Apple was at junk bond status and very close to bankruptcy in 1996 before Steve Jobs came back and turned the whole company around.
Most other success stories involve first going bankrupt (ex. GM, Delta).
Most other success stories involve first going bankrupt (ex. GM, Delta).
Had Jobs kept Apple only in the computer business trying to sell colorful expensive iMacs as alternative to cheap gray PCs, they would have long been bankrupt and their carcass devoured by Dell or Lenovo by now.
Boeing doesn't have any other new untapped markets they can enter and dominate. Come to think of it, neither does Apple now. They tried with the Vision Pro VR helmet thingy but that was a massive flop compared to the iPod and iPhone, coupled with the the shut down of their rumored secretive EV program, so they're left keep trying to milk that 30% AppStore fee as long as they can get away with.
It's where all the revenue growth is at Apple right now. All their hardware businesses are enormous and safe, but basically stagnant. That the majority of revenue is from hardware doesn't mean the future of the company doesn't lie in its ability to extract ever more blood from a stone.
Yeah, but that slice of the market is in decline for them.
"According to Stocklytics.com, iPhone revenue dropped $2.7 billion year-over-year, totaling $85.2 billion in H1 2024."
Makes sense since everyone and their dog already has an iPhone and keeps them for longer than ever meaning selling more iPhones now is more challenging compared to monetizing all the stuff people buy and do on them.
What Steve Jobs did that saved the company was put the hatchet to everything that didn't have an inkling of making cold hard cash. He killed the Newton, destroyed the convoluted product line, and most importantly put the whole company under one P&L statement. That's what saved Apple.
That he then was able to quickly herald a return to portable devices with the iPod is what allowed Apple to become the behemoth it is today. It's useless to pretend to know exactly what would have happened had Apple not made iPod.
> In the quarter the iMac shipped, Macintosh computer sales grew year-on-year for the first time since late 1995, and saw the Mac grow its worldwide market share from 3 to 5 percent. Apple went from losing $878 million in 1997 to making $414 million in 1998, its first profit in three years.
You're forgetting a 150 mil from Microsoft.
People want what Boeing sells: airplanes. They just need to make better products, like Apple did.
Technology is where autonomous flying cars, for example, are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Less ambitious would be things like sleeper planes for long haul red-eyes.
General aviation is a smaller industry, but also ripe for distribution by someone with capital and regulatory connections. It's stuck in 1970-era technology.
I can name dozen of other things Boeing could pull off, if lead by someone like Jobs -- someone with both vision and the ability to execute.
This just sounds like fantasy wishful thinking like Elon's Hyperloop or FSD Model 3 Robotaxis that have been constantly around the corner in the next 6 months for the past 6 years.
>are mostly constrained by regulatory and major capital.
Ah yeah, those pesky regulations about *checks notes*… not killing people. Just like that millionaire "innovator" that got himself and others killed with his carbon fiber submarine who thought he could innovate his way around regulations and engineering process build around decades of accidents and deaths at sea.
Maybe stuff like this shouldn't be left to the move-fast-and-break-things crowd.
This is even more true in zoning. There are much better ways to build homes possible, but not when a regulation is phrased in terms of distance between wooden stuffs, rather than safety and durability.
Economies of scale continue to mean that entrenched technologies get used.
Pilot licensing is especially onerous, where control systems allow flight to be a lot simpler, and a lot of very hard-to-fly technologies (like autogyros) can't be brought to mass scale not due to technology but simply due to regulation.
I think a bankruptcy restructuring would do a world of good for Boeing, the sooner the better. The longer it keeps in this state, the further behind it gets.