Surprise! Yet again someone with a book out is here to say incendiary things about Apple, this time describing how the company is a loser for focusing on profits while Amazon is a winner for focusing on growth.
The Street helps gin this up, possibly wanting some of that sweet Oprah Book Club action.
“Amazon Will Blow Away Apple In Race to $1 Trillion Valuation, Galloway Predicts.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Philip Speicher.)
He might not be wrong. Investors sure do love Amazon.
Amazon is doing so much right that it will likely beat Apple to being worth $1 trillion…
Amazon’s so great. What do you think Amazon’s doing right now? Do you think it’s thinking of me? Or at least processing a whole bunch of algorithms about me in an effort to jam ads for things I searched on into my Instagram feed? I hope so. They’re so great.
Amazon, not Apple, will become the world’s first trillion dollar company, according to Scott Galloway, author of The Four, a book about Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
The Street calls Galloway a “well-known author” which is kind of a weird thing to do because his Amazon author blurb says The Four, which came out on October 3rd, “is his first book”. His Amazon author page shows two other books, but they’re both books of poetry with generic-looking covers that were published over 20 years ago, so the Macalope thinks those may not have been written by the same Scott Galloway.
It can be viewed as correct if you take it to mean that Galloway is sort of well-known and just recently became an author. He’s not exactly well-know for being an author, though.
“The stock will be anti-gravity,” Galloway said in an interview with TheStreet.
This might sound like pablum but it’s actually quite correct because anti-gravity is purely theoretical, just like Amazon’s potential to ever generate sustained, significant profits.
“If you look at where Amazon is budding heads against the other three…”
It’s actually growing heads that point at its competitors. This is how winners compete. Can’t grow multiple heads? Guess you’re not a winner.
“…(Apple, Facebook and Google), it’s winning everywhere it touches them.”
As long as you don’t define winning in terms of profit. In other words, as long as you define winning in terms that are solely favorable to Amazon, then Amazon is always winning, yes. Very good. Bees are also winning at being black and yellow.
“Amazon has replaced profits with vision and growth,” he said.
One of these things is not like the others. And it’s vision. Vision is not a metric.
Apple’s growth certainly has slowed in recent years, but it’s also shown a remarkable talent for generating growth and profit.
Like a big, dumb loser.