Best. Analyst. Ever.
Hindsight is 20/20, and we certainly have had quite a few missed Apple predictions ourselves, but this little bit of Apple history is just such a fun read for any current Apple stockholder, that I felt I must pass it along.
Any writer will tell you that the mixed blessing of the internet is that all your articles, good or bad, are permanently out there for the world to stumble across. Well, faithful Macenstein reader Jeff stumbled across a December 11th, 2000 BusinessWeek article (that’s about 11 months pre-iPod, folks), by Sam Jaffe, who wrote a now-hilarious take on Apple’s future financial prospects, somewhat akin to the Michael Dell “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders” advice of 1997.
You can read Jaffe’s full article here, but some of the best quotes are…
“Investors may be asking themselves what Apple can do to revive its fortunes. The likely answer, unfortunately, is that Steve Jobs has no white rabbits left in his hat. Apple appears to be facing a dead end in its business growth, the victim of mismanagement and unmitigated hubris.”
“..it’s possible that the company can prove the skeptics wrong and come up with some snazzy new products that persuade non-Apple customers to jump on the bandwagon.
That scenario, however, is a long shot. For the time being, with so many disappointments, it’s hard to see how the company might manage to turn its fortunes around. ”
“When Apple (AAPL ) CEO Steve Jobs told analysts in a Dec. 5 conference that the company was going to miss revenue expectations for its fiscal fourth quarter, many people wrote it off as yet another disappointment from a company that has produced so many of them.”
Odds are this article is framed and hanging in the bathroom of Steve Jobs’ private jet.
OK, this article was SOOOO rong at that time. But think at Apple now : don’t you think that they have no more huge projects in their hat ? Don’t you think that all of them are allready there ?
I’m a Mac user since 2001, and I love both Macs with their softwares and iPhone/iPods. But what then ?
Being an analyst has to suck. You have to say SOMETHING about stocks, but in the end, it’s all guess work and luck, and you can come off like a tool. This was right after the cube debacle, but most analysts’ reaction to bad news for Apple has historically been to panic, so obviously the cube didn’t sell, and they jumped out of the window. Now, with the iPod, analysts are a little more secure with Apple, but really, AAPL still falls way too fast on bad industry news compared to other tech companies.