The Story and Analysis of Apple’s Trillion Dollar Journey

How Apple Did It

In “Apple’s Road to a Trillion Dollar Company,” Tim Bajarin tells the story of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in July, 1997. Then Steve and, later, Tim Cook, brought huge success to Apple. Bajarin provides some great background on how it happened.

In late 1996, while serving as an outside adviser to Apple and their executive committee, I was called in to meet with then CEO Gil Amelio. During this meeting, he asked me about the idea of acquiring NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs back to work with him as a consultant to this project. The idea was to use the NeXT OS core for the new Mac OS and build on this.

It’s the kind up-close and personal story that reveals how Apple started its ascent from beleaguered to being worth a trillion dollars. In his section “Fundamentals of the Journey,” author Bajarin lists the reasons for Apple’s rise from the depths. This is a good read and sets the stage for market analysis.

What It Means for Apple, Investors and Customers

In this next article, Jim Cramer writes: “10 reasons why Apple hitting $1 trillion matters for the stock market.”

As I’ve observed on TMO’s Daily Observation Podcast, the number itself is meaningless compared to, say, US$900 billion or $1.2 trillion. But the psychological impact is all out of proportion to the number itself, expressed in U.S. dollars.

Just the fact that this success is being met with enthusiasm instead of fear or derision speaks volumes about Tim Cook’s values and leadership. Cramer explains why that’s so.

Of course, our emotional investment in Apple’s products doubles up with the company’s financial success and our enthusiasm for that. The two are, of course, entangled.

But then, we knew that all along.

Next Page: The News Debris for the week of July 30th. AI tech is our fate.

Page 2 – News Debris For The Week of July 30th

AI Tech is Our Fate.

I’ll start this page with a tutorial. “The Plain English Guide to Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning.”

The business world often uses the terms machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence as interchangeable buzzwords. The problem? Each is uniquely different from its siblings. With so much terminology describing different pieces of the same AI puzzle, it’s easy to misunderstand various components.

Now that you have your bearings, I should point out that Microsoft has been fairly blunt about the risks of AI. “Microsoft warns investors about A.I. risks, including ‘biased information’ and ‘ethical issues’.” The article has highlighted, in a grey box, Microsoft’s concerns. This is only natural. A publicly held corporation must tell its investors about potential risks.

Pepper robot. Image credit: Soft Bank Robotics

And so as we think about AIs, eventually instantiated in robots or androids, it’s helpful to be aware of related research that may give us pause.

• Could you be emotionally blackmailed by a cute robot?


• New study finds it’s harder to turn off a robot when it’s begging for its life

These two articles suggest that everything we’ve been worried about is coming to fruition. It’s almost as if the AI industry has its own momentum, a fateful drive towards everything we’ve been warning ourselves about. And yet. We forge on.

Perhaps it’s a cultural thing. See: “Why Westerners Fear Robots And The Japanese Do Not.”

In any case, here’s one light and the end of the AI tunnel. “The future role of AI in fact checking.” Author Cousins writes:

As an analyst, I’d like to have a universal fact checker. Something like the carbon monoxide detectors on each level of my home. Something that would sound an alarm when there’s danger of intellectual asphyxiation from choking on the baloney put forward by certain sales people, news organizations, governments, and educators, for example.

But then, that supposes we have great faith on the AI fact checker’s design integrity and lack of bias. Can that be done?

It’s all something to ponder.

---

Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holiday weeks.

Share this post