Thoughts about Apple as a company

• The only company that can truly do both hardware and software. This is the main source of their competitive advantage

• Probably Steve Jobs is key to this advantage. I hear he’s pretty crazy. Without him, they will probably be in trouble.

• They are not very good about servicing their products. They make it easy to buy them, which is a good idea, but they don’t provide a similar level of service/support for their products. I think that damages their brand since they’re not fulfilling their brand promise of “easy to use”. If it breaks and it’s hard to fix, that’s not good. I think that in the long term, they’d be better off doing a better job of support.

• People knock them for making their old products obsolete. I can understand that it’s frustrating if you buy something that the “wrong” time, but in general I think it’s a good strategy. Technology moves too fast, you can’t support all the legacy stuff all the time. This is a big problem for Microsoft, but it’s also the source of MSFT’s competitive advantage (keep collecting fees from entrenched users)

• I like that when you buy a Mac, it comes with all the stuff you need to use it. You don’t have to go buy all of these ancillary programs and install them, each one of which probably tries to install another toolbar and reset your home page, etc. It’s also nice that the Mac doesn’t come with tons of third party trial apps that will break the computer if you try to uninstall them.

• Their products are so much better than the competitive products that they are able to attract really top talent. Same with Google. A very nice virtuous cycle. A lot of industries are like that - people want to go work where they are working on cool stuff.