I’ve always said analysts are full of crap, and the ones you pay are even moreso.
I’m a big fan of Om Malik. I read a few of the GigaOm blogs and trust what he has to say. That doesn’t mean, however, that he gets it right all the time, and sometimes he makes a miss so catastrophically bad I wonder if he’s asleep at the switch.
Today there’s a post on GigaOm that has a retrospective of Apple’s key milestones for the decade, and a chart meant to demonstrate why he believes Apple is the company of the decade.
Here’s the chart.
I can’t help but feel something is missing from this chart… It seems that there’s a big gap there, right around October 23, 2001…
A little something called… Oh, I don’t know… The iPod?
Now granted, he does have a video embedded of the announcement of the first iPod, but can we be realistic for a minute here? The iPod, more than any other device, technology, achievement, or acquisition changed Apple’s fortunes from a mediocre computer company that was for artsy people to a technology company that was designing products consumers wanted.
More than the Intel transition, more than the insanely popular iPod Mini, and even more than the iPhone, the iPod changed Apple forever. To make a chart of key milestones and not include the most important product that, even up until now, Apple has ever produced seems to me to be a bit like making a company history of Ford and ignoring the Model T but focusing on how great the Taurus is.
He pays short shrift to the iPod in an article meant to highlight a company over a decade. To me, that’s an unforgivable mistake, especially when you call yourself an analyst and make people pay to hear what you have to say.