Apple Surpasses Microsoft as Most Valuable Technology Company

Não sou acionista e não pretendo ser; não ganho nada com isso. Sou apenas um usuário, durante toda a minha vida informática, dos produtos da Apple. Estou escrevendo num MacBookPro e uso um iPhone, apenas isso. Acho que a companhia merece o título concedido agora.
Mas atenção: a estratégia perseguida pela Apple é muito arriscada: ao manter sua tecnologia proprietária, fechada à clonagem e ao licensiamento ostensivo, ela pode perder mercado para concorrentes baseados em tecnologias abertas.
Quase ocorreu isso, 14 anos atrás, na concorrência entre o sistema operacional da Apple e o Windows, que estava sendo lançado pela Microsoft. Pode ocorrer o mesmo entre o iPhone (e seus derivados) e o telephone da Google, baseado em outra plataforma, aberta a inovações de terceiros. Ver o artigo mais abaixo.
Paulo R Almeida

Apple Surpasses Microsoft as Most Valuable Technology Company

Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world's most valuable technology company.

In intraday trading in the afternoon session, Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27apple.html?emc=na

Apple's Second Date with History
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, May 26, 2010

Whose phone strategy is smarter in the long run—Apple's or Google's?
Apple almost went out of business 14 years ago, and many would have blamed what seemed one of the seminal business blunders in history.

Bill Gates was chatting with students at Stanford at the time and recalled letters he'd written to Steve Jobs begging him to allow cloning of Apple hardware. Had Mr. Jobs complied, Apple's operating system might have become the de facto universal standard, the one everybody wrote software for—a role that fell to Windows instead.

If you think missing out on the riches that Microsoft created for its shareholders was an error, Mr. Jobs erred. Then again, the Web came along to take the deathly sting out of the battle of the operating systems, and Apple resurrected itself as a maker of tasty computing devices for a segment of the public that valued tastiness.

Historical analogies are one of the cheapest in the columnist's bag of tricks, and a temptation usually to be resisted. But here goes: Isn't Steve Jobs replaying the gamble that almost broke Apple?

Google may not be Microsoft, exactly: For one thing, Google is giving away its smartphone operating system, known as Android, for free. Nor will the battle yield a similar winner-take-all outcome. But otherwise the effects are likely to be the same.

Because Mr. Jobs insists on keeping software and hardware under tight control, Google's platform is the one that will benefit from competition among multiple handset makers, producing lower prices and faster innovation, including a flurry of soon-to-arrive tablets and a variety of new devices aimed at niches (say, with a focus on navigation or texting).

Likewise, because Mr. Jobs insists on vetting all applications that run on his phones via the iTunes App Store, you'll need an Android phone to capture the full benefit of openness to the Web. Soon, Android users can expect their available services and apps permanently to outstrip those available to iPhone users through the App store.

Now, as then, the full stakes are only dimly perceived even by the participants. Then, it turned out to be the PC's world-wide adoption as the indispensable productivity tool. Today the term "smartphone" is scarcely adequate to describe a future in which individuals, wherever they go, whatever they do, will always have constant, instant access to the resources of the global "cloud."

Here, another Google advantage is likely to manifest itself over time. It makes its money from advertising (and from collecting data it can sell to advertisers) and its customers reciprocate by wanting services for free, which means advertising-supported.

In contrast, Apple makes its money from hardware sales, and by strong-arming its way to a share of users' telecom subscriber fees and infotainment purchases—all of which could be ripe to be competed away in a dynamic cloudphone marketplace.

The dangers of Google's approach? With so many different Android phones floating around and with so much openness to the Web, the search giant risks delivering a crummy, fragmented, even disastrous user experience, with security leaks, viruses and customer service that fails when needed most.

For Apple, the immediate danger is overreach, undermining its ability to deliver an ineffably superior user experience that just pleases. Apple has decided it needs an advertising strategy. It will need a TV strategy, especially after Google last week announced a version of Android to bring the cloud cornucopia to the biggest, best screen yet. Apple may also find it needs a strategy to compete in search. It certainly will need a strategy to make sure its infotainment offerings through iTunes don't fall behind in price and variety what Android users can get through their browsers.

That's a plateful for a company that, until recently, could focus almost entirely on perfecting the interface between its customer and the underlying electronics. But history has dealt Apple one break the second time around. Its earlier battle with Microsoft was winner-take-all thanks to an historical accident—the failure of the Web to introduce itself a bit earlier and blow up what a Microsoft judge called the "applications barrier to entry."

Apple this time understands (we hope) that it isn't playing for all the marbles, but can build a very nice business on just those customers who crave a premium service tightly controlled by the wonderful Mr. Jobs, even if it means paying a bit more and forgoing access to a lot of Web goodies that might not work so well in favor of a smaller number that work really well.

Still, we'd rather be Google. Why? Because Google can fail at everything but as long as it keeps its search box at the center of our digital lives, the ad gusher will continue to flow.