I am way happier with stock buyback vs. dividend right now, since the stock is so undervalued. There are also tax benefits to buyback.
I would love to see Apple spend billions each (not tens of billions) on:
1) turning iCloud into something amazing -- an individual, small business, or enterprise framework to do device management, sync, etc. Everything Steve Jobs would have wanted as a consumer service, but also available as SAAS or on-premises, like BES, to manage the phones for a company.
2) Don't go into the enterprise software market, but buy a decent enterprise software company or talent just for talent, and get those guys to make Apple the way to develop enterprise software. Basically everything Microsoft does with MSDN, easy hooks to build for the enterprise, etc.
3) Invest in GitHub, either in equity, or just in first-class support. Integrate GitHub and Apple software development and ideally some app development tool like Parse, so it's easy for power users, enterprise IT, and third party developers to build apps for the ecosystem.
4) Use security as a competitive advantage; build platform security like on iOS for OSX, but even better than the best option out there today (ChromeOS). Great management tools for individuals, companies, developers to do MDM, ERM, etc. Make using Apple devices with Apple-blessed apps and Apple-blessed services actually safe.
5) Make i18n/l10n for the Apple ecosystem better and easier than for anything else.
(disclaimer: I have what for me is a fairly huge open call position in apple options over the next 2 years, so I'm pretty "invested" in Apple's success)
Apple used to run an awesome developer program; it's dropped off a lot in the past decade. All the stuff which "forums" do now, used to be directly done by Apple. It's amazing; it used to be as good as MSDN if not better.
They could dominate this today, especially since it's mostly standard open source with only a little bit of Apple extra. There is no reason for Apple not to have awesome web development resources for Apple enhanced platforms (like how Microsoft does with .Net/.Asp/etc.) at the level of what it does with Objective-C. And, since Objective-C is essentially only an Apple thing, Apple should be out in the lead in education making Objective-C a super-approachable language, like Google does with Go.
How do you think Apple makes its products ? Magic ?
They have to communicate and partner with lots of suppliers from small to large around the world. They also have content partnerships with Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Tom Tom, Yelp etc. And the there is the huge array of media partnerships in the iTunes Store.
Apple don't communicate and partner. They give orders and expect obedience. The only partnership I can think of is the iBooks one. And it went to court.
I would love to see Apple spend billions each (not tens of billions) on:
1) turning iCloud into something amazing -- an individual, small business, or enterprise framework to do device management, sync, etc. Everything Steve Jobs would have wanted as a consumer service, but also available as SAAS or on-premises, like BES, to manage the phones for a company.
2) Don't go into the enterprise software market, but buy a decent enterprise software company or talent just for talent, and get those guys to make Apple the way to develop enterprise software. Basically everything Microsoft does with MSDN, easy hooks to build for the enterprise, etc.
3) Invest in GitHub, either in equity, or just in first-class support. Integrate GitHub and Apple software development and ideally some app development tool like Parse, so it's easy for power users, enterprise IT, and third party developers to build apps for the ecosystem.
4) Use security as a competitive advantage; build platform security like on iOS for OSX, but even better than the best option out there today (ChromeOS). Great management tools for individuals, companies, developers to do MDM, ERM, etc. Make using Apple devices with Apple-blessed apps and Apple-blessed services actually safe.
5) Make i18n/l10n for the Apple ecosystem better and easier than for anything else.
(disclaimer: I have what for me is a fairly huge open call position in apple options over the next 2 years, so I'm pretty "invested" in Apple's success)