Posted on 04/02/2015 12:52:50 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple's AAPL -0.18% best days are behind it. And the decline started after Steve Jobs negotiated an exclusive deal for AT&T T +0.74% to be the iPhone’s carrier. Its best hope for the future may be Apple Pay.
That’s my summary of what Stanford Graduate School of Business Lecturer, Mark Leslie, told me about Apple in a March 31 interview.
Leslie’s route to the globe’s top business school comes not from his academic achievements but for what he has done in business. As Chairman and CEO of backup software maker, Veritas Software, from 1990 to 2001, he oversaw its growth from $4 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, according to SandHill.
Veritas did an IPO in 1993 and used the currency to make acquisitions that helped it to overcome the limits to its growth in the market in which it got started. As Leslie told SandHill, “the big lesson I learned is that whatever the business – no matter how great it is – it’s not always going to be a great business. And you need to start thinking about that, and planning for the changes, when things are going well.”
Leslie expanded on this idea in a recent blog post — the Arc of Company Life — and How To Prolong It. He starts off with the accepted notion that companies are born, grow fast, mature, and die.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Leslie was brought on board an already existing company founded in 1983 named “Tolerant Systems” as a CEO in 1989, where he changed the name to “Veritas” in honor of his alma Mater, Stanford.
His approach to Veritas’ growth was acquisitions, not innovation. And his $1.5 Billion Market Cap was in the middle of the Dot Com Boom. . . and literally wasn’t real. It was a BUBBLE that popped. It was acquired by Symantec in 2004.
What is REALLY amusing is that it got where it was by signing an EXCLUSIVE deal with . . . AT&T . . . for their UNIX file system management!
Simply HILARIOUS!
In his lecture on Apple, especially in his claims about excluding deals with AT&T, it is becoming obvious to me, wearing my Economist and ex-CEO hat, that he is recapitulating his OWN business experiences and the arch of the rise and fall in the dot-com bubble burst of Veritas!
There is nothing profoundly deep about his analysis that is at all transferable to Apple’s business arch or that of any other business. He is projecting his Veritas Johnny one-note business experience to ALL businesses, mistaking his limited experience as the way every business must live and die. His view is very parochial and myopic.
No, its best hope is Apple Gay.
Ha...nothing new here....he just took from Ichak Adizes....
Managing Corporate Lifecycles: Ichak Adizes, Adizes ... www.amazon.com/...Ichak-Adizes/dp/0735200572 Amazon.com, Inc. Managing Corporate Lifecycles [Ichak Adizes, Adizes] on Amazon.com. ... Once in the PRIME stage, the author presents proactive measures for maintaining ..
dot.com bubble? Some would argue that we are in one of the biggest market bubbles of all time...
We’re in the thirhttp://www.marketwatch.com/story/were-in-the-third-biggest-stock-bubble-in-us-history-2014-07-15?link=MW_populard biggest stock bubble in U.S. history
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