on 13 March 2009I saw a documentary the other day about the Hudson River plane crash. It was one of those crap documentaries that are made up of clips from other documentaries interspersed with not quite relevant but easily acquired videotape, in this case featuring neither the plane nor the pilot involved but some completely unrelated pilots in a different plane. Well, not actually a plane, more of a flight simulator. To be honest, they might as well have filmed Fearne Cotton playing Imagine Aeroplane on the Nintendo DS.
It was worth sitting through this, however, for one piece of genuinely thought-provoking footage. This showed an Ethiopian Airlines 767, hijacked in 1996, attempting to land on water, the same trick pulled off by Chesley Sullenberger in New York. As the captain skilfully grapples with three assailants and an inconvenient lack of fuel, ET-AIZ is seen descending gracefully towards the ocean, lightly skimming the surface for a few hundred metres before the fuselage cartwheels end over end into oblivion and everybody dies. The point is that anything can look easy once it’s been done; that doesn’t mean there weren’t a thousand more likely ways it could have gone horribly wrong.
Like many of my colleagues in the Mac press, and no doubt many more of our readers, I’ve often thought about buying some Apple shares but never quite got round to it. Last autumn, when the price dipped into the 70s, I happened to have a bit of cash sitting temporarily idle, and a gut feeling that it was the right time. Granted, the intestine is arguably not the organ best equipped to analyse equity markets, but had I followed its recommendation, within three months, taking into account the fortuitously synchronised collapse of sterling, I’d have doubled my money. But of course I didn’t. D’oh.
It’s vital to remind oneself at such times of Murphy’s multiverse law of probability. In the universe where I didn’t buy, Apple stock went up and the pound went down. In the universe where I took the plunge, Alistair Darling produced a masterstroke of fiscal intervention that pushed sterling to an all-time high, reducing US denominated investments to chump change, while Steve Jobs was secretly replaced by Bernie Madoff, who swapped the entire company for Stanford bonds. You see now how procrastination is really a gift.
There’s another universe, though, in which a share of AAPL will set you back $200. And this one isn’t fantasy; it’s already been real. December 2007, to save you looking it up. Give or take a little intervening global financial meltdown, what looked so much better for Apple then? Nothing. The iPhone wasn’t 3G. The MacBook range was on its last legs. We hadn’t yet learned that 10 per cent of all web page traffic came from Macs. And we still cared about Steve Jobs’ health.
Worrying about Steve was the most obvious reason why the stock continued to slide through 2008. Why not pile in while the price was low? Because if you woke up the next morning and found reports of the CEO’s death were no longer exaggerated, you’d also be reading the obituary of your money. Apple is Jobs, Jobs is Apple. Everyone knows that.
Yet in January, the man finally admitted he needed six months off, and the brand went on. Announcing a sabbatical was a way of calling the market’s bluff, a point rammed home by making Phil Schiller do San Francisco. Seeing Phil’s unJobslike form shambling onto the stage induced a visceral shock, like that awful moment in Vanilla Sky where Tom Cruise catches sight of the mirror and realises he looks like Owen Wilson.
Unable to prevent everybody biting their nails about what would happen to Apple the day he wasn’t there any more, Steve’s cunning plan was to make believe that day was now. The result should have been that either the stock price halved, because the sky really had fallen, or it doubled, because Chicken Little was an idiot. Instead, Wall Street looked down at the floor, scuffed its shoe casually, and muttered something about not being that bothered about the whole thing anyway.
Why? Perhaps nobody wants to jump either way until they see how Steve’s recovery goes. But come on: if anyone seriously thinks he’ll be back in June, it must be the same person who believed in 1997 that the then ‘Interim CEO’ was actually going to hire someone else to run Apple while he went back to pottering around corridors at Pixar. Chances are, the second reign of Jobs is over. We can’t be afraid of it because it’s already happened.
So what else is worrying us? I think it’s something bigger than the lack of a big boss: it’s the lack of a big idea. Since Steve came back, Apple has made it look easy. Of course somebody had to invent the iMac. The iTunes Store was the obvious way forward. The world was waiting for the iPod. And the iPhone was a no-brainer. But the longer the run of perfect touchdowns, the longer the odds – no matter who’s at the controls.
Adam Banks has a recurring nightmare in which his life savings are invested in AppleTV.
Published in MacUser, 13 March 2009
UPDATE: Then Jobs came back and announced the iPad and the stock price went back over $200…
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper
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