innovative design disruptive technology and marketing has built a customer base that Revere's Apple with almost religious fanaticism I'm a lifer I'm an apple lifer slow though well me know what you go everyone in my family also uses Apple it's easy once you start with the Apple products he's a number one company in the world I hope I will stay Apple forever [Music] the story of Apple is a rollercoaster drama that took the company to the brink of bankruptcy and on to global domination but it all began in a garage in Los Altos California where two twenty-something computer nerds Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed a company making basic kit computers on April Fool's Day 1976 Steve Wozniak was always early on he was the kind of that the technical brains behind the Apple Computer the engineering kind of brains behind Apple Steve Jobs was the slick marketer he was the person who thought you know we can't just sell this to a small group of geeks who are interested in buying personal computers this is something that could appeal to everyone with the 250,000 US dollar investment from Mike Markkula a former executive of Intel jobs and Wozniak launched the Apple 2 computer one of the world's first microcomputers it had a built-in keyboard and offered high resolution color graphics and sound [Music] it was designed to look more like an appliance than a traditional bulky business computer Apple pretty much was one of the inventors of the personal computer industry was one of the first companies to introduce one of these products but Apple 2 was apples first kind of breakthrough hit it was launched in 1977 and some version of it wound up running until 1993 which gives you an idea of just how big a product this was thanks to the Apple 2 Apple's yearly sales grew from seven hundred and seventy four thousand to one hundred and eighteen million u.s. dollars an average annual growth rate of 533 percent they were growing very very rapidly as a company that I mean Apple was founded in a garage and within a few years it's employing thousands of people in December 1980 Apple was listed on the Nasdaq stock market the shares sold out almost immediately instantly about three hundred millionaires were created Steve Jobs the largest shareholder made two hundred and seventeen million u.s. dollars in four years Apple had grown exponentially Steve Wozniak continued to work in engineering until a plane accident and disillusionment with the increasingly corporate ambitions of the company led to his departure in 1985 I go to business meetings and they're all sitting there in three-piece suits it's a large business there's a lot of dollars involved the people who have come out of school trained to run and manage business is the key element today and that's where most of the creativity is going Steve Jobs became Apple's lead visionary [Music] he had this vision to build great products that would change the world and he always called them appliances does it mean that every housewife will ultimately be a programmer well as you see from the Apple it weighs about 12 pounds and one of the nice things about handling it is if you don't like what it's doing you can throw it out the window he didn't call them computers and he wanted to build appliances that people would put in their homes and would look at fondly from a design perspective but that they would also be incredibly useful he wanted things to be so easy to use that you just didn't even feel like you were using them that you were they just became part of you [Music] Apple has been part of Paul mark Davis's life for over 20 years his unofficial Apple Museum in London has an almost unparalleled collection of vintage machines Apple machines were so much more beautiful than the PC alternative there was no comparable model outside of Apple he goes nothing so I kind of got all of my old Macs out that I've been sort of collecting over the years and put them all together all these various machines from different decades I wanted to have every single machine isn't that amazing it's working fine this is a real mixture of staff from University the Apple Lisa up there is a Apple to one of the most notorious objects in Paul's collection lurks in a special place okay right above his bathroom the Apple 3 it is a huge useless non-working lump I mean most of the machines in here do work and in my defense this probably stopped working about six weeks after it was bought the Apple 3 was launched in 1980 and hopes were that it would emulate the success of the Apple to my Apple but it went into the history books as the company's first big failure the Apple 3 was disastrous early on it ran into technical problems and one of apples official solutions for it was that you should lift the computer up about three or four inches and drop it because this would hopefully reseat the chips inside it and so that's a failure wounded by the disaster of the Apple 3 there was worse news to come [Music] in August 1981 IBM launched its personal computer or PC it was the opening salvo in the PC versus Apple war that would rage for decades the IBM personal computer coming to selected stores across the country unit giants like IBM which then come along and think oh this is a fast growing product category there's probably some money to be made there so Apple faces more competition so I would say that that probably the main challenge that they were facing at the time aware that Apple desperately needed a new hit Steve Jobs has set up a group of a hundred people to work on a top-secret project Andy Cunningham was one of the chosen few his hand selected his team of a hundred people and he only allowed a very small number of outside people to be part of that team and we had special badges to get into the building and he were not allowed in there if you want one of those people so you were living with these people going through the process of working with Steve Jobs which was grueling and difficult he knew what he wanted in his head and he