福布斯杂志：The iPhone 5S, Proof That Apple Has Given Up On Innovation

thundom

That’s the contention in a quite wonderful column from the economics leader writer at The Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty. That the iPhone 5s (and to some extent the 5c) is just an incremental development, nothing particularly wondrous to see here. And that means that the company has lost its innovation mojo following the death of Steve Jobs.

Well, OK, that’s a fair enough opinion actually: I don’t say that it’s true and I don’t say that it isn’t. Only that it’s a fair enough argument to make if that’s what you want to do. However, the bit that follows, about the economics of this, is truly a remarkable  point to make. Especially from one who writes about economics for a living.

    But one thing Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done is what his successor did this spring: cave into pressure from hedge funds and give the company a $100bn cashpile. When a tech firm starts buying back shares from investors, it’s as good an indication as any that it’s run out of ideas and oomph. William Lazonick at the University of Massachusetts Lowell says that Apple AAPL -0.51% is no longer a design and product firm, driven by engineers and designers, but a “financialised” company focused on returning money to Wall Street. It is, he and a team of academics conclude, “becoming a typical American corporation”. That’s a damning verdict for the company that Jobs built. But it’s also worrying in its implications for modern, financial capitalism to deliver innovation.

Let us just, arguendo, accept his point about Apple no longer being innovative. Let us also gloss over the obvious typo about Apple handing out the $100 billion cash pile as well, it’s no where near that amount being returned to investors. So, what is it that we actually want a non-innovative but highly profitable company to be doing with the rivers of cash that it is generating?

Why, we want it to be handing that money back to shareholders. Who can then reinvest it or spend it as they please. And we are entirely happy with the money flowing out of that no longer innovative company because we know, as economists or those interested in economics, that almost all innovation in the economy comes from new firms entering the market.

For that is the truth of it: Apple’s run of innovation under Jobs is the oddity in the economy. Almost always innovation, new products, new ways of doing things, new methods of organisation, that variety of things that leads to economic growth and the creation of jobs, comes from the creation of new firms and the extinction by their replacement of the old firms. So, if a company is making good profits but has no new great ideas we’d actually prefer them to be paying out dividends. Buying back stock: getting that money into the hands of investors who might then invest in new start ups.

We can go further too: if those executives at Apple knew which were the new start  ups were that were worth investing in, knew which new technologies or market areas were ripe for development, then they wouldn’t be out of ideas about what to invest in, would they? So we know, because we’ve already defined as such, that the Apple execs don’t know where to spend the money (recall, we are accepting Chakrabortty’s position for the sake of exploring it). Thus we’re absolutely delighted with the idea of it leaving their control and ending up in the hands of someone who might have a clue.

It is this that is so interesting about the argument being made. The argument is that Apple has lost its innovative mojo and also that the company returning money to investors is a bad thing because innovation. But if Apple has lost that mojo then returning money to investors is the thing we want to happen because innovation.

It’s worth noting that the economics leader writer of The Guardian trained as a historian. This fact aids in explaining much about the British soft left actually.