Apple Market Value exceeds $500B

Wow Apple! The market value exceeded $500B and now everyone is speculating if it will reach One Trillion, which no company has ever aspired. As I look into the valuation this morning, Apple is at $505B. Microsoft is almost at half of that at $266B. Look at the other big ones in technology sector – Oracle ($146B), Amazon($82B), Cisco ($107B), IBM ($229B), Intel ($134B), Google ($201B), and HP($50B). Other stalwarts for comparison are – Wal-Mart($202B), GE($202B), and Exxon Mobile($408B).

Someone commented that if Apple was part of the Dow Jones, then the value would have exceeded 14000 few months back. Apple is an American pride institution that symbolizes great creativity, innovation, and visionary leadership in planning and execution. Once written off as a “has-been”, Apple came back with a vengeance largely due to the dynamic leadership and imagination of the late Steve Jobs. He married liberal arts and computer science into a blend of consumer products that reached the pinnacle of success. It puts the leadership at Microsoft and even Google to the back benches. Let us not even talk about HP.

Steve put together a great leadership team and Apple will continue on its growth for next couple of years. They will announce the new iPad 3 next week on March 7th. I am sure newer versions of iPhone and MacBooks are on the pipeline. Their foray into television should begin to shake up that sector, much like what they did to music, smartphones and tablets. For now, Tim Cook and team seem to charge forward with the same vigor as their departed leader.

At a personal level, I was a user of all Apple products except the laptop, then I bought my first MacBook Air around Thanksgiving time. Now I am in love with my MacBook Air with its SSD and lightning fast boot-up. Every time I go back to my old IBM ThinkPad running Windows, I am in a time-warp of some prehistoric technology.

Hats off to Apple with its great success!

When your email gets hacked!

Yes, that happened last week to my yahoo mail (ATT) account. On a fine morning, my first instant message from a friend warned me that my email account has been hacked and security compromised. That was followed by several calls and mail messages. The intruder was sending a fake email in my name about me being in distress in London and asking for financial help. Hundreds of my contacts got this mail. Most of them knew such spams and ignored it, but some got alarmed and called to check if everything was ok.

I immediately changed my password and the email was accessible, but to my horror, all the contacts and mail folders were gone! My inbox was empty with no messages. It was like starting from scratch. I tried to call Yahoo and AT&T repeatedly, one sending me to the other in a loop, with no clear answer to recovering my lost contacts and mail folders. AT&T has to rank as the worst in customer support and their outsourced help-desk folks must have the lowest IQ. All they can do is to help you change your password! When I asked Yahoo about recovering the folders and contacts from a backup copy, I was explained very carefully that such things evaporate from the server never to be found again! Are we in 2012 or what? For now, my respect for PC-based mail like Outlook has gone up. 

For web-mails, another idea is to back up the folders and contacts into a cloud-storage product such as Dropbox, so that recovery is possible. I did recover my contacts from this MacBook’s address book (thank God, it was backed up there when I bought my new MacBook Air). Losing several folders with important mails feels like your home has been burglarized.  The agony of changing passwords to many other financial accounts is daunting. Fraud prevention and identity protection have to be the new hot category.

I was also advised that Gmail may be lot safer in that respect and Yahoo mail seems to be frequently subject to hacker attacks. One positive outcome is that I am much more sensitive to security management and alternative backups.

Nasscom 2012 – Down the memory lane

I just saw the Nasscom’s (National Association of Software and Services Companies) annual conference program called India Leadership Forum (ILF) 2012. It is an impressive agenda of great topics and speakers that range from the actors (Abhishek Bachhan and Shekhar Kapoor), to political leaders (Kapil Sibal, P. Chidamabram), industry stalwarts (K.M. Birla, Rajendra Pawar, ..) to technical leaders from the software world as well as services world.

The website talks about 20 years of leadership which brings me to this recollection. It was 1992, exactly twenty years back, that I was invited to speak at the Nasscom event in Delhi. I had just left IBM after 16 years of work in developing relational technology products like DB2. I joined Oracle that year in April and the Nasscom event was held in December. The late Dewang Mehta, the founder and first president of Nasscom organized the event, one of the first large forums for those days. Remember, this was one year after the de-regulation of the Indian economy and the beginning of an Indian software outsourcing presence in the global scene. Dewang became a close friend and kept expanding Nasscom until his untimely death few years later.

Mr. N. Vittal was the secretary, DOT who was the inaugural speaker and I had a one-on-one meeting with him the day before. The keynote speakers included known names like Narayan Murthy of Infosys and Fakir Chand Kohli of TCS. When I spoke of the emerging trends in software, the interest was tremendous as I was mobbed by so many people after the talk for the rest of the conference. This was pre-Internet and the focus was all about enterprise computing and how to leverage the client-server computing architecture for cost-performance.

I also spoke at Nasscom back in 2003 in Mumbai. The audience was bigger and the topics were wider. I mentioned of the need for India 2.0 where innovation is to be emphasized besides services. Looking at this agenda, I do not see many new companies with innovative technologies coming out of India. The best ones are copycats such as Flipkart (Amazon like book selling via the web to the Indian market), or several travel sites. Here in Silicon valley, innovation is happening with a vengeance. Many exciting new breakthroughs are reshaping our industry. India seems to live on the “service” focus and slowly moving to product building and innovation.