he would communicate that to you and if you didn't make it happen he basically scream and yell and sometimes throw things and insult you insult you if you couldn't if you couldn't do it all of the images you are about to see on the large screen will be generated by what's in that bag knowing that Apple's fortunes were riding on it Jobs pushed his team of a hundred to create a computer that he believed would change the world the Macintosh launched in January 1984 the Macintosh was the first mass marketed computer to have a mouse and an onscreen desktop interface all packaged in a radical form factor you could consider the Macintosh Steve's baby that was his child absolutely no difference between that product and a child one day I asked him I said what are you trying to do with the Macintosh product and and and its relationship with its users and he said I want to put a mother in every box I want people to open up the Macintosh box and I want them to feel like this product is taking care of them and not that they have to take care of it it was the first computer that felt truly intuitive it was the first computer that meant that you could use it without training that's the revolution in computers the real genius of Macintosh is that you don't have to be a genius the advertising was compelling but the Macintosh failed to do the one thing it needed to do get people to buy it we realized that nobody's buying it they love the ad they loved Steve Jobs they loved talking about it in the press but they didn't they weren't buying the product the Macintosh was too expensive for struggling creatives and too unorthodox for businesses who preferred more established rivals like IBM people who work in corporate jobs who go to work every day in suits and ties it wasn't attractive to business people they're not attracted by that by that image so it's almost like we miss positioned the product if you will the Macintosh struggles commercially and this drove a wedge between Steve Jobs and John Sculley the CEO who Jobs had lured from Pepsi in 1983 to bring structure to the infamously unstructured Apple I think when John joined the company it was like a miracle for everyone because people saw him as adult supervision including Steve and that he has the famous quote you know do you want to go on selling sugar water to kids or do you want to come and change the world and John of course chose the decision to come and change the world and I think John thought that he would come in and play a typical CEO role you know he had come from Pepsi and that was a very well structured consumer company and he goes to Apple and it's not very well structured not very well structured at all and Steve was still making all the big decisions and it was very difficult I think for Jon to deal with that and Macintosh was failing it's not like he launched this product and all of a sudden they were making gazillions of dollars on it that was not happening at all it was costing the company a ton of money to have that product and Steve was just insisting we must we must make this go this must happen and Jonathan Jonathan you know no I don't think so you know I don't think we need the Macintosh it's killing us without the success of the Macintosh in business we couldn't afford the huge investment we have in research and development it was crunch time for Apple and a battle ensued between Scully and Jobs Steve Jobs actually tried to drum up support to sort of wrestle control away from John Sculley John Sculley who came from a very corporate background who has maybe far better sort of as a corporate inviter than Steve Jobs was able to win that tussle the Apple board sided with Scully and sideline Jobs on the 12th of September 1985 Steve Jobs was forced to resign from the company he'd found it what can I say I hired the wrong guy that was going yeah and he destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for sometimes you think you're doing the right thing by removing a force that appears to be a negative force when in fact that's the life force and what you really needed to do is is feed that life force in a way that was going to work and they weren't able to do that I think they thought thank god he's gone when I we can run a business but you know Apple is in a business I mean it is a business but it was the realization of a vision in a person behind that vision an apple had it and when they kicked Steve out they lost it and so lots of things started to fall apart lots and lots Steve Jobs wanted to change the world with Apple computers and when he left the company it's very soul was ripped out over the next decade this would lead to problem after problem Apple had revolutionized the computer industry in the late 1970s but nearly a decade of hit and miss products had left it commercially fragile Steve Jobs passion project the Macintosh had failed to turn apples fortunes around and cause divisions within the company in 1985 Steve Jobs was ousted from the company he had co-founded everyone who was working for Apple would have realized at the time that Steve Jobs leaving the company was detrimental to make things worse that same year Microsoft launched Windows its own version of a graphical user interface that worked on IBM's personal computer or any computer with an Intel chip and Microsoft comes along and starts taking some of what Apple is doing and applying it to to the PC and that's the point to which the balance tips away from Apple with a wider range of hardware software and prices Intel computers running Windows software the so called Wintel sector quickly overtook apple's share of the markets begin in about 1988 the platform share of Apple was going progressively down and it actually sunk below 10 percent around 1991 1992 and an incredible top-down decision that was made at that time it was sight let's go up and crank up the entire supply chain and literally a calculation was done on how many computers need to be bought and sold to get Apple's market share up to like 