Thank You Mr. Jobs

Thirty three years later I am typing on a Mac, I own and iPad as does my wife, all four us in the family use Macs and iPhones.

Mr. Jobs was, not arguably, was, the greatest businessman of the second half of the twentieth century and easily the best one in this new century. The testament to his success is the way people describe his former and vanquished rival Bill Gates – "Gates is the richest man in the world." Not the best businessman or visionary or technologist or leader. Gates and Jobs stole the idea of a windows based computing environment together from Xerox. Gates browbeat the world into using Windows; Jobs wooed the world and in the end he got it right, people came to the Mac and Apple and superior design and ease of use they were not forced into it by upgrade policies and explicit threats of obsolescence that became the norm of the Microsoft sales force.

This journey had ups and downs and his genius as a businessman is best seen in his ability to re-invent and to create – the first generation Apples, at that time the Lisa, at that time the operating system of the Then, well Pixar, at the time the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad, the cloud. You can see him introduce the Mac here.

Investor or trader

And since you are probably an investor or trader, you must be aware that Apple is the best company on the planet, should be trading at $800-$1100 a share based on historical valuations and is only about one third through its conquest of the marketplace. It doubled in size while the intensity of the Great Recession, it will do so again in the then and there three years without any sacrifice of profit margins. It has however a tiny fraction of the cell phone market – like as not less than 4% worldwide. It has less than 3% of the worldwide computer market. And if you count netbooks, tablets and low cost laptops as one market, it as has less than 10% of that market. Incredible room to run. it is the one great stock on any thinking person's list of stocks to own.

I own it, I am not selling it, I write covered calls against it and generate my own 15%-18% dividend, I don’t care if it slides with the market, and if I ever sell it, I will keep one share, get the actual share, and frame it.