Tim Cook's No Bang Theory For Apple

The last two weeks or so,   Apple has been rumored to be looking at a Tidal acquisition to boost its iTunes and services side of the business. Although there has been no official announcement from either side, the chatter is hot and heavy that Apple is in talks with Jay-Z to buy Tidal. The acquisition makes sense since it will bring Tidal's stable of artists already signed to the Apple iTunes stable pretty much like the Beats acquisition did.

However, does it move the needle like the acquisitions and moves made by the competition?

Satya Nadella takes over as CEO of Microsoft and pretty soon engages in and wins a bidding war for LinkedIn for a final deal price of $26.2 billion.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet , takes over and continues making a splash in autonomous driving, soon-to-launch music service, artificial intelligence or AI-based Nest products and who knows what else.

Lest we forget, Alphabet also hires Ruth Porat in May of last year and the shares are up 31% since that hire despite a perceived miss for the March quarter of 2016. Not saying that Ruth Porat is responsible for the rise by herself, but she is a Wall Street savvy veteran who knows better than most CFO's what investors want and she has found a way to deliver albeit not this past March.

Amazon is just about into every single things one can think of whether it is acquiring planes, tractor trailers, shipping rights,and just about anything else to grow their business and lower their fulfillment costs.

Then we have Tim Cook and his "genius" acquisition of Beats and now maybe Tidal to focus on the services business which for the year ended September 2015 accounted for 10% of overall revenues. Heck, let's say that the Beats and the rumored acquisition of Tidal turn out to be the savviest acquisitions in corporate history.

What will those acquisitions do? Double services revenues this fiscal year? I don't think so!

Increase them by 50%? Not a chance!

So, let's say because of these two companies, services revenues go up about 25% right away this year (although even that will not happen), that will add a mere $5 billion to overall revenues of Apple or less than 2%.

Then, let's talk about Tim Cook bringing on Angela Ahrendts from Burberry for a whopping $80 million package. Are you kidding me? Where is she? What has she been doing? Last week pagesix.com had a hilarious but scary (from a shareholder perspective) article on what Angela has been doing recently.

So, while Tim Cook continues to employ his "no bang theory" at Apple to the detriment of shareholders, all the while going pedal to the metal on thus-far-useless buybacks which have basically only served to mask the decline in earnings to an extent, the competition is speeding ahead with move-the-needle acquisitions and actual savvy hires.

We have all heard the saying, "Walk softly but carry a big stick."  Tim Cook is maybe walking too softly and carrying not even a twig and that approach is just not getting the job done except for allowing Apple management to gleefully cash in on their stock options and stock awards/grants.

(Long aapl, calls)