11 12 percent an Apple committed to all of that inventory the Apple didn't sell it didn't come close I think that's the first time the company realized it really was losing the winter water and if you look back at the pricing it's pretty clear why because Apple products were selling at a premium to the wind top products consumers are not stupid and they would look at this and say I really like Apple I really want to buy Apple but I just can't justify it personally despite struggling with finances Apple didn't stop innovating one of its most ambitious projects came out in 1993 a handheld device called the Newton message pad people keep in touch the idea behind giving is that it's an assistant something that actively helps you as you capture or organize and communicate your ideas and information the Newton is a great example of everything that was good about Apple and bad about Apple in the early 1990s the Newton was really in some ways a prototype iPhone except that it could make phone calls in with a handheld computer at a time where even laptops were still incredibly bulky things it used artificial intelligence had all of these amazing features you could write on it with a stylus and the idea was that it would then be able to kind of recognize what you were writing and turn that into computer text which for 1993 is an incredibly ambitious project but unfortunately it turned out to be too ambitious you know Newton's pretty smart but it's not always gonna get your handwriting right the handwriting into text didn't work very well people were disappointed that so you really had something that was really hard to use and expensive and those two things made it a failure really right out of the oh it just it never took on at all even amongst the hardcore Apple Apple lovers it just didn't work when you're done you even have a smart way of getting rid of your trash Apple was panicking but instead of consolidating it continued to bring out different products they were bleeding money they couldn't compete with cheaper competitors they were making too many products they were trying to do high-end middle lower and a diversity of models to cater to for the consumers and so they lost their focus in 1993 the Apple board forced out CEO John Sculley but two successive CEOs Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio couldn't stop the company from struggling as competitors launched fresh products that increasingly outperformed apples at lower prices it was a company which was losing an enormous amount of money it was still bringing in revenue but it just wasn't making profit so it was losing a huge amount of money each year that was really kind of the nadir for Apple that was when everything went wrong and his unclear of how close it came to bankruptcy but some people say it was within 90 days of having to close shop by the late 90s Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy it needed to do something drastic as quickly as possible the return of co-founder Steve Jobs was seen by many as Apple's only hope but the demanding pioneer was busy building a whole new empire this morning at its offices in Silicon Valley California the company is about to get a first look at its new trademark after leaving Apple in 1985 Steve Jobs had started next a computer company aiming to create high-end hardware and substrate I forgot how much work it actually is to start a company it's a lot of work you've got to do everything you've got to come up with a name you've got to come up with a logo you mean in addition to designing the product you've got to figure out what's a design you've got to figure out how you're gonna get it to the marketplace you've got to do a part number system you've got to go get bank accounts you've got to set up charts general Ledger's get a management information system get a little kitchen set up get a coffee maker all this stuff you know it isn't like this it should be something new that's one so somebody's got to say here's what we can do and we can make it happen and here's the level of thing we can ship in 16 months when I hear him saying is forget it and boy that just makes me smoke jobs spent 12 years away from Apple notably helping next computers develop an innovative operating system however there was no doubt where jobs hearts and ambitions really lay the first week or so that I worked with him at next it was so clear that he was out for Apple revenge and also that he was going to go back to Apple because he had something to prove at this point he'd been thrown out of the company that he gave birth to it's like your child throwing you out and and he was gonna go back and make that company successful just how Steve Jobs would bring Apple back to life would revolutionize the computer industry and transform the way we live in the 21st century the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect and we need to bring it back [Music] in 1996 Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and desperately needed a new operating system for its Mac computers so in December that year CEO Gil Amelio brought Steve Jobs next firm for its software bringing apples founder back into the company Steve Jobs coming back to Apple it was kind of a feel-good moment in the sense that you know here's one of the founders come back to the company that he started but I don't think that anyone could have predicted at that point that you know just that act of Steve Jobs returning was going to be what was going to restore Apple to profitability it took seven months for Steve Jobs to convince the Apple board to fire CEO Gil Amelio 42 years old Jobs finally became the chief executive officer of Apple Apple needed Steve Jobs as much as Steve Jobs needed Apple it was his playground and when he came in for the first 30 months he worked for $1 a year he said a year he said I'll come and I want to fix this the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect and we need to bring it back he spent that whole time while he was