Amazon

[Grieve]

And much of their "diversity" is really interconnected. Samsung, for example, sells printers but they aren't reliant on the success of some Samsung branded computer for their success. Samsung's computer business could go belly up tomorrow and the rest of Samsung would function just fine. Samsung has a lot of diversity in their offerings.

You call that a problem, I call that genius. It's the Apple "halo" effect. Someone buys an iPod or an iPhone, loves it, and goes looking for other Apple products like a mac or a iPad. Someone visits a family member, sees them Airplaying a game from their iPhone to their big screen TV, and thinks "man, I've got to get an Apple TV". Someone has an iPhone with 200 apps, and wants to buy a tablet. Do they buy a Kindle Fire and have to buy all their apps from scratch, or an iPad that will play all their existing apps?

I think investor confidence would go up if they could either release something new and big that's not quite so intricately tied to their previous products

Refrigerators? Garden furniture? Chocolate bars?

or if it was a bit clearer that they had some good plans for their excess billions.

I think investors would be far more concerned if they went out and blew their cash on buying Facebook or Disney or whatever. They announced a dividend, a buyback, they are aggressively expanding their stores
worldwide, and they are buying up components in bulk at a discount. All good things in my book.

Apple, despite being way richer than a lot of other companies on that list, is spending relatively little on R&D, both in terms of real dollars and percentages. I mean really. They're being outspent by Seagate and EMC? It does make me wonder what the heck they're doing, or where they're planning to go as a company.

More isn't always (or even usually) better. HP is spending 4X as much on R&D, and yet their profit tanked 44% last quarter. Is that the model Apple should follow?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...14640.html