"flip top volcanic island"
and other options from: www.villainsource.com
Nice, mine's the one with the trap door in one pocket and a fluffy white cat peering out the other.
Steve Jobs has told shareholders not to complain about the Mac maker's $40bn and growing cash mountain as he could decide to do something interesting with it at any time. Shareholders usually get antsy when companies cash piles grow too large, and start demanding execs do something to return the value to... them. Share …
Take the daily interest, split it in half, use one half for the advancement of new products. Take the second half and give it to a random member of the public. Disclaimer that they must spend a proportion of it on Apple products for themselves and their friends.
Sorted! Wheres that marketing director application form?
Does anyone really believe apple would tell anyone if they'd spent it? Of course they wouldn't, even if they'd just bought google.
Anyway, it's obvious that Jobs has already spent it on a massive organ harvesting plant. Thousands of genetically modified rats with human body parts growing out of their sides are being raised at this very moment. The plan is to keep him alive until the cyborg replicator (which is rumoured to be called 'iDupe Titanium') is ready.
Saintly Jobs for an icon, because he's also bought the catholic church.
...Amazon? Doubt it. They’ve already got both an e-store and a set of brick-and-mortars. They could simply expand their offerings through there.
...VMWare? It would probably be a bigger deal than $40B to pry it out of EMC's claws.
…Microsoft/Google/Oracle/IBM/HP/Dell/etc. HAHAHAHAHAHA. HA HA. HA. OTOH, I’d love to know how many hundreds of Billions that would take, were someone inclined.
…Citrix? An interesting thought. Apple sitting on top of that tech would make them an instantly viable “cloud” competitor. Worth thinking more about, if only because it would irritate Google.
…[Server Maker]. (SGI? Supermicro?) Go into super-tight-stacked totally controlled servers and give both Cisco and Oracle heart palpitations.
No, I suspect none of the above, truthfully. Apple’s MO is to make things (preferably CE products) that operate well with Apple, and who cares if they work with anyone else. I’d be far more likely to believe that Jobs will use this money to finally put to bed one of the longest running Mac complaints. “You can’t game on Apple, so it’s not worth buying.” Instead of buying a game dev or suchlike…
Apple games console. (Maybe reusing the failed Apple TV brand as Apple TV 2.0 or suchlike?) It meets the Apple MO: it’s a consumer electronics device. It doesn’t “enhance” or “add value/get you bigger bank for your buck” to anything else they make. Rather gets you to buy a new device that “compliments” you existing Apple stack of CE devices. Instead of buying games in a store, you’d download them from the apple App Store. The marketing and “incentives” to game devs alone might well burn a hole in that $40B, let alone the R&D.
Worth thinking about…
"When we think about big, bold things, we know that if we needed to acquire something, a piece of the puzzle, to make something big and bold a reality, we could write a check for it"
I know Apple are very secretive, but it almost sounds too carefree. Hope jobs knows what he's talking about.
£25b should be a sizeable chunk out of our national debt, and they could use it to mandate their kit in schools, governments, public buildings etc. Sales opportunity...
He could then be made Prime Minister on behalf of a grateful nation; after all, he is known as a "passionate and forceful" leader as well...
But the scaling of the blocks seem to have been skewed in many cases (the budget deficit block is 2.5 times the size of the African debt but monetarily only 1.4 times bigger). In fact many of the blocks don't seem to be to scale when comparing their actual values with their areas.
But nice graph anyway I spose.
A few weeks ago the US Supreme Court decided that corporations were allowed to invest in the political process, supporting candidates and lobbying.
It's not a big leap to imagine a corporation deciding that they wanted to be President and $40B is enough to get Apple elected as prez, with Mr Jobs as Apple's Representative on Earth.
With Apple as President, the people of the USA would enjoy a well designed health-care system. There would be no more crashes. The government would focus on a single issue until it was satisfactorily sorted, or something more important happened; there would be no multitasking. Only glowingly positive press would be permitted. All grievances would have to form an orderly queue but Apple's decision would be final. It would be expensive, but citizens would universally agree that it was easily worth the trouble. Small changes would be treated as major revolutions and would be required to be written about in breathless tones. The military would have stylish, glossy hardware.
No opposition would be brooked.
Uh-oh. I may have given Ballmer an idea. The MS Presidency: a celebration of the mediocre with a lot of marketing about the innovation but no changes. 'I'm a voter and an MS President was my idea.'
"Uh-oh. I may have given Ballmer an idea. The MS Presidency: a celebration of the mediocre with a lot of marketing about the innovation but no changes. 'I'm a voter and an MS President was my idea.'"
Lets see - nothing happens unless there is a huge amount of bloat for very little useful "improvement" AND anything you want to work is basically broken.
Sorry - we already have a MS Government. (Although it might be lots of other big companies ...)
50-foot tall SOLID GOLD Statue of SJ himself...
since hes now richer and more famous(and still breathing) than Michael Jackson.
failing that, they could always buy up Apple records, lock stock and the entire Beatles IP to boot in one go AND still have change for that new statue.
I think Steve should build a state of the art hospital with thousands of beds and a whole floor full of MRI machines, then stubbornly refuse to open it because he doesn't want dying people to ruin his 1337 designs with their pale skin and saggy limbs
He can have it fully staffed with doctors and nurses, keeping them there doing nothing indefinitely then just to be extra tasteless he can get adverts projected onto the moon "Don't come to the iHospital because we don't want your type there"
>> "Perhaps the firm is contemplating a chain of extra-Earth Apple stores to catch the nascent space tourism trade [...]"
Ha, ha! You jest, but surely you know that if Jobs decides to promote space tourism and extra-planet computing Tomorrow, everybody will be building iRocket-wanna-be's by next year--right after they ridicule him for an ostensibly stupid idea.
-dZ.
Anyone remember what happened to them?
They had a ginormous pile of real cash, then Weinstock retired.
Who was it that oversaw the biggest collapse in British Corporate history? Can't remember his name, but he's a nuLabour peer now I believe.
Let's hope crApple spend the wonga before Jobs retires..