at next learning how to be a really good CEO and that's what changed he understood how to make a company operate and how to run it and those who worked with him after he came back to Apple have a very different idea of Steve than those of us who worked with him before it was very clear that he changed I don't think he ever got nicer but he ate to save the company he loved Steve Jobs needed to take immediate and often brutal decisions when Steve Jobs came back he fired a lot of people which is probably not necessarily a good thing for morale but it was a good thing for Apple's bottom line he also got rid of a lot of the product lines which were not particularly profitable and so you're gonna see the product line get much simpler and you're gonna see the product line get much better ears to the crazy ones apples next challenge was to convince the rest of the world that Apple was worth buying from again square holes the ones who see things differently the think different advertising campaign was an attempt to relaunch the Apple brand to bring it back to the counterculture infused values that Steve Jobs first envisioned back in 1976 when the company was founded is ignore them because they changed think different was another incredibly brilliant campaign that really started to attract not only the creatives but people who wanted to be creative it honors those people who have changed the world some of them are living some of them are not but the ones that aren't as you'll see you know that if they ever used a computer it would have been a Mac I think the think different campaign was the inflection point that that took it from a downhill slide - ok no no we're gonna go on up that really is Steve's greatest gift is that he he is incredibly emotionally intelligent he understands what people want before they do he understands what they're gonna do with things before they do and that's what he capitalized on when he came back with the think different campaign so now he realizes ok we have a we have a cult here let's let's protect that cult let's feed that cult and see if we can get it to grow this group of diehard London Mac users meet monthly to share news and information on Apple like most fans of the company they reject the idea that they're like members of a cult I wouldn't see it as a cult I have a very different opinion of a cult update here is for the operating system it's now where you're getting the updates of the apps sorry do you love me Siri is Apple a religion for me Apple feels like a an old friend it does feel like a yeah a company that I've been able to trust all my life you know they've always pushed things they've always pushed the future I see cable was at primary school I was in I can remember the exact Mac I used as well it was in year three of school I remember just being able to draw on a computer screen it was something completely different the keyboard was brilliant it was translucent the mouse you if you moved it around you had the multicolored ball so you could tell if it was moving along they had spent so much effort to make you smile compared to a beige box which is boring Apple's next product certainly put a smile on the faces of the fans and the company's accountants in 1998 the iMac g3 arrived a lot of people will remember the iMac g3 as they can't have a blobby colorful Macintosh from the late 1990s its kind of translucent blue colored after the C on some Australian beach really I would say that the iMac is the machine which comes at the same time the Apple suddenly becomes profitable again so really that is one of the most significant products in Apple history was a machine that everyone could afford and it was beautiful but it was more than that it was very very easy to kind of pick up it was very very easy to feel connected to it and for it to feel like an extension of you designed by Jonathan Ive the iMac g3 was a transformative success for Apple in its first five months it sold close to 800,000 iMac g3 units it's the product which introduces the world to not only the return of Steve Jobs but also Johnny I've who becomes an enormous ly significant figure in Apple's history as the designer of so many of its later products and this was the first time that they had worked together from losing around a billion US dollars in 1997 the company posted a 309 million u.s. dollar profit just one year later and this was just the beginning Steve Jobs and Apple's next target was the music industry the record publishers were forcing young people to buy an entire album that they would listen to only for a few months on their mp3 player and the music publishing industry was almost ready to be destroyed Apple wanted do something not just a mp3 player it actually took on the challenge of saving the music publishing industry the launch of the iTunes music service in 2001 allowed users to rip burn and listen to individual music tracks legally and easily it almost single-handedly pulled the rug from music pirates and paved the way for Apple's next hardware release in October 2001 the iPod portable music player was released I think the iMac was probably the product that relaunched Apple but the innovations came quite fast one after the other so the iPod was truly revolutionary iTunes was a brilliant idea iTunes an ipod function together you can't have one without the other again you suddenly had this closed proprietary system but everyone wanted in Apple had always been a company that was willing to experiment but it hadn't ever managed to do these completely successfully with the iPod then suddenly it manages to take a very promising product the mp3 player and using some beautiful design invented as this product everyone wants many attempts have been made to produce a successful portable mp3 player notably from Asian companies like si Han Co one and creative but Apple's iPods with its innovative design backed by compelling marketing came to dominate the market becoming by 2007 the fastest selling digital music player of all