Apple Shareholder Meeting: No Dividend or Stock Split, Majority Vote Requirement for Directors

[IJ Reilly]

My point is once you get there, your business has to shift its focus to retention... and it's not a fun business to be in because of the dynamics of existing customer expectations and all kinds of other fun and complicated metrics. Apple is getting closer as they keep growing, period. Their share of wallet increases, so remaining share of wallet shrinks. It's not rocket science and there's no way around this except by expanding the wallet faster than you expand into new product lines.

I don't make business/investment decisions on conjecture. What I simply do is evaluate the position of the business today, because the soundness of the business today is the engine that drives its operating prospects tomorrow. (Look at it from the converse... and you'll see what I mean)

I also don't make predictions about where I think they'll be.... all I'm saying is they're nearer to the wall than many other underpriced companies I can find in various industries. In the end, I'm looking for growth. It's not more special to me what products they are or aren't in... If a chewing gum company costs me less than working capital and they have solid growth, I don't care that it's an unsexy product. The internet isn't going to change how people chew gum 5, 10 or 100 years from now.

But technology is a much faster moving target... and that makes me uncomfortable. Rapid growth equals high risk, and I'm not in a hurry to risk loss of principal.

I don't make predictions either, so I think we agree on the difficulties of being a seer of the future where the markets are concerned. Technology and otherwise, IMO.

The conjecture I refer to is your apparent assumption that Apple must necessarily try to squeeze more money out of the same wallets. I believe their clear strategy is to continually go after new wallets -- and with billions of people in the world, the supply of wallets is not so limited as you imply. Apple's strategy is different than the one Microsoft pursued. Microsoft was after pure market dominance with a couple of products, an approach which put them at the wall in a defensive posture. Apple is attacking markets which either didn't exist previously or where they previously weren't players (in the latter case, markets where capturing a five percent share is a big deal).

Will that strategy continue to work? I honestly don't know. I know only that it wasn't supposed to work anything close to this long. I suspect we are in somewhat uncharted territory.

I think you know my opinion of the concept of undervaluation, so I won't continue to argue that point. We won't agree on that one.

Famous last words of passengers on the Titanic and Costa Concordia. All ships are potentially leaky. Including all the ones you are currently riding (planet Earth and etc.).

Those who "predicted" they were on unsinkable ships are just fooling themselves about making a guess than turned out lucky. Your very life is a leaky ship: a common very first symptom of unknown heart desease is sudden death. The same thing has happened and will happen to world economies, markets, companies, and products. Complex systems never continue in one direction.

I didn't make that argument, so I don't know what you are driving at here.