time yeah it changed the entire music industry Steve Jobs next trick was to set the bar for all mobile technology we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class an iPod a phone and an Internet communicator an iPod a phone these are not three separate devices this is one device [Applause] so after a few years the iPod people start saying well as soon as someone invents a phone which is able to play music that's going to decimate the iPod market so Apple thinks that's fine but we'll invent the phone and that's when you get the the iPhone the iPhone spawned a whole breed of smartphone rivals manufacturers from Samsung to Sony entered the market sparking a new war for the supremacy of the mobile phone industry in July 2008 Apple launched the App Store with 500 apps for the iPhone in its first weekend 10 million apps were downloaded like the success of iTunes before it this was a key moment in the commodification of digital content and paved the way for future Apple products there are many companies that do one thing great and that's all they ever do so I think what the iPod iTunes followed by the iPhone made everybody realize how it wasn't just a one-hit wonder it had something in its DNA that it had the ability to make a continuous series of great products by the time the iPad came out everybody expected the iPad to come out and be a great product with its proliferation of products Apple's fan base was growing and in 2001 Steve Jobs gave his congregation a church the Apple Store Tim Kobi is the designer of the Apple stores people would see an apple advertising they would see their products and it would drive traffic to to the resellers but the resellers were also selling you know 20 other computers and so they were typically being counter sold away from the product they came in for two a one where the retailer had a better margin or would say what convinced them was a more more appropriate product okay so this is our R&D area Steve Jobs took her typically hands-on role in the design of the stores the idea of Steve you know criticizing the screw heads on these metal panels and and you know the markups and things that we went through or you know it was an extraordinary time Steve really understood what the Apple brand was about all of the qualities that we were putting into the retail store ultimately went through him as a filter that this was Apple brand qualities that were they were going into the space he was designed as a competitive tool he used it as a way of creating compelling experience for people and I think he probably used design in a much more sophisticated way than most companies most companies do the store is divided into four parts the plans for the Apple stores received a lot of criticism from the industry it was thought to be a huge risk to open a specific retail store just to sell Apple products in this first 25% of the story see the whole product line people were saying it was going to be a big mistake that they were risking millions of dollars on opening an Apple store but ultimately the real risk was probably listening to those pundits listening to those people who were saying it was risky within three years of the first Apple store opening in 2001 Apple became the fastest retailer in history to reach 1 billion u.s. dollars in sales and there are now over 500 stores across the globe they've really grown their network of Apple stores in China enormous Lee over the last few years they opened a store in Singapore last year and they're pushing to open Apple stores in India as well so they've certainly made nods to embracing that market I think opening the Apple stores was a brilliant idea because it created that sense of I'm going into somewhere special to buy a special product it's about creating that complete total customer experience Steve Jobs world's changing vision for his company was getting fulfilled but in 2003 Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and in 2011 he passed away Apple was now a huge success but with its visionary leader gone how would the company cope in new markets and facing aggressive new rivals [Music] in 2011 Apple became the world's most valuable publicly traded company on August the 24th at the same year Steve Jobs resigned from the company he had founded and six weeks later died of cancer he was 56 years old so thank you very much to our extended families out there I was devastated and I felt that they lost a you know close friend never met the man never seen him in person only ever kind of watched him from afar but so it was a real sense of loss and loss he made design cool he inspire people to like computing the quote from Blade Runner that the light that burns twice as bright lasts half as long and that was Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs died there's absolutely no doubt that it affected Apple in the sense that suddenly the company who is robbed of its visionary leader people thought that Apple would suddenly crumble without this visionary figurehead behind it Apple had struggled once before without Steve Jobs but this time jobs had groomed someone to replace him Tim Cook Tim Cook is not the same kind of leader that Steve Jobs was he's not necessarily a visionary leader but he's a great great business strategist and to give some sense of how successful Apple has been since Steve Jobs died when Steve Jobs died Apple's market cap was about three hundred and forty seven billion today it's over 900 billion and it's on its way this year to potentially becoming the world's first trillion-dollar company in history I loved I considered the privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for almost 14 years and I am very excited about this new role under Tim Cook Apple has grown globally significantly exploiting the rising power of the Asian consumer Ifill survival code in Chicago won't meet you what you go Apple is one of those real amazing success stories for China 2010-2011 they arrived and they all start buying smart phones prior to that they were not really a major force in the world Chinese consumers and Apple comes in at the right time smart phones growing very rapidly one of the things that we've seen in the last year has been an enormous sort of growing impact and importance to market like for example China and India sort of developing markets and these are ones which Apple has been very very quick to embrace [Music] Tim Cook's actually talked about the fact that Apple's products today are designed for a Chinese audience in some senses if you look at the gold iPhone which Apple introduced a few years ago that very much as a phone which has been very successful in China and quite possibly was aimed at the Chinese market to begin with 2015 is kind of the high mark where Apple's got like 25% of the China market it's responsible for half of their global growth is China and in the process of this they establish a well known incredibly well respected brand a luxury brand is really what they are yeah [Music] - time - and you'll be ready now you're on the 13 wanna what the museum's one-man show you want one you're just like iOS iCloud in China now the App Store brings in more revenue than the app store in the US so there is a sort of a shift between the two markets and I think that that's something that Tim Cook has been very very aware that he needs to kind of embrace that these are no longer markets which can just be sort of taken as you know it as a nice added extra this is where the battles of the future are really going to be fought and Tim Cook has really embraced that one of the major battles facing Apple in China is the threat of highly innovative rivals all trying to take a bite out of Apple's market Apple has succeeded in China as much as any foreign company can hope to succeed but then what always happens here is phase two which is local competitors come on and they come on very strong and that's what's been happening in the last segment since about 2015 till now it's just one very smart well-run local competitor after another vivo elbow Xiaomi hallway and now Apple is just fighting but that is that is life here I think some of the difficulties in Asia has been price so a lot of lower priced products phones you can get competition from local brands like Sami like Samsung and so on Samsung does incredibly well in ages of very strong mobile phone competitors very strong computer competitors like Lenovo so in each one of the categories in which Apple is very good it has faced very strong local competition and I think that's been difficult it's also priced at a price point which is higher than most Asian competitors are willing to pay for being at the top of the tree makes apple not only a big target for any rivals but also for any criticism battery life issues sticky keyboards environmental policies and labor violations all threatened to tarnish apples reputation and challenged the loyalty of even its most devoted fans most people are feeling bullied by Apple you know they upgraded the system on their iPhone 6 and iPhone immediately became almost unusable slow now who's that helping who is helping it's not helping the customer there are 1.3 billion active Apple devices being used around the world but to stay at the top of the tree Apple needs to keep giving customers what they want and that's innovation I really hope they will continue pushing the boundaries in terms of innovation and all those industries they're they're playing in I'm afraid that they're losing their you know the wrong Jo that they're losing that edge it hasn't been the leader it once was in terms of innovation and it's it's probably difficult for any company to sustain that over over a long period of time but where I think they should be looking to be successful is getting back to focusing on what matters to people solve the thousand songs in your pocket problem not how thick is my iPhone problem what matters is what does this technology do to make my life easier make my life better Tim Cook is an incredible an incredible CEO and an incredible steward of the assets he was left and has taken those and grown them and made an amazingly high value high value company but he's not a visionary and that's that's an issue I think for Apple Apple has evolved hugely over the past 42 years from being a company rooted in counterculture rebellion it is now a massive capitalist machine whether the next chapter for the company will see Apple growing further or being laid low by Rivals is yet to be seen what we know historically is company's rise and fall you never stay at the top for very long until somebody comes in and it's always better to be second or third or be the underdog of an industry because you have somewhere to look up to and you have a competitor you want to beat what Apple has managed to do is diversify in a way that they haven't previously today the Apple stock price is less reflective of one product than at any point in the company's history so even though the iPhone is still by a wide margin Apple's biggest seller Apple services industry for example is enormous it now represents around 30% of apples revenue that's things like Apple music which now has about 50 million worldwide subscribers are by cloud other services like this so in some ways Apple has continued to put out the hit products but not necessarily in the way that they did under Steve Jobs I actually think that despite the fact that at some point logic dictates that Apple will fall I think Apple is looking more secure and stable than at any point in its history if you look at Apple their real competitors today are not computer companies and so on they're Google Amazon those kinds of companies incredibly creative innovative companies as well but it depends what Apple has in the pipeline I don't have a crystal ball [Music]

Channel: CNA

Views: 306,396

Rating: 4.6730247 out of 5

Keywords: Apple, Bankruptcy, Business

Id: blPoY3yrKjQ

Length: 45min 45sec (2745 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018